Category Archives: Meditation

Reverence

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What is real for me in this moment: life feels bittersweet. It’s October again. Soon it’s Christmas. It’s “Where did the time go?” Then it’s a new year, and the school year ends, and summer vacation evaporates, school begins again, and then: another new year. Life is like this, every year. I recognize this, every year. I remember this conversation with myself from last year. The older I get, the more time compresses.

I practice presence — living here and now — and I’ve gotten pretty adept. Compared to the me I was in my 20s, 30s, and 40s, I focus less on past rumination and future anxiety. But that doesn’t make the time pass more slowly. It doesn’t change the fact that this life is such a short stint.

Yes, there’s Presence. The intangible subtle Mystery to which we are connected, from which we arise and to which return. It is possible to notice and experience this daily. Sometimes I even live within and from it — from a knowing that defies description or understanding with the mind.

But lately I’ve been noticing: I like this current incarnation. I like being in this body, living this life. It is precious. Yet it all changes. And there is grief.

I found a photo of myself when I was seven months old. I look into that sweet baby’s face and feel such love for her. Her softness, her open expression. Her innocence. I look at my daughter, a lovely soul, and remember the delicious intimacy of holding her.

Life is doing what it does. I’m so grateful that I am, that I’ve gotten to be this person. It’s just passing so quickly.

KathrynAsBaby

Me, 7 months old

you want some?

Bean, 7 months old

Grow Anywhere

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I just had a good laugh at myself. I was out doing the Sisyphean task of pulling grass shoots showing up where they don’t belong. I heard a sudden hiss and LEAPED up. It was the water system turning on (Hub’s in charge of the timer, and it’s a new system). Good to know my reflexes are sharp. I was immediately soaked. So I decided: Coffee break!

The ubiquity of green shoots in the new garden reminds me of a cherished author, Bill Bryson, and his thoughts in A Short History of Nearly Everything.

“It is easy to overlook this thought that life just is. As humans we are inclined to feel that life must have a point. We have plans and aspirations and desires. We want to take constant advantage of the intoxicating existence we’ve been endowed with. But what’s life to a lichen? Yet its impulse to exist, to be, is every bit as strong as ours — arguably even stronger. If I were told that I had to spend decades being a furry growth on a rock in the woods, I believe I would lose the will to go on. Lichens don’t. Like virtually all living things, they will suffer any hardship, endure any insult, for a moment’s additions existence. Life, in short, just wants to be.”

Prairie Creek Redwood State Park

On the Verge of Seven

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Sometimes I am not certain I have the fortitude of heart — the courage — to be a parent. It’s too late, of course, because I am one. Yet as Bean grows up and into her personality and the world at large, there are times when I am uncertain who she is. The little darling I adored, and who was so much more manageable, has disappeared into a volatile, mercurial, brilliant, curious, glorious, and intense girl. Like me, only much smarter. She is so very quick to anger, and she turns that anger on herself.

I have what is called a “spirited child” — a child who is more intense, sensitive, perceptive, persistent, and energetic. Certain behaviors emerged in 2012 and 2013 that made us curious, and then concerned me. Particular social interactions, repetitive behaviors, and hyper-sensory issues made me wonder if she had Aspberger’s. So with a referral from her pediatrician, we saw a specialist in February. (It took eight months to get that appointment.) I was permitted to be in the room during the entire evaluation of her behavior and intelligence. It was fascinating. In the end, the experts declared that she does indeed have some traits, but that she is “too social” to be classified on the spectrum. High sensitivity is not considered a diagnosable or real condition of its own, though as a Highly Sensitive Person myself I believe it’s real. And the last test result is that Bean is really, really smart. Gifted smart. As some people (a family of teachers) we met while camping said, “Sick smart.”

Now, I’m bright. My husband is smarter. Our daughter is a combination of highly intelligent and acutely sensitive to not only the physical world, but emotions.

Yesterday she was home with a fever. We had two conflicts that resulted in meltdown. Now, I know young kids have meltdowns. However, I’m not sure how many of them say they want to hurt themselves because they are so angry, or try to scratch or bite themselves in an effort not to physically destroy things. And I’m not sure how many first graders sob and cry about how afraid they are of growing up and say, “I feel like no one understands me! I feel like you liked me better when I was younger. I wish I wasn’t so science-y and had so many big words, because everyone expects me to behave older than I am! I feel different from everyone. I don’t want to be so smart. I wish I didn’t exist.”

She cried because she wants to control her world, but at the same time, she doesn’t want the responsibilities and high expectations she feels are placed on her. She used words like “always” and “never,” and places the responsibility for her feelings externally. “You made me mad! It’s your fault!”

So what did I do during all this sturm und drang? I opened my heart. I breathed through my own exasperation, fear, and anger, my wish to grab her and lash out. I told myself, “This isn’t an emergency. It just feels that way, emotions are high.” I asked her to identify where in her body she felt the anger, and what it felt like. She said her chest felt like it had flames inside. She wanted me nearby but not to touch her. And I told her how my body felt listening to her. “My chest feels heavy, listening to you say you want to scratch yourself,” I said. “My story is that the anger you feel is very huge and scary and feels like a monster inside you.” She relaxed a bit. She agreed.

I talked to Bean a bit about the pain-body, a term Eckhart Tolle uses for the ego as an entity of negative energy. I described that we all have a pain-body, and that we have a choice whether to feed it our energy and attention and make it grow, or not. Negative self-talk, angry thoughts, judgements — all this fuels the pain-body. She said the pain-body is bad. And I replied, “It just IS. Whether or not you judge it good or bad, it exists. If you judge and resist it, you push away that part of yourself, and that feeds it too.” I told her that’s why I’m always suggesting she breathe and connect with the stillness inside.

As for the other part, about being different, I simply acknowledged all these feelings and contradictions. I held her as she sobbed. And within me, my heart quaked with this realization: I cannot protect her — from the world, or from herself. I parent diligently, I try to let go and give her independence, I teach her to understand and don’t parent autocratically or through intimidation. In other words, I’m trying to give her a loving, supportive home, and yet she has such anger and feels disconnected from others. I once said to another parent who was coping with a challenging child, “The trick is to accept the child you have, not the one you imagined you’d have.” Well, those words are coming back to me.

She is her own person, on her own journey. She is my heart, walking out in the world. My heart, completely bare and vulnerable. How will I survive this?

What else did I do when she was storming and I felt overwhelmed with this seeming stranger? I prayed, “Help me. Help me trust you, Life. I’m in over my head.” And I keep breathing and being still.

small heart

The Dark Path to Enlightenment

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“We seldom go freely into the belly of the beast. Unless we face a major disaster like the death of a friend or spouse or loss of a marriage or job, we usually will not go there. As a culture, we have to be taught the language of descent. That is the great language of religion. It teaches us to enter willingly, trustingly into the dark periods of life. These dark periods are good teachers. Religious energy is in the dark questions, seldom in the answers. Answers are the way out, but that is not what we are here for. But when we look at the questions, we look for the opening to transformation. Fixing something doesn’t usually transform us. We try to change events in order to avoid changing ourselves. We must learn to stay with the pain of life, without answers, without conclusions, and some days without meaning. That is the path, the perilous dark path of true prayer.”

—Richard Rohr, Everything Belongs: The Gift of Contemplative Prayer

Just Doing It

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I don’t know what else to title this post. Back in the early days of blogging, people started blogs as social interaction. If the blog had a steady readership, the author would feel a need to explain any gap in posting.

Then, other writers started to mock the self-importance of those posts. Who cares why you aren’t posting? Either do it or don’t.

So I tried to avoid that habit. And while this post may sound a bit like an explanation of why I haven’t posted (and maybe get picked up by Sorry I Haven’t Posted, which, um, hasn’t posted in three years), I’m also simply trying to break the mental tomb I seemed to have sealed myself into. Well, that suggests action. It’s more like mental rigor mortis.

When I first began blogging in 2002, I updated often and at length. I was engaged this way for many years. I also posted photos of my artwork and crafts, and my poetry. When my daughter was born, I wrote about my experiences with her.

And then Facebook came on the scene. Most of my social group (online and off) migrated to using that, and I started to as well. And when Bean turned four, I decided it was time to back off on writing publicly about her in detail, and that gutted my motivation to write. I’d still post about crafts we did, and other activities, but eventually I moved it all to Facebook.

In the past year, when I sit down to write here, I fumble. I grope for something to say. I might have a wisp of inspiration, yet some part of me whispers that it’s nothing new, it’s just more noise in the world. Why bother?

And yet. Writing is how I sort myself out. How have I become so disinterested in what’s going on? One voice in me says, “It’s all ego driven.” My practice is to engage fully in the moment, with the world I inhabit and the tasks I complete. I have made a judgment that to be Buddhist requires forsaking the mind. I’ve projected that judgment onto my teacher (not that I’ve told her). In my head, Maezen says this, even though she’s never uttered those words.

Another voice in me calls out, reminding me of other reasons to write. In childhood I felt a deep yearning to know more about my parents, about their childhood experiences, about what they thought of life and current events. Now, as a parent, I understand the difficulty of dredging up memories with specifics to make a good story. Bean often asks me, “Tell me a story about your childhood,” and I simply don’t have access to the memories. Writing is a pathway into them.

I’ve also a strong desire to be known, seen, heard since childhood. I want my child to know about me, if she is interested when she is older. So there is some value in writing. I’ve approached my blog as a kind of commonplace book, where one might read and see what piqued my interest. But as I read Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore, I am tantalized by the idea of a Codex Vitae. What is that, you ask? In the novel…

The Codex Vitae is something that special members of this fellowship “earn” the right to create, after rising up in the ranks. When written, it’s submitted to the fellowship, approved, and encrypted. 3 copies are made of the book, 1 goes to the central library, and 2 others go to branch libraries in other parts of the world. The key to the encryption is only given to 1 person, and it remains a secret until the writer’s death.

–Buster Benson, The Way of the Duck

He thought this was a great idea, and so do I. What if I created my own book of knowledge? A blog is a living book. And perhaps no one will read it, or only a few. My daughter might have no interest. After all, it’s a pretty large resource already, having existed for 12 years. In the end, I’ll die and this blog will go someday, but isn’t there some value in scribing my journey?

The truth is, I miss myself. For now, I will close with a poem that captures my hope:

Love After Love

The time will come
when, with elation
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror
and each will smile at the other’s welcome,

and say, sit here. Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was your self.
Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you

all your life, whom you ignored
for another, who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,

the photographs, the desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your life.

–Derek Walcott

I want to give a nod to two long-term bloggers who in the past week have given me encouragement to try again (even if they don’t know it): Whiskey River and Euan Semple.

And a link to an article from a blog titled Thought Catalog about how and why to keep a commonplace book.

journey

Journey / 2011

Out of Time

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“But love, sooner or later, forces us out of time. It does not accept that limit. Of all that we feel and do, all the virtues and all the sins, love alone crowds us at last over the edge of the world. For love is always more than a little strange here. It is not explainable or even justifiable. It is itself the justifier. We do not make it. If it did not happen to us, we could not imagine it. It includes the world and time as a pregnant woman includes her child whose wrongs she will suffer and forgive. It is in the world but is not altogether of it. It is of eternity. It takes us there when it most holds us here.”

-Wendell Berry

Via Whiskey River

Which?

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Keiji, a long-time Zen student, approached his master and said: “I don’t see how there can be any enlightenment that sets you free once and for all. I think we just get ever greater glimpses of Buddha-nature, the vastness that is our true Reality. It’s an ever-expanding process.”

The master replied, “That may be what you think. But what is your experience, your experience right now?”

Keiji was confused, “My experience right now, Master?”

“Yes. Do you know yourself as Keiji, having ever-expanding experiences of Buddha-nature? Or do you know yourself as Buddha-nature, having the experience of Keiji?

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Flow

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A whole month passed without a post, though I’d thought about it. I’ve been immersed in some personal work and stepping out into new areas that feel exciting. The depression has abated. I feel a need to write but am doing so with interruptions by my little girl and husband every so many minutes, so this post will be less polished.

We’ve been camping twice and will go again soon for the last summer trip. In June we went to Pfeiffer Big Sur, and in July we camped at Prairie Creek Redwoods. Our next trip is to Calaveras Big Trees. We like big trees and rivers a lot, and we like the ocean some. Camping is uncomfortable and requires more work, but it’s also relaxing and restful. My body aches in the morning from the less-than-ideal sleeping arrangement, but the peace I feel compensates. I am bathed in Being, in nature, in the Mystery; living outdoors brings complete contact with the world that creates itself.

After exploring the Quaker Society of Friends, I talked with Hub about where I’m at and what Bean wants. She wants to go to church. Hub was raised Unitarian Universalist and I attended as one years ago. It’s the best fit as far as spiritual community goes. Bean loved it the first time we visited two years ago. The Quaker group only had children’s program once a month, and unfortunately the one time I brought her no one else with children came, and there was no program. I realized, too, that I need and enjoy the ritual of a service. The Quaker service was traditional silent meeting with socializing after. The UU service includes the usual ingredients of a service: hymns, readings, sharing of joys and concerns, a sermon. Hub isn’t a seeker and doesn’t have the same community needs, but we came to the conclusion that the UU church is good for me and Bean. I attended the UU Fellowship in Los Gatos the past two weeks; both Bean and I enjoyed it, and the members are very welcoming.

I had a pilot zazen session on the first Saturday in July. I got cold feet and cancelled on the one person who’d signed up; then another friend last minute showed up. As I set up the small altar on my coffee table, it felt right, like putting on a perfectly fitting outfit. I also reached agreement with Hub that I will go to Hazy Moon Zen Center a couple times a year to attend sesshin and meet with my teacher.

I’ve continued attending salons called Intimacy With Truth, led by a dear friend. They occur in a format similar to Honesty Salons but move into deeper exploration within and between ourselves. I’m learning to listen to, trust, and speak from my intuition and truth. I’m also sitting with the idea of becoming trained to facilitate Honesty Salons or becoming a Getting Real Coach with Dr. Campbell.

I’m re-reading and incorporating the practice that Eckhart Tolle’s books explore. One thing I appreciate about his work is that he echoes my favorite quote, a koan I have cherished for years:

The secret is within your self. – Hui-Neng

Tolle claims that he’s not teaching anything that we don’t already have within us. His work is guidance to excavating it.

In conjunction, I’ve started to explore the process of healing offered by Al-Anon meetings.

After years of thinking about it, I attended a mixed-media collage Meetup at Lori Krein Studios. I immersed myself in the process and enjoyed it, as well as enjoyed the other people who attended. I’ll be going back.

This encounter with collage at the studio prompted me to rearrange my art supplies so they are stored in the same room as my work desk. Proximity will probably inspire more play!

I gathered my many small pieces of art into a binder, and I was astonished at the variety and amount. Seeing them all together gave me a surge of excitement to make more. A friend has suggested I have my own art show at home; I’m not ready to do that yet, but I’m ready to show and share from the binder.

I enrolled in a November training to learn a process called SoulCollage and to facilitate in groups. SoulCollage is a creative, meditative process of exploring one’s inner wisdom in all the ways it manifests. It’s rooted in Jungian psychology.

I’ve emphasized boundaries in certain relationships by limiting what I can listen to and discuss. The immersion in repeated stories about the problems of people I love when I cannot do anything to help was contributing to the depression.

Lastly, I’m contemplating becoming a volunteer at a hospice. For many years (since the mid-1990s) I’ve felt a pull toward it, and in 2004 I took steps in a parallel direction by training to provide grief support to survivors. It was the Centre for Living With Dying. However, my father-in-law was dying of cancer at the time, and I just didn’t have the energy to serve. Since that time the Centre was bought by another social service provider, and it seems they don’t use volunteers any more. But hospice does.

The call to hospice coincides with the sad news that a friend — Jen Bulik-Lang — who is only 35 is dying of stage-IV lung cancer. She began feeling ill in October 2012, and it took awhile for professionals to come to the correct diagnosis at the end of January 2013. She’d been shopping in December for engagement rings with her boyfriend, Jeffrey Lang. She got aggressive treatment, and there was hope they eradicated it, but in mid-June she received news it had metastasized to her spinal fluid. My insides quicken with grief and love as I watch her live with this news. She chose to celebrate life, and she and Jeff got married in a marvelous wedding. I admire Jen for embracing what is and fully experiencing it as a transformation with the faith, as she says, “that [it] will benefit the highest good for all those concerned.”

So in all, the shift in my life is toward community and participating in healing myself, others, and the world. As I wrote that last sentence my self-talk was, “Boy, that sounds lofty and new-Agey, and grandiose.” And yet… The world is broken and insane and aches for love.

harvest

Harvest / 9″ x 12″ mixed media collage on canvas

Sometimes a Retreat is an Advance

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I’d sunk into a swamp of depression. Why bother going? It was only overnight. I cancelled, one day too late to get a refund. So I went.

Nearly there, I found the road blocked. The tunnel said “Under construction.” What next? Go back home? Try to find another way and arrive late? No and no.

So I broke rules. I drove around the barricade and through the tunnel. There was no ditch to fall into, no rubble to hit. I arrived. I showed up.

Teacher saw me and leaped with joy – literally! She hugged me, and I began to cry. Twenty of us sat in slience; we walked in silence. Zazen is painful drudgery. But the tears subsided.

I sat. I counted my breaths. I walked. I ate. I slept. I met privately with my teacher.

Sick of being mom, managing my child? Then be an easy mother!
Lonely? Get out of the Internet echo chamber. Talk to a person.
Bored? Reflect on what resonates; listen for my voice.
Scared about new responsibility? Just show up. Do the next task.
Stop hiding in the house. The world is right here and now.

Later, walking on the beach alone, I found rusty rose starfish washed ashore. It fit the palm of my hand. It was alive! Waiting for a return ride on the tide.

Hello, friend.

I looked up. Saw a man. Decided this discovery was too good to keep to myself. So I went up to him and shared. And he smiled and marveled. And then I did it again, with a woman jogging. And again, with another woman!

Their eyes widened, awakened. They smiled with the joy of the encounter.

Hello, friend.
****************************

Words swept from my mind
Scatter like moths in the wind
Wave meets rock meets wave

seal rocks, or

Comes a Whisper

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…over the margins of life comes a whisper, a faint call, a premonition of richer living which we know we are passing by. Strained by the very mad pace of our daily outer burdens, we are further strained by an inward uneasiness, because we have hints that there is a way of life vastly richer and deeper than all this hurried existence, a life of unhurried serenity and peace and power. If only we could slip over into that Center! … There is a divine Abyss within us all, a holy Infinite Center, a Heart, a Life who speaks in us and through us to the world.

-Thomas R. Kelly, 1941
Faith and Practice, Religious Society of Friends (Quaker)

journey

Afterlife

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THE AFTERLIFE

They’re moving off in all imaginable directions,
each according to his own private belief,
and this is the secret that silent Lazarus would not reveal:
that everyone is right, as it turns out.
you go to the place you always thought you would go,
the place you kept lit in an alcove in your head.

Some are being shot into a funnel of flashing colors
into a zone of light, white as a January sun.
Others are standing naked before a forbidding judge who sits
with a golden ladder on one side, a coal chute on the other.

Some have already joined the celestial choir
and are singing as if they have been doing this forever,
while the less inventive find themselves stuck
in a big air conditioned room full of food and chorus girls.

Some are approaching the apartment of the female God,
a woman in her forties with short wiry hair
and glasses hanging from her neck by a string.
With one eye she regards the dead through a hole in her door.

There are those who are squeezing into the bodies
of animals – eagles and leopards – and one trying on
the skin of a monkey like a tight suit,
ready to begin another life in a more simple key,

while others float off into some benign vagueness,
little units of energy heading for the ultimate elsewhere.

There are even a few classicists being led to an underworld
by a mythological creature with a beard and hooves.
He will bring them to the mouth of the furious cave
guarded over by Edith Hamilton and her three-headed dog.

The rest just lie on their backs in their coffins
wishing they could return so they could learn Italian
or see the pyramids, or play some golf in a light rain.
They wish they could wake in the morning like you
and stand at a window examining the winter trees,
every branch traced with the ghost writing of snow.

–Billy Collins

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“The really important kind of freedom involves attention and awareness and discipline, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad petty, unsexy ways every day. That is real freedom. That is being educated, and understanding how to think. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default setting, the rat race, the constant gnawing sense of having had, and lost, some infinite thing.”

-David Foster Wallace

Nothing Is Lost, Only Transformed

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God pours life into death and death into life without a drop being spilled.

-Author Unknown

Until I attended graduate school at St. Edward’s University, I didn’t know much about Dia de los Muertos. In 1997, after I’d left the fundamentalist non-denominational church I’d been with for years — and with it my entire social network — I struggled greatly with loneliness and depression. Thus I found myself sitting frequently in the Our Lady Queen of Peace chapel, trying to root myself.

On November 1, I discovered an altar covered with painted skulls, candles, photos, and flowers. A number of people gathered, including Dr. Edward Shirley, Professor of Religion and Theological Studies. He led a meditation and gave a little talk about the meaning of this day. I remember at one point asking, “Is it possible to miss someone you never knew?” I was thinking about my maternal grandmother and paternal grandfather; both died long before I was born. Ed answered that yes, he thought so.

After that introduction, I got to know him and spent time talking with him. He was one of the most loving people I’d encountered. His laugh was infectious. His presence was healing. His friendship and guidance were a balm and ballast for me at this time of transition. He accepted people wherever they were at; at that point I was an atheist, certain that traditional Christianity was not my path. I searched for a way to connect with the universe and to find a vocabulary to voice this connection. It was Ed who called my attention to Buddhism.

Ed died suddenly in mid-August, leaving behind a devastated family and community of friends. His impact in the world was deep, and he was much loved. I miss his presence in this world, but his departure brought me to a threshold of understanding what Zen Buddhists call Big Mind.

So, in honor and remembrance of Ed, I offer this tribute on the day that brought us together.

shirleyobit_1541400c

Let children walk with Nature, let them see the beautiful blendings and communions of death and life, their joyous inseparable unity, as taught in woods and meadows, plains and mountains and streams of our blessed star, and they will learn that death is stingless indeed, and as beautiful as life.

-John Muir

Thy Sea Is So Great

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At least ten years ago my mother gave me a magnetic notepaper holder to hang on my refrigerator. It had a delicate angel and rainbow picture, with a saying about love on it. For a long time I’ve realized it doesn’t appeal to me anymore. Lately my hands have been feeling restless and unsettled. Tonight I put on Tracy Chapman and pulled out scissors, paper, and glue and gave it a new cover.

I’ve been thinking about God lately, in the context of Being, Consciousness, Love, and Mystery. Back in the 1990s, I slogged through times of aching isolation and loneliness. Friends came and went. I felt so alone and small. I struggled to make ends meet. At one point, I meditated on love as an ocean. The tides of love may be high or low in a given day, but the ocean is always there. It was a reassuring concept.

As I created tonight, the Breton Fisherman’s Prayer floated into my awareness: “Oh God, Thy sea is so great and my boat is so small.” It is, of course, a prayer for protection. But perhaps, at least in the case of Love and Awakening, the boat is our Ego. Maybe I’m not ready to give up the boat entirely, but I could go swimming more often.

sailing