Monsoon

It seems we've had a fortnight or so of sticky humidity and light rain - very reminiscent of the monsoon season in Nepal.  Sure, climate change:  a 'theory', like evolution, contested by many right-wing industrial capitalists and their nut-job lackeys; however, considered an anthropogenic fait accompli by the vast majority of heliocentric-leaning scientists.  Which I am sorry to admit is quite the mouthful of a sentence.  Worry not, such polemic is not the direction in which this post is headed.

Our meditation teacher sometimes intones the acronym 'r-a-i-n.'  We are advised, while sitting in meditation (or running about our days), if an emotional storm or difficult mind-state, or set of problematic circumstances should arise - we are invited to recognize, allow, investigate, and non-identify with these phenomena.  (I'll leave the 'non-identify' word alone, syntactically awkward as it may be.)

WARNING: Pointless and mildly droll paragraph follows...

I can think of other helpful acronyms:  non-identify, allow, investigate, let-go (NAIL);  inquire, recognize, allow, non-identify (IRAN);  and while the order of IRAN does actually feel more intuitive to me, the acronym is less alluring than RAIN.

END of distraction.

Eckhart Tolle, latter-day purveyor of Buddho-Christo-Sufist insight, in works such as The Power of Now, uses the phrase 'what you accept, you go beyond' (or something like it).  The idea is not to passively sit back and accept abhorrent conditions, and do nothing about them.  Rather, the pilgrim is instructed to open to the conditions - however beautiful or tragic they may be - just as they present in the moment.  To complain that 'it shouldn't be like this' is to invite suffering, and typically does not lead to wise - and possibly corrective - action.  Accepting the present to be just as it is, allows us to go beyond it, and even sometimes to act wisely.

Saints and monks through the ages have shown such peace and faith in the face of very grave situations.  I read of a Tibetan nun, who, while being tortured, says prayers of loving-kindness for her Chinese captors.  Her mouth is taped shut, but still her lips keep moving.  Clearly, her life of practice in opening to the present moment - come what may - enables her to recognize the dire situation she faces, and instead of wishing it to be other than it is - other than what it simply and irrevocably is at that moment - proceeds instead directly to the only positive action she knows and is able to accomplish.

In our day to day lives, we are generally spared from such harsh or life-threatening situations.  To take a recent commonplace example in my life, I had lost an important piece of jewelry.  You see, our wedding was coming up, only days away, and the evening before, Dwan had asked on the phone - tongue mildly in cheek, though past experience gave her question at least some relevance - 'do you still have your ring?'  I'd said sure - which was technically true - but in fact I couldn't say just then exactly where it was.  Or even approximately.  So I looked and looked and looked, till my eyesight and body were exhausted.  Brushed my teeth, and dropped into bed.

The next morning, I resumed the search, now more frantic, our nuptial event just one day away.  I finally dropped into the recliner, closed my eyes, and a light 'rain' began to fall, almost spontaneously:  Recognize the bodily sensations I perceived due to this loss - a sort of weary tightness in the belly, harshness in the jaw, etc.  Allow the situation to be as it is, for try as I might to change or resist it, this situation was exactly as it was in that moment.  Even my resistance to the situation was just as it was.  Investigate the myriad emotions and mind-states which arose - regret, self-recrimination (how stupid of me!), etc.  Non-identify, or let go of attachment to these emotions, sensations, and thoughts, which you can imagine is much easier said than done.  However, simply opening to such an intention - to see a larger whole in which these stories played themselves out - allowed me to feel just how I was identified with, or attached to, these conditions.  And with such recognition came a release, a letting-go, even if only partially.  As waves and ocean currents rage with a tropical storm on the surface, deep down the fish swim through waters as calmly as ever.

After this little 'meditation,' I dropped to my knees, and crawled over to a sort of hutch/secretary in my bedroom.  I'd already looked in it, so didn't really know what I was doing.  I opened the right cabinet door, and pulled out a small drawstring pouch made in Nepal (there are several other such keepsakes in there).  I could feel there was something in the pouch, reached in, and pulled out a small black velveteen ring sleeve.  Now the warm summer rain felt like elixir.

Though I lost and found one other item this summer in like fashion, I also was unable to find something rather valuable after trying the 'rain method.'  (Fortunately I did accidentally come across it two months after losing it.)  I suppose that two out of three ain't bad, but I think the larger point is, though the process is a rich one, attaching to an outcome - such as locating a lost object - can be perilous.  What we may find instead is a heart that feels, eyes that may cry or smile, and a mind that dreams.  It seems that opening up to our present moment is never wrong.

Tick-Tock

I enter triage, take my number, and sit down.
The man seated to my right is large - in a healthy way - his expression placid and warm.
Drifting through space, I'd felt his gravitational pull:  his planet, his star so familiar.
Perched on each knee is a toddler, leaning back.

   As if from a ventriloquist comes the sound -
   a loud, erratic clock.  The man's eyebrows move:
   not in time,
   as if to bury the trick even deeper.
   It seems unlikely - here, in the hushed and busy  
   hospital - but clearly, it emanates
   from this gentle giant.
   Gentle, timeless giant.
   The sound seems to placate the boys, an ancient lullaby.
   Until the older brother asks - he is three, maybe four -

What's taking mommy so long?
The soft, almost whispered response comes tumbling, bathing baritone like swich licour.
The man and sons rise to fetch her, she's just done at the
window with her chemo appointment check-in;
they walk away, small hands in large.

Petrus

Early this summer on a Saturday morning, Miller had a Bat Mitzvah service to attend up in Potomac, a neighborhood northwest of Bethesda.  I dropped him off and drove to nearby Carderock, a favorite 'natural area' destination of mine.  Occasionally I will walk some small portion of the Billy Goat Trail along the sometimes mighty, sometimes docile Potomac river.

However, this time I felt drawn instead to the considerable rock outcroppings.  There were at least two climbers out with ropes and harnesses.  The morning was cool and clear.  I set down my cane, and 'bouldered' up to something of a ledge, perhaps chest high from the trail, and sat, legs crossed.  I was out of view of the climbers, though their voices drifted over me.  "Belay on," said one woman's voice, then "on belay" came her companion's reply.  Then just their chatting - softer than the climbing calls.  The rope they were using was anchored on my side of the massive dark gray rock face.

A few hikers passed right in front of me, their tongue foreign - maybe Dutch.  Did they ask, 'what's with the old gray Buddha?'  Very doubtful they would.  In my world travels, it often seemed that only Americans would assume that nobody understands them and say such dorky things out loud, right in front of people.  (However, one technical caveat must be remembered, namely, that I am able to understand at most German, Nepali, and the various dialects of English.)  And it is assuredly a rather harsh observation, one I remember having as a young man in Germany:  taking pride as I'd blend in with language, dress, and the mannerisms of the modern Teuton; and cringing at the midwestern tourists talking in the U-bahn about what? - the 'stupid conductor?' - or some other such inanity.  Over half a lifetime ago.  I should know better by now:  insensitive dorks aren't just American, they come in all nationalities!  Ba dump bump.  No, the wisdom of years seems to be that people aren't so easily defined by stereotypes.  That these stereotypes aren't solid as rock.

Sitting for some minutes, eyes closed, a cool breeze, no mosquitos or bugs of any kind - a minor miracle.  The voices of the two climbers.  And then falling into the memory of lying on top of a similar promontory high above 'Deep Creep' in Running Springs, a small resort town where my family lived for a couple years in the San Gabriel mountains of Southern California.  A place where friends and I - age ten - would fish, swim, climb, skip rocks - boy stuff.  Or sometimes I would go there alone, and having swum in the pool below, climb up, lay my skinny belly on the wide smooth boulder and dry off.

That rock, this rock, several lifetimes ago.  These rocks seem so ageless and timeless, but I've heard that the terrestrial variety aren't really so very old.  Moon rocks, for instance, can be over a billion years old.  The rocks we climb on, or collect and save on top of our dressers - these are relative newbies, having been heaved up from volcanoes, eroded, crushed a few million years, and metamorphosed many times again before we come to see them.  Rest on them.  Hold them.

What do we really see in them?  Are we looking into and feeling that timelessness we all carry, our Buddha nature, our grace of God, our Allahu akbar?


Rock of ages, cleft for me...we are stardust, we are golden.

I.V. Drip

Just heard a stunning This American Life (TAL) episode about the patent wars raging in the Bay Area.  Stunning on many levels.

Let me begin with an innocent tale of a cutting edge company I read about some years ago, Intellectual Ventures.  The idea was to bring together varied thinkers from the tops of their fields, and convene them around a table, to discuss real problems and issues of the day.  There might be an oncologist, an engineer, a physicist, a molecular biologist, a visual artist, etc.  And on the agenda might be a range of topics including MS, or breast cancer, say.  The neurologist might lead off with the state of science surrounding MS to date - or perhaps just a description of the demyelination process.  This is then bandied about by the meeting of disparate minds - the sculptor might ask what in fact nerve tissue actually feels like, in a tactile sense, while the engineer might ask exactly by what mechanism the flow of blood into the brain is 'filtered' and prevents immune cells from gaining access in one without the disease.  A discussion might ensue that opens up new directions for further research, or even for bona fide applications.  Which then might be patented and sold, leading to the betterment of the condition of us all.

What a lovely idea I thought.  But according to the TAL episode, Intellectual Ventures (IV) has become possibly the biggest and most powerful 'patent troll' in Silicon Valley.  Very few of their own patents have come to see the light of day, and in fact the company now spends most of its resources purchasing patents from other inventors, and selling them to other companies which use the same or similar technologies.  Or more often suing them.  Many of these companies are hit broadside; and faced with possible ruin of their small startups, will agree to settle out of court rather than face millions in legal fees.  Meanwhile, IV was started with billions of dollars of venture capital, investments which are hoping for huge returns.  IV has found that being a patent troll a far more lucrative endeavor than the actual pursuit of ideas to solve problems and alleviate suffering which got them started.  Of course they don't admit this, and their VEEP's and PR people claim that their efforts do even more to encourage innovation.

The investigative journalism provided by TAL, however, presents a far different conclusion, even suggesting that, to the contrary, patent troll's (especially ones 'on steroids' as IV is described), actually inhibit innovation.  Amazing story, I recommend it to all.  Archived TAL stories can be found at thislife.org beginning a week after airing, and listened to on-line, or pod-casted, for free.

Does IV break any laws?  If not, one wonders whether the patent system in general should be reworked so that innovation is truly encouraged once again, as it may have, in days of yore.

Falls Church morning.

Oh what a beautiful morning!

Oh what a beautiful day!

We were running late - tie too short, can't find a belt, where are the black socks, and more questions/issues raised by the boys.  And then there were my own, including a pair of suit pants [not pictured above] that i could barely fit into.  Then waiting for Eli in the car....  Should I send Miller up after him?  No, Spencer says, seated behind the steering wheel, calm down dad, so I close my eyes, take two easy breaths, and out the door steps Eli.  But, it is 15 minutes past the time I had planned to be on the road!

As it turned out, traffic was light, and we arrived at Dwan's only five minutes late, and then had to wait five more for the female folk to be ready.  Vive la difference...  Made it to the gazebo in a nearby park, plenty of time to set up before the ceremony at 11:00 (the time and date having been chosen by our celebrated astrologer - whose name cannot be mentioned to protect her privacy.  Isn't that right Dwan?)  The ceremony was over in a flash:  suddenly we were man and wife!  Woman and husband?  Actually, the wording was 'husband and wife.'

Dwan and I each gave a reading, which I will post here:

A READING FROM ANCIENT HINDU SCRIPTURE,  AS INTERPRETED BY ALAN WATTS (and paraphrased with oblique gender syntax by the reader - PJP.)

When God plays hide and seeek and pretends to be you and me, the earth and sky - and everything else - he does it so well that it takes a long time to remember where she hid herself.  But, that's the whole fun of it - just what God wanted to do.  She doesn't want to find himself too quickly, for that would spoil the game.

That's why it's so hard for you and me - all of us - to find out that we are God in disguise, pretending to be somebody else.  But when the game has gone on long enough, we will all wake up, stop pretending, and remember that we're all one single self - the God who is all there is - and who lives forever and ever.

A READING FROM ANTOINE DE SAINT-EXUPE´RY'S THE LITTLE PRINCE (read by DRR.)

The little prince went away, to look again at the roses.

"You are not at all like my rose," he said. "As yet you are nothing. No one has tamed you, and you have tamed no one. You are like my fox when I first knew him. He was only a fox like a hundred thousand other foxes. But I have made him my friend, and now he is unique in all the world."

And the roses were very much embarassed.

"You are beautiful, but you are empty," he went on. "One could not die for you. To be sure, an ordinary passerby would think that my rose looked just like you--the rose that belongs to me. But in herself alone she is more important than all the hundreds of you other roses: because it is she that I have watered; because it is she that I have put under the glass globe; because it is she that I have sheltered behind the screen; because it is for her that I have killed the caterpillars (except the two or three that we saved to become butterflies); because it is she that I have listened to, when she grumbled, or boasted, or even sometimes when she said nothing. Because she is my rose. 

Japan Syndrome

While my heart goes out to the illustrious island nation that has brought us Zen, sushi, Honda, the kimono - and so much more - I wish I could say that my morning cold showers are taken in solidarity with the privations the Japanese have been facing each day since the earthquake/tidal wave/meltdown disasters.  But no, my daily bracing ablutions date way back to the California energy crisis of 2000 (which was revealed to be the result of Enron's predatory practices.)  However, regardless of the reasons, the state - our state of residence at the time - faced roving blackouts, and other such pleasantries.  What was a bike-riding, light switch Nazi, vegetarian like me to do?

And it turned out that these cold showers actually felt good - though it's been something of an acquired taste - and left me feeling energized.  Whereas, hot showers I had been noticing kind of had the opposite effect.  Well, turns out that 'heat sensitivity' is very common in MS - hot days make your symptoms markedly worse - a condition I was soon diagnosed with.  In fact, back in the days before MRI, spinal taps for chemical markers, and other diagnostic testing, patients where put in a hot bath, taken out, and asked to 'walk the line,' heel to toe fashion - if they looked drunker than before the hot bath (but weren't) - they were diagnosed with MS. Additional benefits of the cold shower:  no matter how chilly the morning, once you finish rinsing off and turn off the spigot, the bathroom instantly feels nice and warm, the towel even more so.  This means, no need to heat the bathroom - or the house much for that matter, the shower kind of judo-kickstarts your internal power plant.

We all know the problems with profligate energy consumption:  Exxon and BP oil spills (just a couple of the big ones), nuclear power risks and the waste disposal 'problem' that won't go away - for eons, global climate change, and on and on.  So, give it a try, I know you are curious...  Maybe start with lukewarm, and gradually drop the temp day by day.  Or jump right in - the water is great!

Clouds

The clouds and mist cleared, the late afternoon sun shining from the west.  We were standing in the Daman lookout tower I had stayed in some twenty four years before at the end of my Peace Corps tour in Nepal, a kind of 'self-retreat.'  Spencer, Miller, and I could see shiny white Himaalayas in the distance.  This remained our only glimpse during the entire Asia trip last summer.

"I can't meditate," some will say, "my mind just won't shut up," they may add.  Now, before you think I'm starting to proselytize, you can calm down - this is not my intention.  Rather, I would like to share some recent insights, and some facility with the contemplative path might be helpful.  Meditation, at least as practiced in the Theravada tradition, neither begins nor ends with clarity of mind, necessarily, or some sort of blissful tabula rasa.  The practice involves a good deal of watching just what the mind does on its own, moment by moment, returning from time to time to an 'anchor,' commonly the breath.  Each time you become aware of having 'drifted off,' and return your attention to the breath, is a moment of awakening to the here and now.  No matter that three breaths later you are adding to your shopping list, lamenting a recent altercation, or making plans for the weekend.  These are three more opportunities from which to 'wake up.'

A kind heart, and patience with the messy process of mind, are quite helpful in this endeavor.  We may be quick to judge ourselves, sometimes harshly, for the confused and muddy mind that presents.  Even these judgments are mind states we can observe, let go of - if only for a moment - and return to the anchor.  "Why did I waste a whole half hour planning and regretting, and now have nothing to show for it?  Am I now more 'awake,' or 'Buddhish,' or something?"  These are questions that may arise, and only you can answer.  The empirical nature of the practice is clear:  if meditation (or any other form of mindfulness practice - yoga, tai chi, qi gong, etc.) does not lead toward freedom, then let it go, by all means.  It may not be a wise path for you right now - or maybe ever.  However, it has been a path I have found quite helpful negotiating a rather challenging decade.

After getting lost in thought (which is bound to happen - to you and even to the Dalai Lama), can you return to the breath with a 'thank you' to the very thought process you were lost in?  And without which you likely would not have noticed coming back to your breath?  The jewel of your awareness - your clear view of the Himalaayas - is not just enhanced by the distracting thoughts which surround it - like the mist and clouds - but is in fact created by them.  The luminous mind is only seen in contrast to the clutter surrounding it.  Yin and yang arise in concert.

I'm attempting to let such a practice of gratitude enter other facets of my life.  One area that has been particularly challenging concerns my symptoms of MS.  Which you are likely aware, is a very big facet.  What would it mean to thank these 'clouds'?  There are times I can feel gratitude for the slower pace, but then there are lots of other times...  Sometimes the MS feels like an animal trap.  Unlike a mouse trap, which snaps and holds with a constant force, the larger animal traps used by professionals in the fur trade do this:  after being triggered they clutch their quarry, and if the trap holds around any moving body parts - such as the lungs or heart - it will constrict tighter with each breath or pulse, narrowing to an intractable end.  Some days my mind will go there.

Driving the other day I was having a more pronounced 'nystagmus' - the slight jiggling of my eyeballs in their sockets so that everything at rest seems to be shaking and pulsing.  This is usually less pronounced in the morning, and gets more intense during the day.  (Like most of my symptoms.)  Anyway, I thought of Cat Stevens' song 'Moon Shadow', with a slight twist:  and if I ever lose my eyes, if my colors all run dry, yes, if I ever lose my eyes, oh way ay ay ay hey...I won't have to [drive], no more.  Because I've never much cared for driving.  But the possibility of losing my license most assuredly gives me considerable pause.

Sure, there are taxis, busses, and metro, thankfully driving isn't everything.  Yesterday I rode the metro back from downtown, the day was mild, even a bit too warm under the windbreaker I wore.  There are many steps, however, between the bus and train doors.  And coming back, I just missed the connecting bus, and needed to use the loo.  Which meant it would not be well to sit and wait the extra half hour, so I decided to walk to the Giant, use the facility, and catch the bus from there.  My early morning walking metric - the number of unassisted steps it takes to get from our door to the elevator - was the lowest number I've ever recorded (since noting this for maybe a year now), tying perhaps only two previous occasions.  However, walking around town my legs - particularly my right one - were dragging something fierce, and my pace and balance were quite shaky.   Fortunately, I have learned after all these years how to slow it way down.

Can I learn how to thank my shaking eyes, dragging feet, impaired balance, etc. etc. etc.?  Are these dark clouds allowing me to appreciate the Himaalayan vistas in my life - my darling fiancée, strong and healthy sons, the guitar that feels gradually lighter and more facile in my grasp?  The vibrant greens of the season?

"But teacher," I ask my inner Buddha, "these MS symptoms are always changing, and are mostly getting worse!  How can I ever find peace with such a dire situation?  Waaah!"  On my good days, I can say, "lucky me!  Impermanence is in my face, every day - no need to imagine a future loss and decline - just hobble down the hall!"  But on the heavier days, oh my.  Can I look at these clouds from both sides now?