saying goodbye

There is so much I cannot do--speak, write, move as I want to. And to breathe without the support of the bipap machine is labor unimaginable before all this. So much of All This is unimaginable. 

How do I say goodbye, never to return? Before this, my goodbyes were paired with an imagined future. Now, my mind full of memories of capacity, I strive to recognize this new self as myself, never to recover what I didn't appreciate enough, never to 'feel better.' Abandon Hope, I used to like to say, with grand jocularity, gesturing at the freedom a Buddhist master embedded in that phrase. Now it is a deadly serious mantra that snaps me out of reverie and back to Just This. 

Most excruciating is the idea of saying goodbye to my daughter. I don't think I can do it. I realized this morning that another goodbye has to come first. My body needs attention before I can part from her. From you.

Goodbye, dear feet. The left, with its hammer toe and neuroma. Before the neuroma you were my better turning foot. The right, perfection except for the tiny second toe, which is supposed to signify something but I forgot what. The arches, so lovely, either because of heredity or early experience with ballet, never realized as a skill due to my being special, as they said back in something grade. 

Goodbye, knees; amazing how I never had to replace you despite all the trauma you suffered from childhood RA (rheumatoid arthritis). The right hip, not so lucky, now a cyber hip that I love even more. Goodbye wrists, fused since my twenties, and the elbows and fingers that valiantly did their work. "You're as old as your spine," I once heard in a yoga class. My dear neck, at its tip, once elegant, now bowed in helpless submission. Goodbye.

And of course, goodbye, diaphragm. We tried, you and my pelvic floor, we and my throat, humming and talking until we couldn't anymore. Untalking, this mind can't quite touch the others. Thoughts linger, then fade away, neither supported nor challenged. Goodbye, mind; without you I am nothing. And everything. 

I love you more than infinity, my daughter and I still say to each other, mathematical impossibility becoming a stalwart koan that tells the truth of continuity. 

All of you, dear you, thank you for being part of my life, for being my limbs and guts and heart and mind. We are never separate. 

Fare thee well.*

April 11, 2022

*I'm still alive but likely unable to continue writing. 

intersections

and yet I breathe

Reading last week's entry, it seems disjointed and inadequate. Maybe I'll edit, or maybe language itself is inadequate. Watercolor is teaching me now.

March 30, 2022

What is Zazen?

Back when I used to teach "Learn to Meditate" at the Village Zendo I would joke about the paradox of Zen Master Dogen's intructions. Since the Way is perfectly pervasive, why even practice? "The Way is never separated from where we are now." Alas, "if there is the slightest deviation, you will be as far from the Way as heaven is from earth." And then he lays out detailed instructions on how to sit--arrange your cushions thus, cross your legs like so, line up your nose with your navel, and on and on. Zazen is seated mind, so how you sit affects your mind. 

What is my zazen when I can't sit upright? I ask my teacher and he tells about how he's sometimes sitting in a chair and sometimes sitting on a cushion. We agree that will be my koan for the next week. When it comes I answer:

"OW!"

People think zen is about achieving some state of mind. Not so. Don't be a zen zombie telling everyone else to chill out.

Think of not thinking, Dogen says, but that doesn't mean your mind is blank.  

Include everything, I say to myself and to anyone who will listen.

Someone asked if I am depressed, or assumed I was. I am not. I am full of feeling. I am empty, changing every instant. I love life and I am extraordinarily uncomfortable. 

Zazen is as impossible to define as life itself, and yet it is possible to practice in such a way that life pours through you, that change is allowed to happen, that you create a new world with every breath. 

March 23, 2022

Sprung

Today is our Urban Sesshin, plus it's gorgeous outside, so I'm just here to say I'm still here. 

Atonement

no I don't have permission from the NYTimes to use this picThis morning at the Zendo our host riffed on a quote she said was erroneously attributed to Trotsky: you may not be interested in war but it is interested in you. And then she encouraged at one ment, atonement, with all the players. I am the wounded pride. I am the mother with no home for my children. I am fear, rage, wailing, determination. 

Last week I was happy to be downtown in our fair city, the buzz of anonymous proximity waking cells long dormant. 

We are picking sides. We are for democracy. But someone said democracy itself is a right to battle, to protest, to parade your point of view. I asked what is the role of structure on the battlefield? If a bully breaks the rules? or makes the rules?

Yesterday the birds squawked and the breeze blew. Today the snow from my window is putting on a show. Who is winning? 

Each breath is a battle. So far I am victorious. Each word presents a challenge to type. I am assisted by the technology we love to protest--auto spell and its intimacy with my mind. Soon I will lay down my weapons and someone might say rest in peace. 

 March 9 2022

as it were

meanwhile, snowbellsI do my part in the war effort by listening to podcasts. This one on Ezra Klein delves into the complexities of economic sanctions.* His interviewee, Adam Touze, peppers his parentheticals with "as it were." This is not as familiar to me as "like" or "uh" so I listen as if it has meaning. 

As I write, errant tabs accidentally fire updates. Bombing my mind. as it were. if you will. if I may. 

Today my daughter is taking me for a ride somewhere, downtown maybe. So I'm going to copy bits of what I wrote on the Village Zendo listserve in response to a beautiful question: What supports you in times of suffering?

My father is a Russian born in Kiev. His father, a professor, was seized and murdered by Stalin. My father remembers Kiev under siege, and feels it again now as he watches the bam bam footage.

as it were. 

He joined the U.S.military because he believed in this country, its democracy, its inclusion. So we lived on military bases during the cold war and were shunned for being Russian. Now my daughter asks if everyone will hate us. No, I say, Russian is many things, too complicated to be an enemy.

We watch the poetry of Tarkovsky (Stalker) and I feel supported. Humans flailing, looking for hope. I am like that.

My friend writes of dancing ash and co-dependent bundles, and I feel supported because his turns of phrase spin me into a new dimension. He writes about writing: "let the page overhear as a benevolent sponge." His words legitimize the hours I’m spending reviewing my diaries. Maybe not so benevolent, in my case. The stories I lived had the power to wound again. as it were!  Now the words begin to blur, lose their meaning, lose their might.

A friend of a friend, Chad, just fled Ukraine. Chad made a beautiful film featuring a Ukrainian artist traumatized by Chernobyl et al.  Russian Woodpecker won the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance in 2015. I watched it on Vimeo for 99 cents, and I felt supported.

I feel supported as I email with my father, hear his analysis and heartbreak, and as I read your accounts of wars in your history. We are like that, built to fight. Is there such a thing as fighting for good?

My friend, Kansho, gave a dharma talk (not yet posted, will link when it's ready). He spoke of of the danger of making meaning and also the danger of abandoning it. A bomb is a bomb is a... 

I am grateful to this sangha and our teachers for holding our face to the fire, and especially for the way that art in its many forms calls us to witness, to hold each other, no matter what. As it is.

March 2, 2022

* Here I learned the term: weaponized interdependence. no modifiers needed.

Who Are You?

Here I sit, awaiting words that always come when I address you. My right elbow rests on a yoga block to support my limp right hand. The back, curved, no matter what pillows I employ, squeezes my diaphragm and makes me pant. The head sinks with no support from the neck.

I describe myself to you and imagine a response. I imagine you feel a little bit of my experience. I imagine it matters. Sometimes you write and tell me it does. That sustains me.

This blog has not gone viral. I am not popular, have ceased announcing posts, have ceased social media, have mostly ceased sending hopeful links to friends and family. There's just so much out there; I can't keep up, so why should I add my voice?

My voice. I give it a try. Just a whisper. I push more air through, direct my vocal chords to draw closer to each other. For a second, a sound. More water would help but I would have to get up, and I don't feel like it. I wonder what picture to include today. I look at the video I took during the sudden dramatic squall a couple days ago. My brother is in it, narrating his own video. Do I ask his permission? Today at 10am it's already 61 degrees. Shall I comment on what that all means?

Some of you are former clients/patients; some of you are Zen students. I worry how it is for you to really see into the mess I have become. I consult my Zen teacher and he says, body exposed in the golden wind, and, nothing hidden--references to koans that upend our preferences for glamour and cover. We speak of loss and what is left. Only love. The next day he sends a link to a beautiful essay by my first Zen teacher, Merle Kodo Boyd, who just died. She wrote about the freedom (enlightenment) that comes when the bottom drops out of the bucket.

I don't really know who you are. I don't know who I am either. I just know I look forward to Wednesdays, to the surprise that comes from this creative process. As I write I hop off occasionally to play with video of my changing world. I'll share it. I'll share my changing self. May the disintegration be of use. Spring is near.

February 23, 2022

foamy

I like foam, foamy cortado, foamy ocean on my toes, foamy beer on my lips. bubble baths. 

When I shared this affection with my zen teacher, he commented: not something, not nothing. My other zen teacher reminded me of foamy skies in koan tales, and pointed to a few lines from our current study text, Shodoka.

Greed, hatred, and ignorance appear and disappear
Like bubbles on the surface of the sea.

And so, my life. here and gone. here and gone. and again. pop pop pop. where did I go?

Helpfully, wikipedia tells me that foam is an example of a dispersed medium, in which two media, one discrete and one continuous, don't mix but instead hold each other in a particular way. Ooh, and I just remembered the title of a friend's brilliant project: Dispersed Holdings. 

A beautiful rabbi came to see me this week to offer comfort and prepare for my funeral. She spoke of the soul. She spoke of fire, earth, breath. She sang. Tears bubbled up, fell upon my my cheeky soul and nourished all of life. 

February 16, 2022

It's the Format, Stupid?

Hotei, a laughing monkWhy add that cruel address? stupid? I'm talking to myself like that because this is maybe the hundredth time I've realized that format steers human interaction. When I told friends about my big Aha, they were, like: oh yeah, look at the signature on your email. 

PsychoZen.Org, Method Meets Life

But, no, I'm not stupid, just making the same old error. What prompted the too familiar revelation this time was that I found myself comparing my Zen friends with other important people in my life who seemed to misunderstand my nature. And then I remembered The Cloakroom, a tiny area at the Zendo where people doff and don their shoes and jackets. In this bitsy space people overflow with the kind of small talk that has always made me freeze with fear and then burn with irritation.

How are you? [do I tell about my disease or just kvell about the weather?]
I'm excited about my new show. [did I know this? should I ask, but do I have to go?]
Got any exciting plans for the summer? [no, I'm hopelessly behind as usual and now I have to ask about yours and feel even worse]

But then the format changes and everything changes. We sit quietly together as our minds entrain to the lower frequencies that can hold and modulate the usual cacophony. The people don't change, except they do.

My patients rarely saw me as judgmental, but plenty of friends and family think I'm pretty opinionated. Who is mistaken? Neither, of course. I didn't judge during sessions because that isn't the format. It would mess up my listening mind. It wouldn't transform anything. It would make people feel worse. While all that is possibly still true outside the therapeutic environment, it's damn fun to have a good argument. Maybe not in the cloakroom, but...

Similarly, tweet all day and your mind will be shallow and fragmented, unless you vigilantly curate your feed. Go to a traditional school and you will produce traditional ideas, unless you make a point of rebelling. Hang around with woke people and you will probably become facile with the splendid spectrum of pronouns. 

Format. Context. Method.

So, I've designed improvisations that elevate the sound of language over the meaning. I've created groups that bend toward truth instead of social requirements. And I've tried to avoid formats that make my brain explode. 

That doesn't make me right and you wrong, just because you like cloakrooms and cocktail parties. And it doesn't make me dislike you. In fact, I might admire you a little. Just don't invite me to your opening. 

Hah, no, that's too harsh a conclusion, though I can't go to your opening now, and you probably aren't having one. But if I could and you were, I might spit and stammer before I finally gush appropriately. I might need an hour or a day to recover. It's ok. I'll survive.

oops, or maybe not. ;-)

February 9, 2022