sight

i met my first patient yesterday in los angeles, let's call him ira. he lost his vision last week. and he's taking it hard.

having worked with actively dying people in the past, one of the things that i have sensed is the greatest problem for them is the loss of agency in their lives. as their bodies get sicker, and they lose various physical abilities, they start to lose the freedoms that we build around those abilities. ira can't walk; now he can't see. he thinks that his life is over. and it almost is, but it's not quite over yet.

but he, completely understandably, feels very isolated. this is his first christmas away from him family. they are going to come for breakfast (he has a large family with children, grandchildren, and even great grandchildren -- and his father is still alive!) but it's not the same. he speaks fondly of last year, and even of last week when he could see, and he cries through non-seeing eyes.

i want to try to make him realize that there are ways for him to learn to deal with his blindness and still be happy. but he's dying. of cancer. he knows it. if he weren't dying, we wouldn't be there. how do you find the strength to bother to learn to relive when you know you have very little time left to live?

so, we sat and talked. and he cried. it's not the same. he doesn't want me there. he wants his sight back. i'm a pretty miserable subsitute.

daily dharma: When the Iron Eagle Flies
Ayya Khema

It will not be persuaded by any pleading of misery to let go of us. If we say to a human teacher, "I don't feel well . . .," the teacher may reply, "I am very sorry, but if you want to go home, then you must go." If we say to dukkha, "Look, I don't feel well . . . I want to go home," dukkha says, "That's fine, but I am coming along." There is no way to say goodbye to it unless and until we have transcended our reactions. This means that we have looked dukkha squarely in the eye and see it for what it is: a universal characteristic of existence and nothing else. The reason we are fooled is that because this lfe contains so many pleasant occasions and sense contacts, we think if we could just keep this pleasantness going dukkha would never come again. We try over and over again to make this happen, until in the end we finally see that the pleasantness cannot continue because the law of impermanence intervenes. . . . So we continue our search for something new, because everybody else is doing it too.

youth

i turned 30 last friday. it's a very odd thing to turn 30 in our society. one thing that i've noticed is that people tend to think of that as an "old" age. since my birthday, i've told multiple people that i'm 30, and their response falls into one of two camps: either they say, "oh, you don't look that old," or they say, "well, 30 isn't that old". (i'm not sure who they're trying to convince, themselves or me).

and yet only two weeks ago i mentioned to someone that i was 29, and the response was, "you're such a baby still!"

there's a bifurcation that happens as we age, i suppose. 30 is a milestone. people expect something of a 30 year-old. time to have your shit together. time to be independent and able to stand on your own two feet. a blundering 30 year-old doesn't get the smile and excusing nods that a blundering 25 year-old gets.

so, i suppose that's a loss of sorts. loss of youth. still young, but not a youngster. time to get ready to face the inevitable. death is not just for old people. it's not just for your patients. its coming. your aging. better get ready. the ultimate personal loss, loss of your own breath, is somewhere out there. and it's no longer something that will be grabbed from you before your time. it's not just freak accidents and lottery-luck cancers that one has to concern oneself with. as my youth marches firmly into my past, i realize that i've got some real-life actualization to take care of.

loss of my youth. loss of breath. loss of life.

it's coming. i want to be ready. i want to be strong.

daily dharma: Right livelihood has ceased to be a purely personal matter. It is our collective karma. Suppose I am a schoolteacher and I believe that nurturing love and understanding in children is a beautiful occupation. I would object if someone were to ask me to stop teaching and become, for example, a butcher. But when I meditate on the interrelatedness of all things, I can see that the butcher is not the only person responsible for killing animals. He does his work for all of us who eat meat. We are co-responsible for his act of killing. We may think the butcher's livelihood is wrong and ours is right, but if we didn't eat meat, he wouldn't have to kill, or he would kill less. Right livelihood is a collective matter. The livelihood of each person affects us all, and vice versa. The butcher's children may benefit from my teaching, while my children, because they eat meat, share some responsibility for the butcher's livelihood.

Meaningful Work
Thich Nhat Hanh in Claude Whitmyer's Mindfulness and Meaningful Work

loss of progress, but not of faith

many thanks to anonymous for her kind, thoughtful, insightful words. anonymous spoke about the culture of shame around death and dying in reference to my culture of shame around abuse. i think this is a wise connection. i believe that it is a sign of our hyper-independent culture that we are expected to paint the rosy picture of our lives no matter what is happening. it's never considered part of our communal responsibility to actually admit that pain is a process, and that issues aren't always easily resolved or dismissed. i'm sorry that your father's death was so difficult for you.

and apologies to everyone for not writing more frequently. i have been writing my final papers for school, which has kept me quite busy for the past few weeks. but the time off has given me time to reflect and to think (and to recover from the last posting, which was difficult for me to write).

so, what other losses have i felt in my life? well, a few weeks ago we had an election. and there was some loss associated with that.

first, let me say that i don't necessarily care that george bush is in office. i don't like him, but i am actually heartened that the american people got out to the polls and voted. they came out in mass numbers. and, by a slim margin (given that number of people), they voted in the candidate who i dislike greatly. but he was the more popular candidate, and it appears that he actually did get a majority of the votes, both popularly and in the electoral college. so, the system is intact and working; it just produced bad results, or, more accurately, results that i disagree with. i can live with that. i have other accesses to power, and i intend to get active and use as many of them as i possibly can over the next four years to force bush to do what i want him to.

but i do have a sense of loss from this election, and that is the loss of progress. i believe that what we call the progressive movement made some great gains over the past few years, especially with regards to same-sex marriage. my husband and i took advantage of this progress to get legally married in san francisco in february of 2004. that marriage was nullified everywhere except in our hearts, but we held out faith that we had started the ball rolling toward something that was gaining momentum. in this past election, 11 states determined to constitutionally restrict marriage to between a man and a woman, and many of those states stripped rights away from domestic partners as well. this reactionary policy of hatred is hurting loving couples all over the country. my heart bleeds for them.

but, despite these setbacks and the pain of the present, i have faith in the future. i have faith in people. i believe that people aren't bad, just not ready, not wired for this movement. and time will fix that.

loss of progress, but not of faith.

daily dharma:In a well-known phrase, the Buddha said, "Hatred can never cease by hatred. Hatred can only cease by love. This is an eternal law." We can begin to transcend the cycle of aversion when we can stop seeing ourselves personally as agents of revenge. Ultimately, all beings are the owners of their own karma. If someone has caused harm, they will suffer. If we have caused harm, we will suffer. As the Buddha said in the Dhammapada: We are what we think. All that we are arises with our thoughts. With our thoughts we make the world. Speak or act with an impure mind And trouble will follow you As the wheel follows the ox that draws the cart.... Speak or act with a pure mind And happiness will follow you As your shadow, unshakable. Happiness and unhappiness depend upon our actions.

Lovingkindness
Sharon Salzberg

childhood, parents

those of you who know me probably know that i'm a survivor of an abusive father and mother. it often makes people blanch when they hear me talk about it, which i find odd. abuse is a weird little secret in our society; we all agree that it's a bad thing, but we don't often want to hear about it. there is a societal instinct to deify our parents, and speaking out against them really makes people uncomfortable.

but fuck that. not being comfortable talking about it creates a culture of shame around abuse, and asking the victims of abusive parents not to talk about it sends the message that the victim is somehow to blame, or in the least that the victim should deal with the problem on their own and can't expect support or assistance in extricating themselves or dealing with the issues once they have gotten out.

so, as a child, we were raised in a highly charismatic christian home, which is odd for catholics. my dad is this weird brand of freakish, speaking in-tongues, wanna-be-snake-handling catholics. he made me go to a few services with him, which i hated. scary shit. my mother, the consummate irish catholic, was the ultimate keeper of the peace in an abusive family. there was a lot of emphasis in our family catechism about turning the other cheek (a staple in a family trying socialize the children to hide abuse).

so, the cycle of abuse in our family went something like this: 1) dad would come home, ready for some bullying. the family would tense, waiting for the explosion. 2) the family would tiptoe around dad, trying to minimize any opportunity for him to find fault and let his fists fly. 3) dad would inevitably find some napkin out of place or some banana peel not neatly folded before it was placed in the trash, and he would let loose, sometimes on me, sometimes on my brother, occasionally on one of my sisters, and once on my mother. 4) the "offending" recipient of dad's beating would be banished to his or her room to consider what she or he had done. 5) after a safe cooling off period mom would come to the room to tell the child how they were to blame, and how he or she should remember not to make dad angry. 6) the banished child would return to the family, humiliated, and be expected to pretend that nothing had happened while dad reigned smugly over all of us.

lather, rinse, repeat. daily. for nearly fifteen years.

as i got older and became more socratic in my thinking, i began to question my culpability in this little ritual. i was no longer willing to be blamed for the fact that the transmission on the car was broken, as i didn't know what a transmission was, nor had i done anything to the car that could have conceivably damaged the transmission. i was unconvinced that it was my fault that there were dirty dishes in the sink, because in a family of seven there is likely *always* to be a dirty dish in the sink; preventing that state would be someone's full-time job. my mother's stump speech changed to accommodate. instead of telling me why it was my fault that dad had beat me, she began her "turn the other cheek" campaign. which worked, for a time.

i was twelve years-old when the loss of my childhood occurred. dad had beaten the not out of me for something inane, i don't remember what. mom came to my room and pitched the turn the other cheek speech. and she left. and i sat and thought about it. and something broke. i *couldn't* turn the other cheek. because if i did, he was just going to hit me on that cheek. the problem was not that i was an ungrateful, unforgiving son. the problem was that he was an abusive old man who had no intention of changing. and i couldn't conceive of a god who would want me to get kicked around by my father and not to protect myself, however a twelve year-old can protect himself from a grown man. and i knew that if i was going to survive this, and to protect my siblings, that i had to grow up and get hard. right then and there. so i did. at age twelve.

my father was a dodgy fuck, and he remains so. there was sexual abuse in the family, too, and i'm not comfortable sharing details about that. i live with the guilt of not reporting it every day of my life. my dad would probably still be in jail if i had. my mother remains his eager defender, asserting his infallibility (and her own, which is really more the point) at every juncture. and so we live, estranged. a boy who became a man too early, who is completely unable and unwilling to understand his parents because they can't apologize. and parents who are unable to understand or admit wrongdoing enough to apologize. loss of childhood. loss of parents.

daily dharma: Our minds are used to thinking, but when we want to become calm and peaceful that is exactly what we have to stop doing. It is easier said than done, because the mind will continue to do what it is used to doing. There is another reason why it finds it difficult to refrain from its habits: thinking is the only ego support we have while we are meditating, and particularly when we keep noble silence. "I think, therefore I am." Western philosophy accepts that as an absolute. Actually it is a relative truth, which all of us experience. When we are thinking, we know that we are here; when there is no chattering in the mind, we believe we lose control... Our first difficulty is that although we would like to become peaceful and calm and have no thoughts, our mind does not want to obey... So instead of trying over and over again to become calm we can use whatever arises to gain some insight. A little bit of insight brings a little bit of calm, and a little bit of calm brings a little bit of insight.

tramp

i think my earliest memory of really personal loss came when i was about seven years old. we were living in the old house on ohio street where my parents still live. wait, hold up. there's some back story.

my first memories in life are of a small trailer home where my sister, my brother, my mom, my dad and i lived. it was in a trailer park on the air base -- we lived on cherry street. they are not all good memories; my father was an abusive man and life wasn't easy. we were five people trying to make ends meet on an enlisted man's salary. my mother didn't work outside of the home. times were very tough, and even as a young kid i knew this.

but the memories weren't all bad either. i remember eating beef stew in our little dining nook. i remember my brother (who we then called pj) turning one year old. i remember playing "bum bum, here we come" with my parents out in our little yard. and i remember getting tramp on my fourth birthday.

tramp was my dog, for sure. i think he was a shepard mix, but who can tell, really? i had no idea, i'm sure he just came from the pound. but i loved the shit out of that dog. and i think he loved me. we grew up together, a little, although he outpaced me; he was my jacky paper, i guess.

when i was five we moved out of the trailer home and into our home on ohio street. it was a dump, but my parents have really worked on it over the years and built it into a nice home. they did a lot with very little; looking back on it i have no idea how they managed it all. one of the best parts of the new house was the big back yard (it had maybe 1/8 of an acre of land, b but at the time it seemed positively immense) where tramp and i could run around.

when i was six we adopted a stray and named him spot. tramp and spot were quite a pair -- we loved playing with those dogs. spot was much smaller, a short-haired, pissy little dog. and he turned out to be a bad influence.

about four or five months after we adopted spot, the dogs started jumping the fence to our backyard. it wasn't something that tramp had ever done before, and frankly i have no idea how spot managed it. but off they went, tearing through the neighborhood. at first it seemed cute. and then the local dog warden caught them and brought them back to us. he told us that if the dogs bit anyone, we would be fined by the city and we would be personally liable. mom and dad wanted to give up on the dogs right then and there. i begged for one more chance on their behalf.

in the end, they didn't learn their lesson and the guys from the pound came to take them away. the dogs knew something was up -- they crawled up under the house in the crawl space and wouldn't come out. i was sitting in the bathtub, crying, when my mom came upstairs and told me that i had to come down and call my dogs out so they could take them away. i remember calling them and calling them, but they wouldn't come. i tried whistling through my tears, but i was seven and couldn't really whistle. the guys from the pound were laughing at me behind my back, but i barely cared.

finally, the dogs came out. and they leashed them, muzzled them, and took them to the pound. where they were incinerated, i'm sure.

i still miss my dogs. especially tramp.

daily dharma: You might think that if you let go of your ego world, you might become passive and defenseless like some kind of crash dummy, and people will take advantage of you. Or that you might wander around aimlessly in the street without an agenda. If this were the case, as one contemporary Buddhist master pointed out, it would be necessary to have enlightenment wards in hospitals to take care of bruised or socially inoperative buddhas. But this is not the case. Rather than being inmate types, people who have become enlightened to any degree are builders of hospitals for other people. Their intelligence and compassion are relatively unobstructed, and they tend to become quite active and effective citizens. -- Samuel Berkholz, Entering the Stream

grandpa newton

at some point i have to stop intellectualizing this process and actually start talking about loss in my life...

the first time i became aware of loss was when i was three, i suppose. my grandpa newton (my mom's dad) had died, and we drove to kentucky for the funeral. my grandma ruby (she was my step-grandma, but i didn't understand such things, as i had never known my blood grandmother) was there. i remember pulling up to her in our station wagon with the wood paneling on the side, and my mom hugging her through the car window. it was raining, i remember, and i couldn't tell what on her face was rain and what was tears. she had on one of those translucent rain hats that grandmas always wear when it's raining to protect their hair. she was wearing a berber coat, or at least i think she was.

the kids didn't stay for the funeral, i'm sure of that, but where we went i can't remember. and what remains of the rest of the day is lost in a mess of memories that might have been from that actual day or might have been from any other of a number of indistinguishable visits to my parents' families in kentucky.

i don't really remember my grandfather newton. i think my mom once told me that i had met him a few times. when i see photos i can conjure up a vague image of a skinny man, tall-ish and handsome-ish (but that could just be from the vantage of a small, faggy boy who is both terrified of and sexually obsessed with all adult men), with skin not unlike beef jerky and a kind voice. the thin, sweet smell of pipe tobacco hangs in that pseudo-memory.

i have always been jealous of people who know and love their grandparents. i never knew mine. a loss of a different kind, i suppose -- loss of something one never had?

daily dharma: Right livelihood has ceased to be a purely personal matter. It is our collective karma. Suppose I am a schoolteacher and I believe that nurturing love and understanding in children is a beautiful occupation. I would object if someone were to ask me to stop teaching and become, for example, a butcher. But when I meditate on the interrelatedness of all things, I can see that the butcher is not the only person responsible for killing animals. He does his work for all of us who eat meat. We are co-responsible for his act of killing. We may think the butcher's livelihood is wrong and ours is right, but if we didn't eat meat, he wouldn't have to kill, or he would kill less. Right livelihood is a collective matter. The livelihood of each person affects us all, and vice versa. The butcher's children may benefit from my teaching, while my children, because they eat meat, share some responsibility for the butcher's livelihood.

apple cores

thanks to anonymous for the interesting discussion about the teacher and the apple core. this introduces another kind of loss into the discussion, which i might classify as loss based on expectation. students in a class expect a very specific something from a professor -- it is probably merely face-time during the agreed upon lecture time. maybe it's also a certain kind of behavior. students also don't expect faculty to lie to them -- to say they'll return and then not to do so. from this persepctive, i think, loss is based on unrealized (or perhaps more appropriately) broken expectation.

i think some buddhists might say that these expectations are our desires. we expect not to be caught up in traffic, and when we are it leads to a loss of control. our desire for control when we are controlless makes us angry, makes us generate karma. we expect that if we are paying someone to perform a service (somewhat in the vain of the professor walking from the classroom) that that service will be delivered in a way that is commensurate with our expectations. when it is not, we perceive an injustice. our desire for justice makes us angry, makes us generate karma. we expect good things to happen to us, that we will be surrounded by loved ones. our desire to recapture good times when they are gone makes us angry, makes us generate karma.

and yet, we mourn these umet expectations, always, daily. our logical mind tells us that getting angry while driving accomplishes nothing, that service providers are fallible human beings, that good times can't last. and yet we cling to the expectations.

in my hospice training last wednesday i talked a little bit about my last patient in north carolina. he died days before we moved away. i was so caught up in the move that i never really allowed myself to mourn that loss. while common decency and hippa standards compel me not to say too much, i can say that he was an astonishing human being and one that i was blessed to know. and he's gone. i was the last friend he ever saw. that's an honor that i feel immensely unworthy of, but it is so precious to me that i can hardly bear up under the weight of it.

digging deep. ouch.

daily dharma: Speech is a powerful force. But how much attention do we pay to our speech?...Do we actually bring some wisdom and sensitivity to our speaking? What is behind our speech, what motivates it? Does something really have to be said? When I was first getting into the practice of thinking and learning about speech, I conducted an experiment. For several months I decided not to speak about any third person; I would not speak to somebody about somebody else. No gossip. Ninety percent of my speech was eliminated. Before I did that, I had no idea that I had spent so much time and energy engaged in that kind of talking. It is not that my speech had been particularly malicious, but for the most part it had been useless. I found it tremendously interesting to watch the impact this experiment had on my mind. As I stopped speaking in this way, I found that one way or another a lot of my speech had been a judgment about somebody else. By stopping such speech for a while, my mind became less judgmental, not only of others, but also of myself, and it was a great relief.