a zinger about ambition, from Seneca (ca. 4 BC-AD 65)

Reading Seneca this morning, I had the feeling of being with a shrewd friend who was laughing at me! And I had to laugh along, because there was a lot of truth in what he said.

“We commonly give the impression that the reasons for our having gone into political retirement are our disgust with public life and our dissatisfaction with some uncongenial and unrewarding post. Yet every now and then ambition rears its head again in the retreat into which we were really driven by our apprehensions and our waning interest; for our ambition did not cease because it had been rooted out, but merely because it had tired–or become piqued, perhaps, at its lack of success.” Letter LVI, p. 111-112, in Seneca, Letters from a Stoic, ed. Robin Campbell (Penguin ed., 1969.

HA! just see all those books on my bibliography about Buddhism, alternative economies, compassion, and “letting go” etc., as contrasted with the exuberant posting when I made a sale on Etsy! We are all the same.

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day 53: “Long in dream, a butterfly comes” (thanks to Bada Shanren)

Since nothing killed my spirit in the news today (or perhaps I’ve just become inured to the awfulness), my mind floated along peacefully during the short, sunny, steep walk and back up to our perch on the mountaintop. I felt like the luckiest person in the world!  My  gaze turned to another favorite book of Asian art, a book dedicated to Bada Shanren, to capture the peaceful thoughtfulness.

Chinese painter Bada Shanren (1626-1705) is the artist; born into the Ming imperial family, he fled and became a Buddhist monk before re-emerging into public life later, after 30 years. During the period when he created Lotus and Ducks, he was already a worldly man in his 70s.

Lotus and Ducks (pictured) is a hanging scroll of ink on paper, ca. 1696. It is absolutely hypnotic once you start gazing at it. “Yes, awfulness exists,” the ducks darkly gaze. But a quiet feeling of Zen awareness is also here for the taking–it flows through the lotus waving gently in the breeze (or is it rippling water?).

The last lines of the inscription capture the feelings perfectly, in their vague and hazy way of conjuring an image of natural beauty and hope amidst the wreckage caused by humans.

“Today we heave a sigh:

Wolves are besting tigers, bear gives birth to fox,

Long in dream, a butterfly comes fluttering along.” *

—–

* Bada Shanren, trans. Stephen D. Allee, Lotus and Ducks, ca. 1696, in catalogue of In Pursuit of Heavenly Harmony: Paintings and Calligraphy by Bada Shanren from the Estate of Wang Fangyu and Sum Wai, ed. Joseph Chang and Qianshen Bai, Catalogue by Stephen D. Allee (Washington, DC: Freer Gallery of Art and Weatherhill, Inc., 2003), p. 66.

 

Thanks for giving us this beautiful book when it first came out, Steve! I’m so glad to have the opportunity to read it peacefully and enjoy discovering Bada Shanren in this quiet time (of quarantine).

 

Fyi: yesterday’s face mask production:

 

morning is the hardest time

Today is one of those days where everything seems off. I’ve only been up for 90 minutes and already had a grumpy, prickly exchange with my spouse over stupid stuff. The news is downright terrifying (alarming fires, shootings, and floods, plus bizarre tumbleweed attacks!). The only article in the New York Times that seems to resonate is called “Why is America So Depressed?” Hmmm.  Plus, to add to my sense of emptiness, yesterday I attended an event I had organized–a discussion of Little Women for young readers at a local bookstore–and no one came.  Add to that list of grievances is my physical worry: my knee makes a weird shooting pain sometimes, despite all that T’ai chi and walking I do.

What makes life worth continuing?  Is it the sunshine coming in the window or just inertia, I wonder.

Well, whether it’s “worth” living or not, I’m not ready for it to be over. So back to the sewing machine I go. Creating quilts is the only means of expression that seems really worthwhile anymore. At least they can keep somebody warm someday! Here’s the latest of my kimono silk quilt-in-progress.

Thanks for reading.  Here’s hoping the “joy” will return.  Maybe later.  Because mornings really do seem to be the hardest time.

Road trip day one: immensity!(and just a little irritation)

After we escaped from the aggravating agglomeration known as Chicagoland, the drive from South Bend, Indiana to Albert Lea was sort of bland yet exhausting, the landscape huge, the rest stops tidy. Crossing the Mississippi was impressive, especially imagining how people managed to do so in the olden days!

Honey Girl is a calm and pleasant traveler; no complaints about her. Traveling all day with another person is not so easy. Heck, spending all day in a car hurtling down the highway at 70 miles an hour is not that relaxing, no matter who you’re with. I feel a new-found admiration for truck drivers, who do that every day, all day.

As a reminder to be grateful, despite the irritations of daily life which are after all impermanent, I’ve brought three little stones to align at the end of each day in our motel room. They resemble a cool rock formation seen somewhere in Wisconsin!

 

Here’s a good thought for the day ahead from Gabriel Cohen:

“I used to think of the spiritual path as a detached, solo journey, like Moses trekking up the mountain or the Buddha wandering off to sit under his bodhi tree. I imagined how challenging it would be to renounce life’s pleasures and meditate in a cave. Now I realize that life offers a much more common but just as powerful spiritual trial: just try getting along with one other person for the rest of your life.”

Cohen, in “Of Course I’m Angry,” in Right Here with You, 143.

 

Day Ten: the brewing storm

29 days to go and the skies are churning. A storm is coming to South Bend this afternoon, they say, and I am looking forward to it. A storm breaks the tension, gives us a common enemy, and may even accelerate other life-giving events. 27 years ago in July, some thunderbolts gathered over Tempe, AZ, and may have hastened the birth of my son. Or so they told me at the hospital, when I  arrived…

The storm at home is as prickly as the heat today. Why? No big reason but several small ones. My partner is manifesting some old habits of passive-aggressive hostility, now that he’s being forced into concrete action and decision-making after many years of retirement. Honey Girl pounced and killed a small ground hog yesterday on our walk. I have felt and voiced unkind thoughts toward a number of people, mostly elected officials but still…

What to do?

What is there ever to do?

Practice the Morning Routine. Refrain from harmful speech. Bury the little grey critter, if it is still there.

Rejoice in the rain when it arrives!

***

 

Storm image courtesy of http://blog.gpcom.com/tag/severe-weather/

Why do I do this? (Give trust a chance)

I write this blog for those who want to feel better and have a more peaceful life. But I also write this blog for me. It is a record that shows how determined I am to keep feeling good and experiencing less pain in daily life, as time goes by.  I do walk Honey Girl  every day and that helps. But where she can just chomp on some grass to get relief (like she was doing this morning), the various disturbances I feel now and then get stuck deeply in my system. Recreating a peaceful mindset is more of a challenge. Chomping on grass doesn’t work.

This blog reminds me that peace is possible, despite it all. But it is a daily effort.

Let’s take today as a case in point. This morning, I encountered a cluster of alarming icons on my phone screen. (I admit it: as soon as I opened my eyes, I looked at my phone. Bad habit, I know! But I’m just like you. We’re all addicted to those phones.)

Immediately, my stomach flipped and my shoulders tensed up, as I saw that my husband had called twice around dinner time, and my faraway son had called after midnight. Neither had left a message, as is their habit. I never know what that means, but it did not look good. Then I saw some texts. My Chicago-based son (with whom my husband was supposed to be dining last night with my brother and sister-in-law who were in town specifically for that purpose) texted the following message at 12:36am: “Hi, I just received an alarming call from Nick that you and Dad were worried about my whereabouts. If you can, can you give Dad my cell phone number. I forgot the details of his email for dinner reservations tonight and forgot to go. So I assume they were worried. Can you also tell him I’m sorry that I forgot.”

Well, as you can imagine, I immediately texted back to him and in no uncertain terms told him to deal with his own mistake and make his own apologies. Then ensued more texts. YUCK!   Whatever happened to waking up slowly on a peaceful spring morning?

Well, I tried to recapture the moment. I looked out the window, and opened it wide to take in the sight of a pear tree covered with white blossoms, to listen to the songbirds in the trees, and to admire the powerful St Joseph River flowing swiftly by down below. But that sick feeling remained in my gut.  It remained for a couple hours, until after I took Honey Girl for a walk and did my morning routine. In retrospect, it just makes me a little sad. And a little tired. (Actually, very tired.)

Anger management has been an issue with this family. I am a bit worried about witnessing the remnants of Rich’s anger at that son when he gets back later today. (See the book by Mason and Kreger on the bibliography: an essential help for living with hotheads.)

So what can meditation and T’ai chi do for all that emotional turmoil?  Like most people, I exist in a web of relationships. For better or worse, I do not seek to extricate myself from that web or to adopt monastic vows. So I must cope. And it is the coping that brings the joy, because it allows me to spread peace to the ecosystem where I am planted. It is a sad fact, however, that joy is personal. You cannot force others feel it. Nevertheless, it can be yours!

Bob Klein describes the typical person’s nervous system as a dammed-up mountain pass or blocked riverbed. T’ai chi and meditation are tools which allow one to chisel an opening in the stone, and allow the water/spirit/energy to flow through freely.  For daily practitioner of T’ai chi, life can be transformed. As he writes inspiringly, “When you speak or act, the channels have already been opened; you are satisfied with what you have created and now your creative spirit flows through. In other words, after you work on yourself, transform yourself, empty yourself, then you must trust yourself. You must trust that when you act or speak spontaneously, good things will come out.” (Movements of Power, 161).

Let’s give trust a chance.

On health (and pharmaceuticals), calm, and joy’s return (no matter what he says)

Hi,

Well, this has been another tiring week, with much grading of papers and intensive course preparation as we begin the final stretch to the end of spring semester. (Three more weeks of ND and 76 days til SEA!) More showings of the house and cleaning loom on the horizon. An annual check-up I was looking forward to, since I’m feeling so good these days, became a startling event when an unexpected symptom was brought to my attention. Inspired by the recent New York Times article on anti-depressants by Benedict Carey and Robert Gebeloff, and my own desire to “get back to normal,” I had already convinced my doctor to slash my prescriptions so that instead of taking three pills a night (two typical “women’s pills” and one anti-depressant), I take one-half of one anti-depressant. Now I’m on a strict diet also and who knows how “withdrawal” from those medications will go? Grading and prepping took all my time, so that I did not even do the morning routine yesterday. Friends I’ve spoken to have revealed more scary health events—kidney, back, and eye problems. (Old people problems! Yikes what does that mean?) And my right hip has been hurting for the past two days, plus my sinuses were acting up. I was feeling old, apprehensive, and blah.

Those were my thoughts before the morning routine.

As I settled in, I picked up a book I love and read a passage about “Being Calm—The Presence of Being.” I’ve pasted it below for you.

Gazing out the window of the sunroom, with my heels touching and feet at 90 degree angles, my back straight and spine crackling nicely back into place, I let go of all that busy thinking and just looked. The sky was blue with puffy white clouds. A few cars drove by; no radios were blasting and there were no train whistles or sirens in the air. But there was so much bird activity! I saw cardinals, robins, sparrows, and a crow.

A bright red male cardinal made my heart soar with his beautiful song, but when I tried to take his picture, he hopped higher and higher up in the tree. See him way up on that dead branch?

Later, a female cardinal showed up in a bush nearby. Last thing I saw of them, they were flying rapidly around the neighbors’ yards, him behind her.  They were pretty to watch, fluttering up and down in currents of who knows what emotion or feelings. Whatever it was, it looked exciting and fun!  (or maybe not. Maybe he was over-aggressive or creepy, and she was trying to get away. Now I see him way up in that tree again, alone.)

Suddenly, a sparrow flew up and I realized that other forms of life were right at hand: they built a nest right outside the window!

When the 30 minutes were up, my hip still hurt a little (T’ai chi should fix that). As for my mind, it feels all better.

P.S.  On what happened next.  Inspired by the happy feelings, I decided to give away one of my  “Spring Yellow Plaid” Honey Girl pillows to a young man who does carpentry work for us—who was just in the hospital for a serious operation. Since Rich works most closely with the workmen here, I went downstairs to see him and tell him my idea.

He immediately looked down, shook his head, and said, “I don’t think so. He’s not the kind of guy… blablabla negative negative negative.” I smiled and said, “But Rich, have you seen the way he looks at Honey Girl? How he talks to her?  He calls her Woofie Girl. He made a cement plaque for her in the backyard…”

But he just shook his head, looked down, and went shuffling off to do the crossword puzzle. That is a typical exchange between us. It used to bug me a lot and could even drive me to despair and great loneliness. But as you can see on the “Happy Clients” page of my fledgling business, I have learned to take his advice with a grain of salt (or not at all)! Typically, when he tells me not to do something kind and generous, I do it anyway.

And so I just turned away, saying in a pleasant, non-angry voice, “Well that’s ok. You don’t have to be involved. It makes me happy, so I’m going to do it.”

And now I am smiling again, looking forward to another good day. As Rousseau once wrote, “You must be happy.”  And as a long-lost fortune cookie added: “Don’t stop now!”

 

The text from Peter Ralston, Cheng Hsin: The Principles of Effortless Power pp. 5-6:

BEING CALM—THE PRESENCE OF BEING

Sometimes we experience what we call “being calm.” It is thought of as a state of mind in which all the activity of mind is clear, at ease, and undisturbed. How this comes about is usually unknown to us; however, it is conventionally attributed to “self-control” and so we take credit for it. When I speak of calming the activity that we call “mind,” it is not to support the manifold assumptions that exist as mind, but to point to a principle that appears in the presence of what we’re calling “calm.” Being calm appears when our internal activity is aligned with the principle for which this is so. This principle seems tied to the presence of being, in which the mere presence of being is allowed to be, regardless of how it appears. In this, being is experienced without preference or aversion, no matter the form. What is the principle in which this is the case?

When the activity that occurs as mind is distorted into a form in which that activity appears to be disturbed or unsettled, it is often rejected and held as something wrong, something to be avoided. This relationship to what is apparently already occurring immediately severs us from the activity itself, putting us in the position of “fixer” rather than one of simply being. This occurs the moment we first ascertain that we are not calm. From this position we are not in the best place to correct this malady, should we hold that it needs fixing, and so a struggle ensues to find and move to a place in which the disturbance can be corrected. This way of holding calm makes calm almost inaccessible.

Being calm is essential to all that we do. Having a calm mind doesn’t depend on appearance. It doesn’t depend on situations. It is more powerful to see calmness not as something that we have to force into being, but as something already existing, or simply as a quality of being in which we can abide, something to be fallen into or uncovered. It can be held as a base or context to those qualities that we call non-calm, or different from calm. Thus we can see attaining calmness not as something that we do, like jumping from one item to another, but as a shift into the sea in which all things float.

It is our tendency toward constant reactivity that reveals to us the power of stillness.

[…]

By holding calm in the way suggested here, we can simply not “do” those things. … instead of trying to make those things disappear, we can simply let them be, not feed them energy and attention, and let them float in the base that we now call being calm. It is from this principle that we can be responsive and clear.

• Peter Ralston, Cheng Hsin: The Principles of Effortless Power, pp. 5-6.

day four, what is real?

Hello on day four of the five-day meditation in a mirror challenge,

It is already after noon yet the house is very quiet today, after yesterday’s tornado of family conflict, stress and strife, during the “birthday dinner.”

Today’s setting: the downstairs hall mirror–a full-length mirror ca. 1910–and the downstairs bathroom mirror–another heavy, gilt-framed antique that came with the house. I opened the closet door to allow the full-length mirror to reflect the bathroom mirror, and as I stood there I moved it slightly to see how they reflected each other and the things in between.

We think mirrors are “true” reflections yet look how easily I distorted “reality”: by slightly moving the door and camera’s focus, it is easy to create doubles. The camera shows doubles: doubles of the mirror, of me, of the Picasso print of a girl (Head of a Woman in a Hat, 1962): all those doubles are merely reflections created by the border in the glass of the full-length mirror.

So what is real? right now, cold feet and thirst are real. My ears resound in silent static and my intellect feels wary and weary of things social.

As Alan Watts writes about awareness, “This very simple ‘opening of the eyes’ brings about the most extraordinary transformation of understanding and living, and shows that many of our most baffling problems are pure illusion. […] Because awareness is a view of reality free of ideas and judgments, it is clearly impossible to define and write down what it reveals. […] The truth is revealed by removing things that stand in its light, an art not unlike sculpture, in which the artist creates, not by building, but by hacking away.”  (Watts, The Wisdom of Insecurity, 76).

Letting go of a past “Identity” is scary. This applies to adults who must let go of one Identity, of being PARENTS–law-and-order border agents, battling evil to keep their children safe–and undertake a different Identity when those tykes grow up (anywhere from 18 to 35 years later).

From PARENTS, we must accept to exert less power and control over our children. We must let go of our PARENT domination and accept a new role as a kindly, non-invasive partner–merely a fellow human on a chronologically-defined journey we share with those people from birth (theirs) to death (ours, if the chronology works the way we hope it will).

That letting go is scary and hard. Words may help:

if in our anger, we realize

the other person is suffering,

we can free ourselves

from anger

and from suffering,

which also helps free the other.

–Shi Wuling, Path to Peace, Feb. 8

Sometimes abstaining from action and thought, what the Chinese call wu-wei, is the best action.

Especially when we’re all so tired of each other. Maybe we should all just tread lightly and remain silent for a while, like Honey Girl here.

 

embrace the inevitable

Gearing up for another week of work or school in mid-November can be a challenge. May these words of wisdom by Peter Ralston be a guide; they are from a chapter on “the Principle of Inclusion” (more on that to come on this blog!):

There is a state of being that shows itself as power, has free and uninhibited life force, with no thought or refuge being taken in the intellect, which honestly and simply abandons itself to the task at hand.*

Whether your task is reading, preparing a speech, or just waiting for a ticklish raindrop to fall off a leaf (or your nose!), it helps to think of yourself as living-in-process. Whatever you fail to embrace now, you will simply have to confront later.

Roll with the punches, let go of ego and angry recriminations, allow the energy to flow uninterrupted.

An example:  Just now, I said to someone, “It is nice and cool outside today.” The person replied, “No, it’s actually warm. Much warmer than yesterday.” Since my comment was inspired by a desire to connect with the person, untroubled by ideas of being “right” or “winning,” I merely smiled at the contrarian. Remembering Ralston’s wise counsel, I replied, “Yes, it’s nice and warm today.”

* Peter Ralston, Cheng Hsin: The Principles of Effortless Power, 1st ed. 1989 (Berkeley, CA: Blue Snake Books, 1999), 79.

 

how to stop battling your mind

Well, not every day can be a winner. Today’s mood and the dark, stormy weather inspire more sober thoughts on the battle between the Mind and the Body-Mind. (Even Honey Girl seems a little tired and droopy this evening.)

The desire for certainty and safety prompts people to identify their mind with their self-image. It [the mind] cannot let go of itself. It feels that it should not do what it is doing, and that it should do what it is not doing. It feels that it should not be what it is, and be what it isn’t. 

To cling to the mind’s self-image is thus to be in constant contradiction and conflict.  Hence [Zen master] Yün-men’s saying, “In walking, just walk. In sitting, just sit. Above all, don’t wobble.”

In the end, the only alternative to a shuddering paralysis is to leap into action regardless of the consequences […] We must enter into it without second thought, without the arrière-pensée of regret, hesitancy, doubt or self-recrimination. Thus when Yün-men was asked, “What is the Tao?” he answered simply, “Walk on!”

— adapted from Alan Watts, The Way of Zen, 1st ed. 1957 (New York: Vintage, 1989), 138-139, 141.

Bon courage! and let’s hope tomorrow brings more fun!