GRATITUDE

My friend Liz recently wrote a fine piece about her gratitude journal (you can find it at http://thefeministgrandma.typepad.com/).  She inspired me to blog on the subject of gratitude also, a practice that has been uppermost for me the last few months.

 Last fall I went to a documentary about the civil rights strife in St. Augustine during the 1960s.  St. Augustine had no public housing and a black community that lived in dire poverty.  At one point in this movie the film maker interviewed an old black woman whose 'house' - little more than a tar paper shack with a leaky roof - burned down.  Whatever its condition, this woman had lived in that house her whole life, and she  owned it.  She said, "Well, I always thank God for the good things that happen, and I always thank God for the bad things that happen."  This idea - thanking God for everything - is an important part of all spiritual disciplines, although rarely put in practice.   I find myself staggering along under a load of unfair and unwarranted vicissitudes, real and imagined, whining away and plotting how I can escape the situation or make it easier.

This woman's statement had real impact.  She was not some priest or guru sitting on a velvet cushion intoning words of wisdom.  She was the truly surrendered voice of God.  This idea took fire for me.  I realized that to thank God for the bad stuff, I had to take a real look at the bad stuff and consider what life is trying to teach me.   This is a process.  I would find myself saying, "Thank you God for having Gladiola wake me up at five a.m. by kicking over my glass of water and breaking Freeman's clock."  Followed by, "Sorry for lying.  I'm working on it though."

Then a real challenge came along.  In late January I had a mild case of the flu that involved an inner ear infection. It quickly went away with the homeopathic remedy Carolyn recommended and I thought no more about it, until a few nights later.  I plopped down in bed and immediately had a sensation of falling out of my body and down into an abyss.  I screamed at the top of my lungs and clawed my way out of bed, only to find that the room was spinning around me in mad circles.  I stumbled along holding on to pieces of furniture.  Finally, the room stopped spinning.  I had never experienced anything like this before and assumed it was, to quote Fred Sanford, "The Big One."  I called Carolyn in a panic and she said, "Oh, it's gelsemium flu and it causes vertigo.  Ten of my other patients have had the same thing."  I took the remedy she recommended and all was well, but not for long. 

This episode reawakened a very serious anxiety/panic/sleep disorder I had battled with for the first 40 years of my life.   It was part of the PTSD that has followed me around since my childhood.  What with one thing and another - art, meditation - I had largely overcome the problem.  Now I found myself dizzy and panic stricken every night when I tried to lie down.  I ran through some emergency diazepam I had stashed away and tried to get more, with no success.  Diazepam, Xanax, all the minor tranquillizers, got caught up in the big crackdown on pain pills.  I think it would have been easier for me to score heroin than to get a prescription for a few tranqs.  I was offered various antidepressant pills, but antidepressants give me anxiety as a side effect so they did nothing but make things worse.  I began drinking Nyquil straight from the bottle, and still had many sleepless nights.  I began to feel like my life was over. 

Freeman kept assuring me, "We're going to find a solution for this.  You are going to get through this." 

In the meantime I tried one homeopathic remedy after another and took homeopathic tranquillizers by the handful.  All the time I kept thanking God for giving me this opportunity to grow, and journaling about what I might learn.  I could learn trust.  I was no longer in the cozy illusion most of us have that, "I am the Captain of my Soul, I am the Master of my destiny."  Surrender leads to union with the will of God and to real peace, no matter what's going on.  I would lie down, with the bed seeming to rock and roll beneath me, and pray the Lord's prayer, slowly, thinking about what it meant, and then the 23rd Psalm.  Both pieces came alive for me.  Also my Buddhist practice:  "This very body the Buddha, this very earth the Lotus Paradise."  Right now under these circumstances.  I began to feel Spirit's presence in my room.

I continued to work with wholistic remedies and the situation was gradually easing.  Then, I reached a whole new level of gratitude.  I started to see that these nightly attacks of anxiety had put me in a place of extreme passivity and victimhood, a place I hadn't actively frequented for quite awhile.  It suddenly hit me, "I know how to have courage.  I can be brave.  I can say 'Screw you, anxiety.'"  When I was a child, my grandmother, who was mentally ill, sometimes terrorized me at bedtime.  She would lean over and say, "I may kill you while you sleep."  During those years I felt helpless beyond measure.  That was the feeling that came back and that, I recognized, had never quite entirely left.  Underneath all my derring do, there was a little theme of whining and victimhood.  Seeing it this way, in this context, I was able to start blasting it straight out of existence.

I am a now born again Gratituder!  I get up in the morning and my mind starts nattering on about all that it has to do, and this problem and that problem, and my next thought is "NO! I am grateful for this day and all that it brings me."  "This is the day that the Lord hath made, rejoice and be glad in it."
More and more, I am learning how to be happy.  Gelsemium flu was a small price to pay.

THREE THINGS ARE LEFT TO ME

Compassion, gratitude, acceptance of what is.  Is equals God.  The vast, multi-dimensional tapestry of  "is" I will never comprehend.  I can only feel - eternity around me - infinity - everything - such beauty, such horror.  Such mediocrity, which may only be the corner of the painting where a mouse sits and grooms its whiskers while a television blasts DANCING WITH THE STARS.  A C-level celebrity with a big butt, so stretched with plastic surgery there's probably a little knob made out of skin in the middle of her back.  She wears a scarlet min-balloon and dances with a tuxedoed man who looks like he works at an Arthur Murray studio in Schenectady, New York.  Polar ice caps festooned with pretzels where white bears contemplate their imminent demise - energy and matter constantly merging.  I am stuck here for the moment.  Ego mind still worried because the saint is such a sinner, and someone is going to figure that out.  Going up to where vast clouds drift through the universe.  All the changes - all the objects breaking down to infinitely small powder - all the bursts of love from broken hearts creating rainbows in the misty sky.

A DAY IN THE LIFE OF....

A DAY IN THE LIFE OF…..

I have a friend who frequently blogs about her own life – holidays, vacations, family visits, memorable meals, surgical recoveries…She illustrates her blog with great pictures and enjoys a wide readership. In my case, I’ve never been able to believe that anyone would be interested in my everyday life.  Still, since almost no one reads my blog anyhow, I might as well take a crack at it.

There are difficulties.  First of all, am I going to tell the truth?  Hardly anybody does.  As Mark Twain pointed out, writers are professional liars.  In general, this is all for the best.  It’s important not to tell people more about you than they want to know.  There are anonymous message boards where people can talk about their anxiety attacks or their struggles with a spastic colon, and that’s all for the best.

Then there are confidentiality concerns.  What can I say about my life without embarrassing other people who are innocent or not-so-innocent bystanders?   Writers are always getting into trouble about that.  Still, I’m going to give this a whirl.

Yesterday.  September 13, 2013.  The thirteenth day of the ninth month of the 13^th year of this millennium.  An important day in the Wiccan Calendar, in a month that will be marked by spiritual suffering, according to the ancient art of numerology.  My first memories of the day are at 5 a.m.  Gladiola wakes me up so that I can open his little cat door.  He will slide out into the night to have cat adventures in the green jungle of our backyard and the field that lies beyond.  I go back to bed, but getting back to sleep is not so easy.  The existential horror that has been part of my life for decades overtakes me.  I remember sitting in my second grade classroom and wondering what I was doing there. What is all this? Where was I before I was here? Where am I going?  What is death?  Other kids were cutting out paper bunnies.  I have never, in the intervening years, overcome this affliction.

I lie in bed and feel the earth whirling around me.  The ice caps are melting.   Friends are battling horrific diseases.  Half-naked teenagers are having simulated sex on national television.  Bombs are dropping.  People by the millions are sitting in their houses tweeting and twittering.  Homeless people are lying in the woods, surrounded by clouds of mosquitoes. 

I remember to thank God for this amazing bed, in this beautiful room, for the fan that sits at the foot of the bed blowing a gentle breeze.  For the miracle of indoor plumbing.  For a kitchen that has food, lots of food, too much food.  For my simple Freeman who lies beside me, gently snoring.  He has little existential horror at this time of year because it’s football season.  Then in the Spring there is basketball season. Maybe in my next lifetime I will be a guy.

I take three homeopathic sleeping pills and one Benadryl and eventually I am able to sleep again. 

I wake up to the smell of coffee.  Freeman and I take turns making coffee in the morning, a task complicated by our small herd of domestic livestock:  “Feed me.”  “Fill my water bowl.”  “Let me out.”  “Scratch my ears.”  When it’s Freeman’s turn to make coffee they get short shrift.  He’s not a morning person and he figures they will still be alive and well when I get up and see to their furry needs. 

We lie in bed and watch the hurricane news on the weather channel, and engage in desultory conversation about the coming attractions of day ahead.  Up front there is cleaning out the big thermoses leftover from the meal we took out to Tent City.  As usual, I beg him to clean out the ones that contained meat, a product I do not indulge in.  He wrinkles his nose.  I tell him that it would be even more traumatic for me.  He and the dog will carry out this task.  He power washes the thermoses outside with a hose while Beauregarde licks the ground and wags his tail enthusiastically.  I do the tea thermoses as befits my more refined sensibilities.

Then there is answering email and reading newspapers online.  There is avoidance behavior, like compulsively playing FreeCell and Gold Miner.  In Gold Miner a little guy with a fishing pole captures prizes that are worth money.  At every stage there is a minimum amount of money he must make in order to stay in the game.  I pretend that I am an 18-year-old Vermonter whose parents have tragically died in a car accident.  Can I make enough money to save the farm?  Will I be able to raise my younger sisters or will they be carted off to Kinhaven, the Vermont State Orphanage?  The little man and I fish like mad. 

This is just a little bit thin – it cannot ward off reality for long.  To do that, you need bigger dramas, and at age 68 I no longer work on creating big dramas.  Now there is running loads of laundry, emptying waste baskets, cleaning the cat litter pan, putting stuff back where it belongs, throwing out dead food, planning what to fix for dinner.  There is also music.  I love to play the “Shuffle” station on Pandora Radio.  I listen to a Bach cello concerto and then to Jimmy Rodgers wailing about “A Six-Pack to Go,” and then a Gegorian chant, and then some Dave Brubeck, and then Frank Sinatra remembering a White Christmas.  This station definitely helps me avoid getting into an emotional rut.

The day goes on with errands and television and trips to the garden.  I fix a big egg salad and Freeman makes a garden salad to go with it.  We are having a sandwich and salad dinner, enough food in this heat.  In the evening we plan to go downtown and listen to a Beatles cover band play in the downtown community plaza. 

The music is good but extremely loud.  We sit across from the plaza, in front of the giant clock, with our friend Pat, who has a big cooler full of ice and bottled water.  He has propped two signs up against the clock base:  FEED EVERYONE  and FREE WATER.  The public fountain in the plaza barely works, so he brings this water for the homeless people, or anyone else who is thirsty. Sometimes people give him money, which he uses to buy more ice and water.  He has various friends sitting with him, including a renegade lawyer who used to defend death row inmates, but now has chosen to live outdoors and walk – sometimes 20 or 30 miles a day – for reasons that are not apparent to anyone.  Strange karma, but no stranger than activities people regard as ‘normal,’ such as watching many hours of television a day – surfing from accounts of cheerleaders murdered in 1964, to the adventures of SpongeBob, to talk shows where loud young women proclaim that they slept with 47 guys and want to know which one fathered their baby.  It’s even more confusing now than when I was in the second grade. 

Michael, a young homeless man who is a writer, stretches out on the sidewalk in front of us to take a nap.  We encourage him to move behind the clock, where he will be less likely to attract a curious cop, but he chooses not to.  Homeless people come by and get water.  Snooty housed people walk by with their faces averted.  We are a seedy looking lot.  Old friends come by and chat for awhile.  It is a little like the front porches of my childhood, where people sat out in big rocking chairs while neighbors strolled by, stopping to talk for a few minutes.  We don’t have much of that in our twittering, tweeting world, and I enjoy it.

Tonight, though, there is a slight vibe of danger.  Some teenagers fighting about money, the smell of pot drifting down from a neighboring bench, a guy with a dog on a leash.  He is talking nonstop and waving a half-full bottle of beer.  The dog escapes and runs into traffic.  I bury my face in my hands.  The dog makes it back to the sidewalk and the drunken man walks on.

We decide to go home and eat some ice cream.  It’s been a pretty good day.

Crack Track Blues

Crack Track Blues

At 9:30 this morning there was an old white woman sitting on my doorstep, weeping in anguish and ringing my doorbell over and over again, wanting money for her “medicine,” as she has before.  She never brings me a receipt because this medicine is crack.  She always tells me she lost the receipt.  She’s a retired hooker a few years younger than me.  I’ve known her for 20 years.  She is called Mom on the streets because she is kind to other homeless people, particularly those who are old and frail. 

She rings my doorbell over and over again, “Please, Miss Arupa, please, please, please,” through her sobs.

I know the details and I know the generalities.  Ninety-percent of all prostitutes were the victim of long-term sexual abuse in childhood.  Hookers are controlled by pimps who feed them drugs, beat them, and take their money. I know this woman’s innocence and know what her life has been.  There is not, within reason, a damn thing I can do for her.

I still feel like Simon Legree.

The Enormous Room

The Enormous Room

I first heard this phrase spoken at a lecture at Bennington College, more than 50 years ago.  I did not hear another word of this lecture, except to dimly know that it was about a book by e e cummings.  The walls and the ceilings of the old carriage barn, the ‘room’ of this lecture, dissolved and I found myself in a vast space, alone and with others, who sat in attentive rows, their faces lifted toward the speaker.  I knew the enormous room:  this world, this universe, this infinite and eternal space wherein I found myself, knowing nothing. 

I have spent the rest of my life in this enormous room, sometimes decorating the walls, sometimes erecting a tent in which to huddle, terrified, sometimes as an anthropologist observing and analyzing the behavior of the others who swirl around me.

Jesus is in this room, Buddha, Mohammed, Lao Tzu… Maps have been made and these maps are worshipped.  Small rooms are erected, within which people pretend that nothing else exists.  Wars, symphonies, forests, dinner parties, festivals, foreclosures, stock markets, farmers markets, the massacre of children, vast tomes, oceans, the auctioning of guns and chamber pots, elections, selections, educations, prisons, cathedrals, insurance policies, covered bridges, hospitals, boats, plots of marigolds….

I forgive everyone.  I forgive myself.  Within this enormous room, who is to blame for anything? 

Vast tumbleweeds of thought dance and crash.

Rutabagasontologicalanorexicaltheoreticallocovoriousrutabagasmillipedestitanicmilitariousphilodendronmagnificentblasmphemygodloveitoushelliferousrutabagablindingnesssnowromincoushollywoodrutabagasbiliousoceanic….rutabagasrutabasrutabagasdeath….

Blownhome…

is

WHAT ARE ATHEISTS AFRAID OF?

Recently an association of atheists put up a monument to atheism, with quotes from Thomas Jefferson and Madalyn Murray O'Hair in front of a local courthouse that also has a monument listing the Ten Commandments.  I believe in the First Amendment and the free marketplace of ideas, so I support their right to establish such monuments.  Still, why, in my secret self, do I wish atheists would keep quiet about their convictions?  I think it's because most atheists I know embrace a philosophy that sucks the wonder, mystery, and hope out of life.    Life is difficult - a road and a landscape that, for all it's beauty, is blighted with pain and all manner of tragedies and all kinds of questions that have no answers.   To me, their philosophy adds up to the lines from Shakespeare:  "Life is tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing."

I am also troubled by the extreme dogmatism of many atheists.  It is possible to debate spiritual questions - Is there a God?  Is their life after death?  Are prayers answered? - with agnostics, with Episcopalians, with Lutherans and Presbyterians and Jesuits... and probably with some atheists.  But Those I have known either get angry - they think I am trying to convert them (I'm not) - or let me know that the subject is boring or too silly to be worth their time. 

In reality, it is not possible to prove, in  a scientific sense, that there is a God or that there is not a God.  Rigid theism and rigid atheism are both based in belief in things unseen and unprovable.  There is empirical evidence for the reality of reincarnation, but most spiritual beliefs and disbeliefs cannot be empirically validated.

In my opinion, the rigid beliefs of fundamentalists are often based in fear.  In such a vast and often terrifying universe it is comforting to think that one has all the answers and a sure-fire map to Heaven.  Fundamentalists tend to get aggressive when their beliefs are challenged.  That is the response of fear and secret doubts that must be drowned out at all costs.  A reality-based belief doesn't need to be defended.  Water does run downhill and if someone chooses to believe that it doesn't, I can live with that.  I have no need to defend truth.  Truth is its own defense.  The beliefs I must defend are those that I suspect may not be true.

So what are atheists - not all atheists but the kind I privately think of as 'fundamentalist atheists" afraid of?  Are they afraid to hope?  Are they afraid of the part of their mind that would embrace irrationality?  I have said in my poems, a time or two, that life belongs to poets, lunatics and saints.  Are my atheist brethren afraid of finding themselves among that number?  Afraid that they will no longer pay their bills, mow their lawns, go to work - but will be walking down fourth avenue in white robes, chanting the ten thousand names of God?

Fear not, atheist friends, it takes a long time, probably many lifetimes, to reach the stage where you will feel impelled to grab your begging bowl and head for 4th Avenue.  Being open to knowing that one does not know, being open to the infinite possibilities of this vast and mysterious universe,  being open to receiving wise counsel from the deepest parts of the self, where the still small voice of Spirit lives, has no downside.