Thanksgiving in Oregon

Oregon is cold and grey, with some intermittent moments of sun accompanied by damp chilling temps ... it is winter here, for sure, and once again the family gathers for Thanksgiving.  In a large house in the Oregon suburbs four (or is it five?) generations from two sides of the family mingle, cook, watch television, take walks, play cards, take showers, do more cooking, and play with the terminally cute schipperkee puppy called Tugboat, and the noise/energy level rises and falls, but mostly rises.
We prepared a beautiful and very generous turkey dinner, complete with several kinds of potatoes, roasted root veggies, green beans, succulent shimmering cranberry sauce, and we ate with great appreciation.  Good red wine abounded.  The talk was light, but I think the hearts were full:  of appreciation, each in our own way, for being alive, being with people who care about us, for having the abundance....  Daughter #2 whose home we inhabited made four pies.   Pie making is something she truly loves and is proud of.  Lemon, Pumpkin, Chocolate candy, Apple.  They were quite something -- a parade of pies!  This may be the only time I eat dessert, and I must -- to honor the heartful effort she put forth.
Journeyed to Portland yesterday to visit the art museum, a pristine bright, light space filled with art old and new.  The contemporary collection feels pretty significant, and my heart warmed to see some painters I knew well.  Looking at art makes me SO happy.  I feel complete.  As though this too is enough, just the way it is...  The kids tagged along of course, and occasionally related to the work on the walls.  Mostly I think they just loved walking through the spaciousness of the museum, feeling the freedom of that spaciousness.  I saw my desire to teach my family arise and I kept it as quiet as I could.  I know so much more than they do, and part of me wants to impart all that knowledge, and then, too, I have to realize that they may not need or want that information.  Knowing about art has been essential to me, from the time my mother dashed off to art school, and subsequently filled our environment with her dashing, brave abstract paintings...  It was a survival thing this relating to art.
Lunch at an upscale boisterous Peruvian restaurant in the Pearl district was a foodie's adventure.  Lots of small plates and succulent flavors, from paella to ceviche to seafood wontons and avocado stuffed with crab (oh so good!).  We ate and we ate and finished, of course, with dessert:  three kinds of creme brulee, some chocolate extravaganza, a shortbread cookie sandwiched over a rich caramel.   Then out into the chilly streets to explore this warehouse district turned upscale artsy neighborhood.  It was getting darker (our lunch had been a long and late one!) and colder by the moment, and while I wanted to relish the character of the brick buildings and interesting storefronts, ducking inside was a relief.  Cargo -- a funny eclectic store that seems like a maverick cousin of Cost Plus, and much more daring.  A sprawling warehouse of kooky, enticing, imaginative goods.  I wondered:  could one do ALL one's Christmas shopping there??
Last night we played poker, while others watched some strange sci-fi movie with very loud sound effects.  I realized in the midst of all that how sensitive I am to sound.  It's the living alone, I guess.  There was movie sound, shrieking of children sound, chips on the table sound, miscellaneous interchange at the table, occasionally the high pitched bark of Tugboat when the children screamed at their movie.  It felt like physical assault at times, and I tried very hard to roll with it, but at times I found myself reacting before I could stop myself.  When I got in my car late into the evening to motor to my very quiet motel by the river, I relished the silence - I turned the radio off, and just drove...   I LOVE quiet.
Since earlier in this visit I had finished my knitted scarf project, I had little to occupy myself with as we sat around the family room with the giant TV screen showing a movie that seemed meaningless to me.  I wondered about conversation, and why there was so little of it.  Just another moment of many where I realized what a different world I inhabit from the rest of my family.  Sitting there feeling separate, and much of the time being at ease in that separateness.... There were times when I wished I was more a part of their world or they of mine, but then I remember how impossible that really is.  And, in fact, it is NOT what we really want.  Aren't our wonderful unique differences what help us to appreciate, respect, and treasure one another?  Unconditional love is born out of that acceptance and maybe even gratitude as well!  We are all separate AND connected.  And as long as we don't expect (or crave) respect and adoration, we can simply roll with what comes in this ever changing dynamic of family...
When I return to my sleepy little house in SF, I know I will feel twinges of loneliness -- really alone once again, and in this season of darkness and the dying off of things, this season which invites melancholy no matter who you are with  (or not with!).  The 20th anniversary of my mother's death is December 1, and I will try to mark it in some ritualistic way, so the sadness doesn't envelope me, but rather so I can invoke and honor a life that gave me life.  For twenty years now I have been the matriarch in this family!  And I can't help but wonder :  how long will this continue?  Ah yes, death and dying are with me, with us, now.  BUT, I am just now reminded of the Pablo Neruda quote that Jack K. loves to offer up on retreat:  "You can pick all the flowers, but you can't stop the spring."  That sounds pretty beautiful to me right now.
May all beings find peace, joy,  light ... and the inevitable spring

Less Light, More Dark ...

The air is cooler, and the darkness is more upon us now, as the winter season makes its presence known.  This is the time of year that my old melancholia tries to nudge its way back into my life, with a free-form anxiety coming along for the ride.  I have realized that the amount of solitary time I spend is directly related to the tenacity of my dark spirits...
But this weekend I had a chance to spend time at the beach interacting with visitors coming to Salmon Creek for their "art walk," and the change in momentum is clear.  To the prevailing enthusiasm about my art (my eclectic, eccentric necklaces), I feel myself becoming animated, attending to my words, actually liking what I hear.  I feel authentic and solid in those moments.  In keeping with the ever changing nature of things, these weekend days went from grey and drizzling to bright and sunny (today), and you can feel that "nip" in the air, which is invigorating.  I go to bed listening to the roar of the ocean, and wake up to the beginnings of bird conversations, and in moving about my little house I pay close attention to the minutiae of life ... the warmth of the teacup in my hand, the ivory keys of my piano under my fingers, the smell of some exotic new soap in my bathroom, my cat posing on the windowsill in the sun ... all this and more, when I'm not ruminating about our terminal human journey.  Impermanence is with me through all my waking moments it seems, and there are many times I have a hard time opening my heart to it.
Have been reviewing my photographs recently in preparation for doing a photo show, and that has been a gratifying process : to view one's own work with objectivity and respect.  I see a thread in the work : the spiritual character of our human existence.  As I look at the Burmese children with their wide open smiles, the Bhutanese monk proudly gazing at my camera, the Balinese couple with their hands raised in prayer ... I realize the need we all have for the divine realm, that place where we are all together as members of the human family, and there is no separation, no judgment.  Which leads me to wonder whether I should move out of my hermit self, reach out more to the world, offer more of myself to life, much like I have this weekend with the art enthusiasts... Connection is a lifeline.  It vibrates.  Solitariness can be retreat -- ever so still;  one's line of sight becomes so much narrower the more time one spends alone.
Yes, now that there is in fact more darkness (the season for hibernation!), and, yes, the 20th anniversary of my mother's death, I will take some steps outward.  And I will see perhaps that I am not as alone as I believed I was.

Magpie's Beads Returns!

My website which I've been shepherding along over many months now is officially launched!  And it is quite beautiful, thoroughly personal, and a tad brainy (lots of information on beads and bead history).
The artist profile casts me as an eternal traveler, one who has been shaped in every way by all the faraway places I've visited.  To me beads are in and of themselves carriers of human history, uniting all peoples because of trade, and because of the commonality of human vision and imagination....
Take a look and see what you think!  And, I must confess I have crossed over that line that I once refused to tread:  I have created a website that actually sells the art.  I am an internet merchant!
You can find my treasures at:  www.magpiesbeads@yahoo.com

Giving Up House Decorating

How long does it really take to feather your nest, before it's ready to live in?
Woke up this morning remembering a line in a conversation with a good friend yesterday, and it went like this:  it's time to stop decorating my house and start living in it.  We were driving along the sunny Sonoma coast on our way to lunch, and the statement seemed picture perfect -- metaphoric and quite true to life at the same time.
I have been hauling all kinds of beautiful and useful things up to the beach house each time I make the journey, and then lovingly arranging them once I get there.  Then I sit back and smile happily at my ability to adorn my environment with some pizzazz!    Turns out I haven't been really LIVING in the Bodega Bay house, as much as dressing it up.  With a new laptop sitting on a brand new cherry wood desk in front of a window that opens to the creek and the magnificent wildlife, I have my working set up all ready.  And do I sit down to write, or work on my photos?  No.  Not yet.....
I have been also helping to decorate my new website - to be launched in the near future - and watching as this virtual space becomes more and more interesting, and lovely to look at.  The perky, very smart web designer is responsible for teasing out some of my quirky uniqueness, and it has been a fun journey doing this collaboration with her, and feeling inspired by the creative work I have done with beads over the years.  But, I am still decorating the house, as opposed to working in it.  I am not actively working on new pieces, claiming that I have no proper work space.  Is this a cop out?  When will I stop worrying about the particulars of the website's "look" and get down to business of making art?

Getting out to the beach with two dear friends this weekend opened up the door to DOING rather than planning and envisioning.  We sat about and knitted and talked and worked and talked, and I felt that wonderful satisfaction of creating some THING in the world -- in this instance a kooky colorful baby hat for a friend's newborn.  And as the conversations unfolded, and the life stories popped up, I realized I want to tell stories.  It is an integral part of who I am, and I want to offer  this to the world in some tangible form.  And then there's always that romantic notion of handing down one's own peculiar wisdom to future generations who might easily forget they had a remarkable great great grandmother who dared to cut her hair and smoke in the 20's, who studied classical piano, and became a liberal thinker and intellectual though she had been raised in the deep south.  Yes, stories are good.  Not only are they a gift to those who don't know, but to ourselves who find ourselves in them at every turn.
Decorating the house is like creating the beginning of a story, laying out the landscape for the narrative, and it is pretty easy to do.   If you keep returning to this, you are not moving your story forward, but you're like the writer friend of mine who when trying his hand at book reviewing spent all of one long night perfecting the first paragraph of his piece on Hunter Thompson, because in his view getting this paragraph to be "right" was essential to launch the work.  I saw that as wheel spinning then, and now I fully understand that as I continually rearrange art, place rugs, move objects in my sweet little house, trying to get the project perfectly completed.   And let's not forget the security and comfort in all this spinning...  The catch is that I believe perfection and "just right" to be illusory.   Just as I believe in the wonderful mysteries revealed through doing the work!
There are so many stories to tell and beautiful necklaces to make and photographs to print, and it is time.  Summon up some trust and faith, breathe, and begin...

A Quiet and Serious Sunday

Have been peering out my murky windows at the ocean, the beach-line shrouded in grey -- (this is northern California in the summer, after all) -- and have been watching the movement of my mind, realizing that I'm torn between restlessness (you must get out there and walk on the beach, after all!), and listlessness and apathy (it sure feels good to just sit and bear witness to all the Labor Day visitors hanging out, to the egrets swooping in, the kayakers bobbing about, to just BE in this moment).  Being alone allows me to do exactly what I feel like doing anytime, and there are moments when that freedom is difficult, when I feel I become quite static.  The do list is long:  walk, knit, play the piano, make jewelry, do some writing for my website, clean up the house a bit, appreciate my abundant garden.  The NOT to do list is short.  Just breathe and sit and become aware of yourself.  When you plunge into the doing, the time races by, and at the end of the day you feel as though you've accomplished something...  But you have simply passed another day, another tiny piece of your life which is shortening gradually each day.  If you choose to sit, the minutes and the hours stretch slowly before you, and you may even feel as though you're not functioning, as though you are instead floating in water, carried along by its energy - or the energy of passing phenomena (and hours).
I have been thinking about mortality a lot, and wondering how much time is left for me to wrestle with these things.  The fragility brought on by the accident has forced me to realize that we have very finite and yet mysterious life span, and that in the blink of an eye, every single thing can (and will) change.  Just in the last few days I heard news of accidental death, and the onset of a fatal disease, and I know more will be coming my way...  My 100 year old ex mother in law's ashes will be be laid to rest next week in Illinois and my daughters will go to join family and take part in this eternal ritual.  Putting to rest...  I told daughter #2 that we do this for ourselves, and that it is a good thing, for it allows us to move on with our lives in the realm of the living; when I say things like that I hear my teacher's brain kick into gear, issuing information that I think is useful.. As I remember looking down on my own mother's gravestone many years ago, I wished for relief and a lightening of the grief load.  But in my life since (and I suspect in many others), I have been continually saying goodbye to this troubled woman I spent my childhood with and even loved.  So, the rituals of funeral and memorial are just the beginning of the farewell process.   There's truth and there are the stories we tell ourselves...  In order to persuade my kid to travel to take part in an event she seemed to dread I had to put on my know- it -all hat.  This will be good for you, I imply.  Being a part of family is a good thing, I assure her, though I know how very painful finding your true place there often is.
The mood is sober, the images and subjects traveling through my mind are dark and sad, except when I see the pair of egrets swooping down to land in Salmon Creek.  Except when I sit at the piano and play a Goldberg Variation... or eat a perfectly sweet summer tomato ...  Life is this shimmering thing we have for a while, amazing to behold, and also such a lot of work to stay conscious for.  Next week I will return to hospice work after over two months away playing the part of a hospice patient myself.  I will put myself in the position of actively helping the residents, and I will remember again the extraordinary beauty of our human existence.  That we have life at all is such a phenomenal thing, and to reach out and love others -- by sitting, by doing, by talking -- is an opportunity that is unspeakably unique.   Touching love is touching the very thing that sustains all beings, no matter where we live, what language we speak, how we look, or how old we are....
And maybe now, a little walk along the creek.  I need to get closer to the ocean's roar.

Hunkering Down with Grief

Grief and sadness have been my (private) companions for some time, going back even before my life was forever altered by a car in my neighborhood.   But since I was forced to inhabit this place of extreme helplessness, I have felt myself hovering over my vulnerability and pain, wrapping myself around this so as not to burden others.  Not a wise course of action to be sure, but one that feels familiar.  I am tired of reminding people of my difficulties, my needs, my pain and loneliness.  So, what does this look like?  When I'm not out in the world carrying on normal conversations, performing common everyday tasks, I am at home in my refuge of a house, wrapping myself up in the beauty that is here, the comfort of my two cats, and the escapism of movie watching and working with my beads.  There is an antisocial element here that feels slightly off to me.  Do I not want to see people, and reach out to those I love?  Yes, and then again, maybe not as much as I thought.  It looks like I want to be with my melancholy and not have to justify this to anyone.  But then this sorrow seems to grow like a seductive weed inside me...  feeding on itself... I have the distinct feeling that something in my life has changed forever, and that I have left behind some wide open, spontaneous and carefree terrain for good.  Old age and death are certainly more vivid in my life's view.  There are psychologists who would agree that this self-focus is normal in someone who has suffered a trauma to their mind and body, and I would like to let myself off the hook as easily as that -- but I can't.
A woman to whom I was related long ago died last week, and I have been ruminating all week about this death, and the meaning of this loss to my children who have not really lost anyone very close to them.  A sobering conversation on the phone today with my older child reminded me that I couldn't address her loss, that I had failed her in a way that would normally be objectionable to me.  There were no words to explain this, I found, and I felt very sad indeed.  I had stayed turned inward at a time when I should have pushed myself out of my bubble and reached out to this young woman who lost one of the most meaningful family members in her life.  Why, why?  I wondered at the conclusion of the phone call.  Self-absorption yes, but perhaps there is something else here.  Was there a lurking resentment in me  that my oldest trusted her grandmother and her grandmother's vision sometimes more than she did that of her own parents?  And would that all be called up in the remembering we would do as we spoke about her grandmother?  There were many times when I imagined that my own feisty eccentricity drove her to find comfort elsewhere, and that she trusted her grandmother's stoicism and conservatism more than she did my messy inconsistency.   I know that I often felt unequal to this formidable mother in law, unequal and then contracted in my resentment.  But, over time we happily found ways to engage each other with kindness and respect -- we forged an amicable (perhaps not completely loving) relationship in the midst of the family landscape.  And I could let go of some of the judgment that had been rained down on me.  My eldest daughter has been a firm task master with me the way her grandmother was, and even now I sometimes wonder if I ever will measure up to her ideal.  I have tried and tried, and then again, I have stopped trying, hoping to be accepted and loved for myself, just the way I am... and just the way I am sure that I love her.
Families are so complicated.  We have such needs, dreams, and expectations of the good life together.  We all want the comfort of loving relations:  the kind attention, compassionate words, the presence of those who truly know us ...  And despite our desire for these really reasonable things, we thwart ourselves, moving often in the opposite direction from that which we want.  Moving inward may have its benefits (reflection leading to insight, or privacy in times of great duress just a few that occur to me), but it can also take us away from connection, and the happiness that emerges from this closeness.  I behaved lately much as the turtle or the snail, pulling myself inside my shell in an effort to somehow protect myself.... but protect myself against what, I wonder?  I need to take a page from the Buddha's wisdom, I think, and ask what the intentions and effects of this choice are.  If I wish to continue a life of non-harming, then the path is clear; it is the path that leads outward to others, to compassion and understanding, and love  This shell of mine must be discarded until such a time as it is truly needed.

A Long Life Ends

There's a woman who has been in my life for a very long time  -- some 50 years now -- who died last night.  She would be my mother-in-law if I had remained married, but happily perhaps for her and for myself, we ceased being related in a family way about 20 years ago.  We rarely found ways to accept one another:  I seldom dedicated myself to the minutiae of being a homemaker, and she wouldn't and couldn't accept my untidy, lawless, eclectic self.  She would have been 100 years old this December if she had weathered all the deterioration of her life -- the blindness, deafness, the growing sense of not belonging in this world ... She leaves behind saddened grandchildren, an embittered daughter, and emotionally limited (but adored) son.  She died alone, which seems sadly appropriate, dying as she had lived for so long...  Not comfortable, but appropriate.  Earlier tonight I was hoping that I would have the chance to pay her a visit, to offer some respect for the long journey traveled, and some comfort in this mysterious passage between life and death. I could bring some of my hospice wisdom and compassion, perhaps, and offer it to a woman who knew so little love in her long life.  I could help heal some of the scars left over from our past...  And then a phone call letting me know that she was gone.  Her daughter took the news bravely at the beginning, but then unleashed her sorrow and bitterness that her mother who had apparently never offered her much kindness through her life had died alone.  For her this felt like the cruelest fact of all.   I sit here now in a quiet living room and remember soberly that we all die alone.  And, does having someone there in the end really make a remarkable difference, or ease the way for us?  This is a question I ponder and turn around in my mind continually as I sit at the bedside of the dying.
Watching someone you love and have a history with die is very painful, and it returns us to our own mortality.  We know where we are all going ...
My youngest daughter sat with her grandmother a few days ago and felt huge discomfort and fear.  She had never seen a person so close to death, pale and immobilized, the breath rasping irregularly in the throat, the chill of the body growing .  This death seemed alien and terrifying in the context of her own vital, warm, loving life ...  I heard this and wished I had been able to be at her side.  But, as we all must die alone, so we must allow those we love dearly to have their pain - alone.  Will you sit with me when I'm dying, I asked?  Will you be able to do that which you find so hard to do now?  Yes, she said.  Good, I said, as though I really believed that we have any control over these things!
I will miss this stark, lonely woman who died tonight, a woman who cut me no slack when we were related, and who often armored herself with views and prejudices I couldn't support.  She had a life, a very long one, and I'm sure it was filled with both the joys and the sorrows that I have no knowledge of;   I wish now that she be free of suffering in her continuing journey.  She might have been an "enemy" of sorts in my younger days, but in being that, she was perhaps one of my best teachers, helping me to conjure up both the worst and best of myself.  I am grateful for this.  I am glad she lived.

Just This Step, Just Now

Last night I walked up the hill and around the corner with my cane, taking myself out to sushi (alone) for the first time, and I found myself paying attention to every step I took on the not so even sidewalk.  It was like walking meditation:  first one step, place the cane, then another step, and of course be sure not to see yourself as this fragile being closing in on the end of life.  Rather think that you're a peaceful monk taking his evening walking meditation, each step keeping him mindful of his body, his practice, his life...  And, when you cross the street, keep your eyes not only on your steps, but also the comings and goings of automobiles.  I'm sure I will never again take for granted the act of walking across the street!   There's uncertainty, for sure, and then there's the memory of that night of June 15, of being flattened on the pavement in a fraction of a second.  I came close to a car as I approached the restaurant - it was running with someone in it, someone on her cell phone, and it was almost as though I could smell that trauma of two months ago.  How strong are our memories and sensory selves...
Playing the piano again with my young teacher I was returned by my senses to that comfortable cultured world I was so happily inhabiting before everything changed.  I again delighted in the sound of Bach under my fingers, and felt the joy that comes with being a transmitter of beauty.  My left hand is working fine, if a little weak and tentative at times.   It needs some extra attention.   I will do some Well Tempered Clavier pieces left handed as exercises to both relax and train that left side of my body.   So, even playing the piano can serve as physical therapy...
Am beginning to see more and more of the things I do these days as pieces of physical therapy, from the lifting of a cup of tea, putting on my new silver running shoes, or the filling up of the bird feeders with fresh new seed for my little wild friends....  And when I was at physical therapy yesterday and was being worked on quite forcefully, and all I wanted to do was scream out in pain and discomfort, I found these words to repeat to myself: "this is just discomfort, that is all. this will come and it will go."  A helpful choice.  It is ALL coming and going.... And as I take my monk's walk on these neighborhood streets in the days to come, I know I am becoming stronger in my 66 year old body, and in spirit too.  I am becoming more of who I am, who I have been all along.

Elbow Portrait

No More Training Wheels

Yesterday I took a photo of my elbow's xray so I could keep an image of what the esteemed surgeon had done to it six weeks ago.  It was an astonishing image:  a long plate around the end of the elbow affixed with 7 screws, I believe.  To look at it you might find it hard to imagine ever bending and moving that elbow again, but of course all that metal is there to facilitate bone healing.  The laconic surgeon, Dr. Kandemir (from Turkey) informed me that it was essentially "healed."  In other words, he saw no more evidence of fracture.  I peered at the picture, and concurred.  But all that metal!  I couldn't keep my eyes off  those brilliant lines in the xray....  New parts of my body.   We went on to talk about the future -- what I now needed to do to make limbs work normally -- and I realized that the doctor was releasing me to the care and wisdom of the physical therapists whose job it is to make me work hard, endure pain, and ultimately regain function.  Healing of bone had occurred in both elbow and leg/ankle, and now the body needs to be retrained.  My immediate response was fear.  Oh my god, this is going to hurt, I'm going to have a really hard time, I want there to be an easier way, etc., etc.  Sort of like what a young child might feel when told that he or she can actually ride that bike with two wheels ....  "you can do it ... yes! .... you can do it .... go for it ...."  We all have memories of that.  We've all stood at that threshold separating protection (training wheels) from the big wide world (motoring on two wheels)....
I've never been very good at physical feats, rarely trusted my body to do anything correctly, and so moving across that threshold is a tad harder for me, perhaps.  When the doctor said my boot could come off my leg, and there were no restrictions to my physical activities, I should have felt some sort of excitement, but instead sensed a little panic inside.  What will I do with the pain?  the fear?  How will I know when I've done too much - gone too far?   Obviously the time has come to remember to trust, and to know that I can take care of myself.  Have faith in the body's phenomenal power to heal, and in my heart which knows I can tend to myself.  
I have been doing just that for quite some time now, without supervision from those related to me.  My mindfulness practice has shown me my inner wisdom and I have finally paid attention!


I have a plan, I think, to begin to tell stories in a different way, without benefit of the computer's keyboard.  I ordered a recording device, and I hope to speak into this.  The more I look back at my life - and there has been a lot of that lately during this recovery - the more I know I want (need?) to tell some stories that lurk in the memory web.  I want to bring some people who have informed and delighted me to the forefront, so that others may see them and like them too.  The free associating mind I seem to be endowed with can spin out stories, I suspect, once I get started reflecting on someone, like my mother, my grandmother, my very eccentric stepfather ...  It will be good not to look into a computer screen at the words popping up, and popping up ungracefully or inarticulately, causing that fatal pause in the narrative stream, and stifling the true voice which holds us spellbound.   So, without too many expectations, I will do this.  It will make me feel useful, much the way I feel useful when I practice the piano, create a great necklace, or knit a beautiful scarf.  Those will come also, but for now they feel daunting physically.  Who knows  -  it is likely they are entirely compatible with the doctor's wishes for me to continually push myself.  One of these days I'll park myself at the piano and revisit my dear JS Bach, and see just how my hands/arms/whole body do with the challenge!


A lot came up for me as I finished A Widow for One Year by Irving, the narrative of a woman who struggled with the loss of a mother, defining herself as a creative being (a writer), and discovering the nature of love with a man.  I was particularly touched by her willingness to allow love for the woman who abandoned her.  That and her commitment to writing.  These are familiar pieces for me indeed.  It's a sprawling, yet well composed novel, and when you reach the end, you feel just a bit of loss as you say goodbye to that manufactured world, and thank the writer who gave it to you.  My heart goes out to those who give their life blood to writing so that I may be enchanted and inspired!  Question is:  can I perform that kind of enchantment for myself?

Home

My cats watch me carefully and stick close;  do they wonder whether I will disappear suddenly again, or is that my own anthropomorphizing this early in the morning?  I woke very early to soft grey skies and now listen to Gregorian chants as I sip dark tea.  I am home, sleeping on the sitting room couch surrounded by pillows, a Buddha or two in the window, beautiful greenery climbing the fence outside and brilliant purple hydrangeas emerging from a giant pot....  It has been a few days and I am beginning to feel as though it is real.  Yesterday I sat at the dining room table drinking tea and talking with a good friend about what I would do with my stepfather's ashes that have rested on a shelf for several years now, and all of a sudden life felt normal.   Yes, the body is still hurt, and the weight of the boot still chafes and pulls on my left leg, but I have re-entered my life.  Why not plan to cast R's ashes out to sea at Bodega?  And to participate once again in creating an elegant website for my fading jewelry business?  I've been unable to launch a new knitting project, but I have been able to dive into another meaty novel -- John Irving's Widow for a Year.  It carries me along the way Verghese's book did, allowing me to inhabit the fictional world, and to admire the bravery and perseverance of writers who work in their lonely spaces to craft stories...  Watched a great movie the other night:  Of Gods and Men, about these loving French monks surrounded by violence in Algeria, who respond to terror with compassion, and ultimately are martyred.   You are taken into monastery life with its candles and chanting, and later you feel the dust of that barren world in your nose, where beautiful women seek medical attention for their children and young terrorists temporarily put away their guns to get help from their Christian brothers.   Very moving story.
Today I will meet a young health care worker who may become my regular helper at home, a woman recommended as "soft," and very capable.  I will be in the position of structuring this woman's job day by day .... hopefully we will become close in the way that happens between the grateful (and needy) "employer" and the person delivering the services.  At least with her I will be asking freely and without hesitation, and I will also have the space to complain or - god forbid - whine about my unfortunate and painful circumstances.  There is freedom in the business arrangement that there isn't with family.  Not so much editing of my words and shielding my cranky heart.
So, on this Friday morning at the end of July I am an extremely grateful human being who sees a great array of possibilities before me:  music to listen to, books to read, maybe a knitting project, or a dinner out from time to time, and lying on my couch watched over by the regal Jackson, my Maine Coon boy who seems always grateful to be living with me on White St.   Each day will bring new awareness of how very fortunate I am and how fragile and precious this quicksilver journey of life is.

Aging Buddha in my daughter's house

I need to remember to take pleasure in the sight of a tiny hummingbird dipping into the lavender, the sight of the distant ocean, or sleek beauty of Alberta the cat as she walks from room to room.  Much of the time I feel at the center of some swirling energy pool of children and grandchildren, where I'm continually trying to find a safe place to land....   Eventually I do, and then I feel as though I'm not a part of it all, locked in this angry body of mine, trying to return in my mind to my own universe.
I have been a guest in various universes, and as a guest I must tread carefully and considerately.  While this is good practice, it wears me out just a little.  The constant state of fatigue that I feel seems to come from this fitting in process, as well as the residual effects of trauma...
Fatigue, sadness, anger, frustration, fatigue, anxiety, loneliness .... these are my visitors.  Do I invite them in as Rumi suggested, or do I try to turn away, to find something beautiful to contemplate?
It occurs to me that even in the company of loving family an acute loneliness and sense of separateness can occur.  As I look back on the last four or five years of my solitary existence, it would seem that I have felt more of that aloneness when in the midst of others, out in the world....  Out in the world we have our anonymity, and in the midst of family we have our essential separateness which rises to the surface as we force ourselves to cooperate and tend one another.
When I return home to White Street I believe my life will be simpler.  Or will it?  I will have to get to know someone who will work for me, and I will have to learn to live with my loneliness.   And my infirmities...
When I tried to defend getting older to my daughter last night I didn't have my heart in it really.  It's not the wrinkles in the face or hands that seem to bother me but the deeper sense of a whole body being old(er), more fragile.  I'd trade a thoroughly wrinkled face for physical strength, I think.  But, then, I could call to mind Suzuki Roshi's words when he was dying, and his monks were despairing all around him, and he said, "It's alright.  It's just suffering Buddha, that's all..."  Yes, this is just aging Buddha -- that's all.

Variations on a "theme" ...

One quiet day leading to another, and before you know it you're making plans again.  Looking ahead.  Thanks to the generosity and good nature of a man who tends my urban garden, I'm getting railings made for my back stairs to help with my passage in and out of White Street.  And with that in mind, I can entertain this idea of going home. Yes! 

"Going home" carries a lot of emotion as I say it to myself.  Being close to my beloved cats, gazing at my Buddhas, listening to music and staring out at the birds, playing at my computer, and watching endless old movies  .... behaving in any spontaneous fashion without a thought of being observed or critiqued .... yes, that freedom that my mother was so obsessed about at the end of her life.  And, on the other side, the sense of aloneness that is both a gift and and reminder of our final, irrevocable state.  Will I long for company once I find myself at home alone?  Or, will I be happy being tended by a delightful sounding woman from Kenya who will do home care-taking of me for a while? 

From here I go to daughter #2's house for about a week, where the challenges will be greater:  the children, the lack of downstairs bathroom, the humility I'll be forced to experience as I use a portable toilet, etc., etc.  Wanting to be around family some more, I will go there, but I am sure it will have its trials.  I seem to carry those trials with me wherever I go because of the inherent helplessness of my body.  Will the three ring circus be a sufficient distraction from the profound restlessness and discomfort I feel, or will it just underscore and magnify that physical condition?  I have only to move toward this opportunity to find out.  And take everything one day at a time....  

Was relieved to finish Cutting for Stone, a 600 page epic that is both beautifully written and in some cases predictable and repetitious.  I learned more about surgical practices than I ever imagined I would, and was reminded of the impassioned life of many who practice medicine.  Gave me a deep sense of gratitude for all those who are impassioned and dedicated to healing.  It is interesting the part that the ego plays in medical practice;  it has to be firmly rooted and vital, and yet when it comes to trauma care, I think it must have to step out of the way, as the doctor follows his internalized knowledge straight through to the resolution of an extraordinary problem.  I bring that up because I wonder a great deal about the balancing act of ego and that wonderful concept of "no self" that the Buddhists teach.  The ego helps us move forward on life's path (sort of like the engine driving the bus), and no self allows us to let go and embrace all that is, and therefore avoid suffering.   Looking back again to the incident on the street when I was hit by the car, I know that ego was in full force from the very moment of the impact -- all that screaming out in pain and distress, my ego crying out to be noticed -- and that the letting go part wasn't able to manifest until I became safely tucked on a gurney, or a bed, and could see that some form of order would prevail.  Verghese's book also reminded me of how very vulnerable our human bodies are - vulnerable and resilient at the same time.  I (we) must trust that those about us will give the best care they can, and at the same time I (we) must accept that life (health, longevity, safety, happiness, etc) is uncertain.   The more we see and live with uncertainty, the more precious every moment, every piece of our life becomes.

As I keep returning to this blog, convinced of the importance of entering my thoughts, I also feel as though I'm dragging myself there,  so tired of the meanderings of my mind.  I yearn to discover fresh new thoughts, and instead encounter the same old questions and doubts, much as my body keeps returning again and again to similar disturbing physical sensations.   Variations on the theme(s) of reflection, insight, and pain....  Here's hoping that those of you who are reading can follow this spiraling tune that is playing out!

You Don't Have to Go Down the Rabbit Hole

As little tics of pain and discomfort pop up here and there in my arm or leg, I think about the miraculousness of the body's healing process.  These little blips of physical sensation remind me that while I eat, talk, read, do my exercises, even take a shower,  the cells of my body are knitting themselves together, growing and stretching as nature dictates.  An amazing unfolding that we cannot see, a cause for joy, really.  There is so little we control....  and no cause for dismay.
It is a grey day in the family room here at K's, the soft black and white dog stretches out on one couch, T reads on another, and I pull myself up from reclining to create an illusion of elongating my body.  This restlessness that I feel reminds me of our residents in hospice who are in the throes of dying, and at the same time trying to escape their physical bodies.  Is this a mental or physical phenomenon, I wonder?  I don't sense a message from brain to body exactly, but more an internal movement, as though pure energy needs to push from the very inside out, stretching, trying to find more space and repose.
We dined out last night at a local restaurant, and for a few hours I almost forgot that I was disabled.  Shows you what a good meal - sand-dabs no less - and a couple of glasses of wine will do!  And already in that comfortable state I had forgotten an earlier moment of frustration and dismay, where I felt treated in an unexpected and dismissive way.   My "story" about that earlier moment placed me front and center in the role of victim, and there I sat licking my imaginary wounds.  Displaced anger seems to be arising in me, along with a bottomless neediness. Yes, I am really angry at that woman who mowed me down on June 15.  Having admitted this, then what?   Where to go with it?  As for the neediness, it looks like the rabbit hole that Alice fell into -- all too familiar...  Unfortunately that normal anger at the heedless driver is compounded by my own nasty feelings about myself and all my inadequacies.  And there I am back in self-loathing, that dark realm I thought I had escaped after a month of sitting at Spirit Rock!  There is no escape, is there?  Does the fact of being a human being inevitably include being that unkind- to -self human who can't progress fast enough, who can't always say the politic thing, who can't stop whining to herself about her unpleasant state?
I think I will do some exercises for my arm, and approach my body with some kindness.  That ought to help with some of this emotional mire I've been traveling through.   Staying in this moment, with this arm, just now.  Breathe, and let the heart slowly open.
   

Refuge in Atherton -- Sunday morning

There is an abiding peacefulness in K's house here in Atherton, the sounds of birds outside reminding me I'm just steps away from the beauty of the natural world, the world that knows nothing of institutions and Alzheimers....   Looking out her expansive picture windows to her much loved garden gives me a huge sense of freedom.  Happiness at how remarkable everything in life is.   Each evening we sit outside and eat on the porch and listen for the doves, the quail, catching sight occasionally of a deer marching along the back fence.
I am being tended well by my dear friend and older daughter, and still rankle with my helplessness and pain.  But I do it quietly and subtly.  I wake up hurting, having contorted my body during sleep so as not to ever put weight on my damaged left arm, and my entire left side pulses with discomfort until I start to move about more.  Just pain, I tell myself, nothing more.... no stories .... just unpleasant sensation, impermanent.  I have found a good book to read - Cutting for Stone - and reading fortunately takes my mind on a journey away from my physical trials.   And yesterday I sat at K's piano and hammered out the Bach Goldberg variation I've spent so long in learning.  It was still in my fingers and memory!   I feel I need to keep using my hands and fingers so they don't atrophy.  Have bags of multicolored yarn around and am trying to locate a project that will be simple that I can sink into.   More exercise for the fingers.

Yesterday went out with Tara into Menlo Park to buy coffee, hair-clips, and a pile of groceries.  I marched through all of it, crutch in hand, and it didn't seem to be a bad thing for my body.  Was so satisfying to be out there in the world amongst functioning people.  Gives you the illusion you too are high functioning!    This of course is dispelled once you return home and remember you will need assistance in order to perform the simple task of showering.  The other day I let very hot water pour over me while trying unsuccessfully to adjust it and I didn't ask for help, even when it came to the awkward move from shower back into my black boot and the seat where I could dry off and dress myself.  It was laborious and I stubbornly wouldn't ask for assistance.  I was scolded for not asking for help, and all of that made me feel all the more despairing of helplessness.  Where is my kindness toward myself, I wonder?  Momentarily forgotten....

Right now the house is extra quiet.  Annie the dog and I are here in the family room, and the rest are out and about to church and golf.  I am going to use this time to look for equanimity and peace inside.  I am not my body, and so must hold the body's difficulties with compassion.  Maybe knitting myself some socks, or creating yet another beautiful scarf, stitching in love and not crankiness, would help me arrive there....

Waiting

Awake since early, early ... 5:45 or so when the sun's light was still a soft blue-yellow through all the greenery outside my window.   I was unable to return to sleep, so eager am I to move on, to go to my friend's house and begin my journey back to a normal life "out" in the world.  This is the morning of my release, therapists having agreed I am capable of managing outside this institutional setting.  And because it is the morning of my release, I am eager, impatient even for all to go smoothly.  Perhaps there is a lingering fear that at the last minute they'll say to me I can't go, I don't know...  I just want to hear it verified, and so I sit in my room waiting.
Waiting - now there's a familiar experience!  As much time as we spend in these rooms alone, stuck in our own heads with the ten top tunes and the 15 favorite anxieties, we have a lot of time to understand "waiting."  Don't think that the Buddha would think that waiting was a constructive way to spend one's days, for what is waiting but leaning forward into the non-existent "future"?  I have to confess that I AM leaning forward into that future (and I'll forgive myself here for being yet again an imperfect Buddhist!).  I feel complete with my present, and ready to take the next steps.
Before I move on I guess I should pause to acknowledge the kindness and care of this place.  The entirely non-white nursing staff has been generous, sweet, good humored at times, even understated as they do their work moment to moment.  Because I have set myself apart here, they have never hovered, and at times have walked on by instead of checking in.  My own fault perhaps, for acting as though I didn't need much help at all.  Or, for acting as though I just preferred my own company.  Another example of our actions having consequences!   Then, of course, there are times when I want the attention and conversation, or just plain information, and feel I have to push for it, and then try to find patience. Things don't happen quickly here, I've found, much as is the case in hospice....   This is a good thing.  Where do we need to rush to after all?
I have had so many thoughts and feelings about death since being here, surrounded by so many who appear to be closer.  When I look at these white haired old men and women, I try to picture myself in their spot, truly helpless in the wheelchair, slumped over from sheer weakness, waving at phantom images, or moaning from that feeling of being lost in the dark.....I so want to be at ease with this enormous, mysterious event in my life, and still feel myself shrinking away.  No, no, not yet, I repeat to myself, I'm not ready.  The pain I have endured from these injuries has made me reflect on how NOT in control of things we all are, and in sitting with that awareness there's that understanding that my death is similarly out of my control.

There's awareness, and then there are feelings and emotions.   Awareness feels so calm, cool, collected, focused, and right.  And then the feelings come rushing in, all jagged and turbulent, speaking my fears as though through an echo chamber, sounds ever cycling back on themselves.  Every new strange physical sensation in my leg or arm sets off a stream of feelings colored by anxiety.  Will this beat up body ever return to its former pre-accident state, I often wonder.  That question surely needs to be relegated to the "don't know" or "out of my control" file!    It's just pain - no story attached.  Remember impermanence.

So, here I sit waiting, as the sun becomes more yellow and brilliant on the leaves outside, leaning forward toward the unknown stretching out in front of me.  Better I should pull myself upright rather than lean, and move more steadily and securely through the coming hours and days and .... That would be safer not only for body but for mind and heart as well.

May all those who labor here in service of the frail, sick, and dying, be safe, happy, and free from suffering.    May they (we) know their (our) true nature.

"On Retreat" at the Terraces

There are ways that being in a nursing home (even using that phrase used to give me the "willies") is a little like being on a meditation retreat.  How, one might ask?  It is the moment to moment experiencing of your life that links them.  Here, sitting in a bed by the window, you have the opportunity to note the particular-ness of the passage of time, from first waking to the very early morning light in the sky beyond your little compound, to the warm sensation when you have swallowed a pain pill and the deep ache in your shoulder begins to recede, to the arrival of your breakfast tray, the arrival of the CNA to announce that it's "shower day," and so on .... You are a captive audience, no longer in active mode pursuing any number of your desires.  You are frozen in place.  And the parade of nursing home life goes on outside your door.  As you try to read a good book - Krasny's Spiritual Envy - you hear the distressed patient down the hall calling for help, or the beeping of a call button asking for help from somewhere else, or the vacuuming of the rug in the hallway.  Which of the sensations will hold you now?  The minutiae of existence are there for you to witness, and there is a hypnotic repetitiveness about it.  Nicely dressed residents of the nearby retirement community walk by outside, with canes and straw hats, having their constitutional, and for a second you envy their freedom.  Then you remember to feel grateful for your health, the wellbeing of your mind, and the love you know surrounds you out there....You are mindful of the body both inside and out, and you know that you are strong enough to stroll again, on the city streets, or the beach at Bodega.
In the middle of the night I had trouble sleeping again, and put my attention on my breath and body, breathing evenly, trying not to listen to the patient who was protesting down the hall.... the more I returned to the body this way the farther away the disturbance felt.  I debated whether or not to listen to some beautiful music on my phone (Bach's St. Matthew, for instance), and then decided to return to  sleep some more, though the sky was becoming beautifully pearly and  light - a Vermeer early morning.
It is early Sunday morning on a 4th of July weekend, and I have another long day of noticing phenomena.  No activities to distract, as the therapy staff is off (deservedly).  It will be hot outside today, as it was yesterday, but inside this place it is cool and comfortable, without air conditioning, and the voices of the Philippina nurses and CNAs will softly travel the hallways, gently lilting.  Again I will feel enormously alone, but I will have my mindfulness as companion, and my deep gratitude that I am really fine now.  Alone, yes ... fine, yes.  This I can handle.

  

A Road Map & Uncertainty

I have a road map now, a journey out from this place, where I both relax into the care being given, and twitch with restlessness and anger because of my condition.  I will leave here in a week to rest with my great pal in Atherton, who has a spacious peaceful, level house where I can continue the convalescence.   The last few days have been filled with emotion, a sense of deep helplessness and intermittent tears...  One kid gone on vacation, another one coming, and myself floating in this lonely institution, trying always to remember impermanence, and lovingkindness. I say thank you a lot here because I must, and I go inside and see how things are changing each hour, each day, and AGAIN I know about what Ajhan Cha called "uncertainty."  And I think about my road map, and place myself just where I am in time, right here, right now, with the minutes ticking by invisibly.
My distressed neighbor Mr. Tibbs left today, and I have to say I felt relief knowing this.  His agony and wild vocalizing (especially at night) stirred me up, set off fear, anger, all those feelings we all would rather not own..... Fear of pain, of dying, of not being understood, of being humiliated, of not being seen -- the list goes on.  Anger because I want my private space to be quiet, because the story I have told myself is that I need tranquility to mend.  When I step back to look at it, that anger is pretty selfish and contracted, and I do not want to be that way.  But it is all about being with what is - isn't it?  And I certainly have sent lovingkindness to this man in many odd moments, unseen, and I know that he has no wish to harm his fellow beings.   He is in deep suffering.  And now he is gone.

My visit with the ortho doctor Tuesday, Dr. Morshed, in  San Franscisco, was quite an adventure.  I was transported in a wheel chair van to this slick new complex in China Basin, where I met with the colleague of the man who did my surgery - a man as yet unknown to me, and to whom I feel extreme gratitude.  His message: all is moving along according to plan, normal healing taking place, with a 6 week overall prognosis for complete healing, which makes another 4 weeks before I can consider completing that journey!  My arm will take longer.  The 11 stitches were pulled from my arm, and small tapes applied, and now that arm hangs just as anyone else's might, bare and unadorned, except quite bent.  I will revisit the ortho corporation at the beginning of August at which time X-rays will be done to ascertain  the true status of this injured left side of mine.  It is not time yet to know anything for certain.  We can only sit around and talk of what is expected, what is the norm under my current circumstances.  Uncertainty once again.  I liked having this visit though it gave me no guarantees.  I felt listened to and informed.  I knew where I was on this path back to my other life, the life before this life.
Yesterday felt shaky and emotional, today feels stable ..... and who knows about tomorrow?  Stay here now, just here, just now.  The road map will be there exactly when you need it!

Meditation on Ever Changing Emotions

I live in Room 108 at the Terraces, and keep my door open during the daylight time so I can feel a bit a part of the flow of life beyond my little space.  And because I have the door open, I have had several inquisitive would-be visitors, both of them men, both suffering from dementia, I suspect, but able to move their wheelchairs about on their own.  One is Mr. Tibbs, my neighbor, and I don't know the other.... There is curiosity and befuddlement in their faces as they stare into my space, and I try to meet that stare with kindness.  What I find comes up more often though is distaste -- an aversion to being gazed at as though I were some specimen in a jar (or in this case, in a hospital bed!).  I don''t open my heart but feel it shrink, pull away from these guys, wanting them to wheel themselves elsewhere.  Where is the compassion?  And why do I have this aversion?  It almost felt like fear the other night, as Mr. Tibbs literally wheeled himself into my room.  What was I thinking he would do to me?  Get too close?   And then what?  I think I felt helpless to get away, literally, and fear came right along for the ride.  Yes, I have been through a life altering experience and my nervous system is not as strong as it used to be, perhaps.... I need to remember this ... There is a huge fragility present in my system, and maybe I am not sure it will be protected.  I don't want to be repulsed by these suffering old men, and I can think of many reasons to go the other direction -- that of compassion and openheartedness.  But, yet, I just want to be left alone.  I want to know that my space is my space...
Unfortunately, when you are institutionalized you don't have much control over your space.  And, so, I must be with that.

Moment by moment reality.... uncertainty ....  meet these and be with them.  No judgment, no reaction.

Am feeling a mixture of pleasure and sadness that Sara & family are going on their Canada vacation, the one we were supposed to do together.  I want them to have a good time out there and I know I am missing that time, and I will be missing her terribly.  She is a sweet loving presence in my life that makes me grateful for motherhood.  She tries hard to do the right thing, and agonizes when she's unsure of the right choice.  She needs this vacation to replenish herself, and I need to let go for now.   Loving and letting go.  Tough.  When I start to think of letting go, I realize there are SO many ways we can do this.
What do I see:  letting go of fear (just a passing emotion), letting go of loneliness, of control impulses,
of imagining my future plans, of identifying with the pain in this body, of wanting more creature comforts .... the list could continue on.... but I won't.
The sun outside my window is sinking and the light softening.  This is one of my favorite times of day, and I am stopping now to take it in.  And feel grateful I am alive.

Sunday Morning at the Rehab

I have gone from feeling forlorn to perky in the space of an hour .... Sunday feels like a lonelier day here in the rehab hospital, lonely because there are fewer people tending you, and because it is a day when families hunker down to do their own thing, which may not include visiting their relations.  The help here feels more distracted on the weekend because my guess is they would rather be somewhere else.
My sadness was coming from a sense of deep separation -- not only being separated from my friends and usual pursuits, but separation in a large existential sense.  We are all really doing this journey alone, separate, no matter how many communities we partake in....  Separation reminds me of living alone and what I now feel deeply are the drawbacks of that solitude.  I have been blowing my horn in a way about how pleased I am to be living an independent life, but under the surface of that bravado is a lingering fear.  Will I depart this life unnoticed?  And, of course, working with the dying as I do, I know that there is no way of knowing the what, when, and how of it.  Uncertainty.  Impermanence.  Acceptance.  Equanimity?  Hopefully!
Yesterday I visited the volunteers who came with their dogs - "pet therapy" it's called ... Many of the people in the activities room were slumped in wheel chairs and not engaged.  But I loved looking at those four legged creatures, all eager to relate, to be petted, acknowledged!  There was a boxer, and a daschund, a terrier, and a Bavanese.  It all reminded me of the time Charlie and I took Francesca to the nursing home in SF and had her visit patients in her beautiful gentle way.  She was born to do that work, really.   It occurred to me that I still miss her deeply.  It's the unconditional love that I want - of course.  And then I think :  can I give myself that unconditional love just as she would have?
Eleanora wheeled me into a shower room, and sprayed hot water all over me and I instantly felt rejuvenated.  The washing away of the residue of the last week or so, both the scratchy grit on my skin and emotional layer as well.  We chatted in the shower about having children, and I helped her scrub my curly hair, which she said she liked.  What a pleasure that experience was.  Hands on care.  Just that.  My wounds were covered in large plastic bags and I nervously stretched my arm away to be extra sure it didn't get wet.  Putting on fresh clothes, and lotion in my hair made me feel human, and lively.  The loneliness is still here but I am not feeling oppressed by it.  When she left my room, I thanked her profusely  for her kindness and hard work.  Now I so clearly understand the depth of gratitude our hospice residents feel for our loving care while they live with us.  I don't want anyone's help to go unrecognized.  It all forms a bridge that I can take myself across .... to a place of ease and self sufficiency finally.
In finding the wonderfulness of a CNA's attention today I was able to dispel the bleakness inside.  Or perhaps I was able to hold that bleakness with love.

Uncertainty, Fear & Loathing .... then Compassion

It wasn't that long ago that I felt that my life was shimmering with happiness, that it was just sweet and beautiful, with my amazing beach house as refuge so close to the roaring ocean, with my new found surge of creativity for bead making, my deepening immersion in hospice work, and the sounds I was producing on my piano:  Bach's Goldbergs, and now Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata.  Yes, it was a charmed existence, and I breathed it in and was thankful.
Then as I was crossing the street in my neighborhood a week and a half ago, everything changed.  A heedless driver ran me over, or literally ran my foot over, knocked me back onto the street.  It was a surreal event that I saw coming, and that I could not prevent though I tried, screaming out to her.  Splat I went on Polk Street, and the screaming burst from my body.  People gathered, wanting to help, 911 was called, and I writhed on the hard concrete while an anonymous guy from Starbucks offered me his knee to rest my head on.  I screamed and looked down at my foot now flattened and deformed from the tires of that woman's car.  She stood silently on the sidelines looking as though she were viewing a ghost.  I fell back in a shivering state of shock while we waited for the ambulance, and people formed a circle around my body on the street...  I even tried to get up, deranged enough to think I could actually escape this state of being.    An ambulance took me to the best trauma center in the city - SF General - and an amazing team of people worked to discover, to ward off pain, to mend, to reassure.  A warm flood of painklllers streamed into my body, filling my torso as I thought blankly about how sorry I was that I had missed dinner at Pesce, my local fish bistro. Then, a burning thirst in my mouth, uncontrollable shivering, my mind moving from wildly high speed to a drugged hiatus, and then more horrible thirst....
The following morning I was operated on for 5 hours for a broken elbow, a badly broken elbow.  I now have some titanium plate and screws beneath the surface of this crook in my arm.  My leg was broken close to the ankle, the fibula bone, and no surgery was done.  Encased in a large splint, and expected to heal on its own over time.  I spent a bleak, frightening several days at General Hospital as I waited for word of my future landing place.  I was to go to a skilled nursing facility to be rehabilitated until I could manage the challenges of my 1912 San Francisco house with all its stairs.  A deep sadness came over me as I realized I would be away from my little refuge, and my beloved cats, for an indeterminate amount of time.  I would be under the control of the medical establishment for better or for worse until they deemed it viable to release me into the world.....  Helplessness gave way to anger and stubbornness as I remembered my mother's outrageous resistance to authority, and then I saw the story begin in my brain and then I stopped myself and said, yes, this is what is happening.
One of the reasons I want to chronicle this is that I want to create clarity where there was deep chaos, and fear, and because I have been in a drugged condition ever since this horror occurred.  Drugged though I've been, I have also been able to reorganize parts of my life, and relay information to relevant people, etc.  Percocet has been a helper in the tending of this extreme pain, but I don't want to count on it as a savior.   There is something so inexorable about profound body pain....  It is the ultimate reality, and it never really goes away.  Just relaxes its grip a bit, I think.  I do sense the scrambling of my mental process on and off, and the whooshing in and out of deep fatigue, and I yearn for a spacious, stable place inside.
As I rest in a rehab facility in Los Altos, amidst trees, rose bushes, and lovely planting, I am trying to stay open to the upheaval, and the grim feelings rising to the surface.   I will be walking soon with the aid of a crutch, and my arm will hopefully look and act like a normal arm, and I have no trouble believing in that, but I am weighted down by despair and anger that I have been so assaulted.  At the same time, though, I try to remember that I am a person alive and breathing, and healthy -- that I still have a life.  Yes, and with that gratitude.  And then the whoosh of sadness : will I feel crippled and deformed as I resume my journey into elder-hood?  And how will I hold that reality?  And threaded through all of this is my compassion arising  - in response to myself, my very wounded self, in response to those who work the grueling shifts to care for the fragile and ill, in response to people who are so numbed out in life that they cannot focus as they go about their daily lives ........ Yes, the Buddha had it right.  THERE IS SUFFERING IN THIS HUMAN LIFE.   And the only way through this suffering is on the back of compassion, that opening of the heart in response to pain.
There has been an outpouring of generosity and compassion toward me that has given me space to breathe, and cope, and finally, to rest.  I need to rest and welcome those feelings of helplessness, of anger, of fear.  They are as real as my injuries.  I need to hold myself as a mother would hold her wounded child, tenderly and softly.   Along with this holding is the witnessing: the looking at my broken limbs, the discoloration and abrasions and deformity, with acceptance not fear.  The ugliness I feel is there is not -- it is simply injured body parts.  Do not judge.  Love instead.
I want to continue my exploration of this event because I know that there is profound learning to be had here.  I already know that my body is healthier than I had ever given it credit for, but I need to shepherd my heart through this life changing act.  Healing will come at its own speed, in its own time, and I must stay steady and patient and loving.  I feel proud to say that I can do this.  Stay with me in your thoughts and with your attention -- it will be an interesting ride.

Creativity and the heart

Have been thinking a lot about the power of the creative path.    Why is it that some of us cannot leave it behind?  What keeps all those amazing juices flowing inside?  I think it may have something to do with living and breathing, surviving even... We go beneath the territory of the brain and all its brilliance and artifice, and we sink into some deep - even physical -  truth about ourselves, a truth we can't necessarily articulate. When we are in the presence of good art, whether it is a Bach fugue, a Matisse painting, even a line of Shakespeare, a ballad sung by our incomparable Wesla Whitfield, we hear the profound voice of the heart, and we are slowed down in the witnessing of it, as it moves over us gently.  We are held in a moment in time.  In the presence of such truth, we cease to make plans, review our past, worry about our health or future; we simply remain present with the gift.

I keep trying to make things with my hands:  knitted pieces, beautiful food, colorful wrapped gifts, beaded necklaces, photographs ..... because in the doing I am entirely present, in touch with my heart.  I was talking recently with a friend about my work in hospice and the profound meaning it carries, and he said that when working with the dying you cannot be anything but real -- that "real" which emanates from your heart.  The roles and agendas you have been clinging to are no longer relevant.  And so, too, in creating art,  you find the opportunity to stay in touch with that authentic core of who you are, because anything less will not yield the kind of beauty (truth) you want to offer the world.

Art and death ... Beads and knitting, cooking and making music and holding a sick person's hand .... all ask us to return to what is true in us.  I can't think of a better way to live.

Films, Beads, and our Human Story

On the weekend I saw a haunting film called "Cave of Forgotten Dreams," which gently stirred up my feelings of love for what has come before, and along with that such an appreciation of the kind of life I've had where I can dip into ancient-ness through travel, and through the creation of necklaces with old, old beads. After almost a month of unimaginable tranquility (following the retreat in March), I found myself returning to activities in the world both surprised and comforted me.  Found myself signing up to go to films at the SF Film Festival, seeing at least 5 films in one week, and then spending a weekend at the beach "peddling" my necklaces, pieces I crafted many years ago when I called myself a jewelry artist.  The films - mostly foreign -- took me to worlds far away so troubled and filled with death and darkness, and I sat with that understanding:  suffering in this world is huge and constant, whether it be the Middle East, South America, or India and Pakistan ... or our own safer looking world here in America.  Images from these works of art, and they were genuine works of art, are still living in my mind.  I feel grateful for the courage of the filmmakers who brought them into being, so we could see what is real.  The re-discovery of my own body of work -- beaded necklaces - also takes me to a distant place -- that time years ago when I searched with all my heart for objects of beauty, which were old and had deep histories, that I could use to combine into new configurations of beauty to share with the world.   Embarking on the creative path allowed me to tap into a deep part of myself that had nothing to do with the overactive intellect, and also exposed the courage to take a step "out" and offer my creations to the public.  Re-acquainting myself with my work has inspired me, given me a bit of a nudge to keep on going with those magical old beads, those beads which in their thousands of years of history have moved through so many human hands and carried countless human emotions and aspirations ...

It takes courage to continue to express yourself when you're not sure who cares, who is paying attention, and where your lovingly crafted work will end up.  But the point of expression and creativity is NOT about what is outside, or in the future; it is about now, this moment and your connection to your materials in this moment.  And the joy to be had with the handling of such beautiful objects as ancient dark glass from the rubble of Afghanistan, or 2000 year old creamy colored shell from the Indus Valley, or mysteriously striped agates from Central Asia, otherwise known as Iraq -- this joy deepens and enriches life. 

The caves in France that were the subject of the film, discovered less than twenty years ago, contain paintings done some 33,000 years ago of exquisite horses, buffalo, rhino --- man's companions in that unfathomable ancient world.  Herzog's film in 3D allows us to move through the darkened cave with the scientists and explorers, and feel as though we could reach out and touch those damp cave walls.  You find yourself holding your breath as you continue to witness the miraculously preserved art, art done lovingly in the service of the human spirit.  There is something mind-bending about being a witness to such ancient work, as though we are being reminded of a brotherhood extending far beyond our imagining....  We are NOT alone, here in 2011.  We may not be able to physically visit these caves (the caves of Chavet, Lascaux, and Alta Mira are all closed off to public viewing to protect the extraordinary neolithic art inside) to see for ourselves, but we can partake of one artist's realization that brings this remote universe forward. 

We are NOT alone -- I like saying that!  My ancient beads show me that I'm not alone as well, and that I can hold in the palm of my hand stones and artifacts that have journeyed for thousands of years,  acquiring the patina of human connection;  they are transmitters, in a way, of human experience.  I'm going to continue have a relationship with this beautiful stuff, and see where it takes me -- one bead at a time...

Inspiration from Lao Tzu

Always we hope
Someone else has the answer.
Some other place will be better,
Some other time it will all turn out.

This is it.

No one else has the answer
No other place will be better,
and it has already turned out.

At the center of your being
you have the answer;
you know who you are
and you you know what you want.

There is no need
to run outside
for better seeing,
nor to peer from a window.

Rather abide at the center of your being;
for the more you leave it, the less you learn.

Search your heart
and see
The way to do
is to be.


I LOVED THIS PIECE!  It points to carrying the wisdom within without really knowing we are doing it, with being right here, right now.  "This is it."  The going outside ourselves to find the knowledge and understanding is very like moving forward in time to "get" something we believe we need (OR looking back and believing that at some other time you had the understanding ....).

Have been moving pretty mindfully through these last days, taking in sound (and there is a great deal of it here in the city), and sights, tastes, and smells, and passing phenomena in my mind and body.  Things taste more vivid to me now, and sounds feel very bright and distinctive...  I closed my eyes at a Bach concert Sunday night, and I could follow each instrument of the group playing its part, as well as the exquisite harmonies occurring as the violins, violas, cellos, and so on, met up with one another.  This is a beautiful way to listen to music.  Just be in the music - no other sensations - or have the music be in you...  Having good conversations with each of the people I meet, even the man at the service center where I took my car!  And there is, I think, a small smile on my face much of the time.

"The mind creates the abyss
The heart crosses it."
-- Nisargardatta

AND SO, HOW WAS YOUR RETREAT?

We have all we need for enlightenment inside ourselves, our bodies, hearts, and minds ....
We possess the teacher's wisdom though we too rarely see this ...
Keep going inside, inside deep, and you will find what is real...
Just keep breathing, in and out and in and out, and keeping your awareness bright and curious ...
Inhabit that awareness ....
Be that awareness ...
Listen to the heart which does not lie ... it points the way to the path of wisdom ...
Remember to love yourself just as you are ... and hold that "self" in compassion, and you wish to hold all others ...
Our lives ARE like rivers where we must take the leap of faith, and let go into the stream ... stop trying to hold on to what we think is solid :  the logs of identity, the rocks of opinions, the shore of our feelings...
And these rivers rarely move in linear form ... they twist and turn and what we see and meet is always changing ...
Ever changing ... the path we're on, our bodies, our perceptions and feelings ... keep watching this until you know that solidity is an illusion ...


The above some fragments of insight I now see with some clarity and conviction after sitting on my zafu at Spirit Rock for four weeks,  and for each of these fragments I could journey forth with more to reflect on, more to share.  There is both a lightness in me and a solidity and rootedness coming from my heart for which I am deeply grateful.  How long will I be stepping on the earth this gently and assuredly?

No need to worry about this, because just being with WHAT IS NOW is enough, is ALL there is ...

What is NOW ?  A golden sunny late afternoon in my bedroom, my cat Jackson stretched out on a warm hardwood floor looking ever so happy with his life, an anonymous grey pigeon perched on my roof waiting to steal some bird seed from the feeder,  and sounds of Bach's Goldberg Variation #2 that I just played still echoing in my mind.... each thing I perceive is IN me, as is the music -- a fact I discovered on retreat when in the midst of deep silence a refrain from my beloved Bach's composition threaded its way into my field of awareness as my fingers started to do the playing of it, ever so gently in my lap.  It was an extraordinary moment among so many others in that long silence!

I feel great peace.

On the eve of retreating

Another birthday gone, along with the fleeting feelings of melancholy and nostalgia, and the always present question:  where did THAT year go now?  I feasted on good meals with friends, saw some good music -- everything from the great Paula West to the American Bach Soloists performing their magic at the little blue church called St. Marks.   A small parade of pleasures which served only to remind me how very transient it all is.  I want to be able to recall the exact quality of lunch that I had on my birthday with my dear friend, and just the telling of the details doesn't do it, doesn't capture the feeling of something magic going on in your mouth when you bite into a perfect piece of roasted crab, or some exquisite lettuce that takes you back out into the garden it's so fresh...  I do know that Chez Panisse Cafe is a place still at the top of its game, and it makes eating both a leisurely and very normal ritual and also an opportunity to bow to the creators of great food as though they are gods.  This was my birthday gift to myself this 22nd of February, along with a visit to a garden store to select two superb orchids in full bloom, to cheer up those now sitting at my kitchen window looking bare and unloved.

Tomorrow I journey to Spirit Rock to sit in silence for four weeks.  Just the writing of that makes me feel daunted, as though there looms a great mountain peak ahead that I must scale... I have been waiting to do this for some time, with both eagerness and skepticism.  I know it is a gift to retreat from the world and simply explore one's life, and I know too that it is difficult, funny, fearful, confusing, and so on, and so on....  Many around me feel it is courageous (which is true).  Just using that word makes it feel immediately more difficult, more of an obstacle than an opportunity to expand in mind and  heart. Whatever it is, I appear to be doing it.  And there's nothing wrong with owning up to my own courage either, now is there?  This time I have no reason to turn away, as I thought I did a year ago. And this year, I will sit and take what I get.  And hopefully practice a lot of lovingkindness toward myself,  just in case I might cave in to agonizing doubt and judgment.  I am taking a lot of clothes with me so I will have just that to distract me (perhaps), and even my journal, which I probably won't write in.   I want this familiar stuff with me.  Ah, the illusions we carry about what we really need in this life!  Pretty soon I will discover that the myriad of clothes I have hauled up there are far from entertaining or reassuring, and even my beautiful down comforter from home is just that -- just a comforter.  Not a provider of happiness or ease.  I will also take a few small buddhas to "decorate" my space.  My stubborn attachment to beauty endures!

In hospice yesterday I talked to a resident about time being like a river that we all floated on, not something that we passed through, or over, or into.  We ride it, and there are times when the ride feels wildly swift, and then times when the current slows at bit -- especially when meditating and living mindfully.  This man was worried about the swiftness of time's passage, and the shakiness of his own mind.  I could have said that we cannot control this mysterious element called time, but that would have sounded didactic, I think.  True as it is, there had to be another way to say it.  And so I thought of the river's flow.  Do I still have watery-ness on my mind?  Still the fall-out from walking through all those damp alleys of Venice?  It is far more comforting to me to think of riding a current than to accept this truth which tells us we cannot control our forward journey.  We do seek happiness and comfort relentlessly...

As I sit in silence, and commune with my mind and body, I will be sending lovingkindness to all beings, because though isolated on retreat I never feel separate from the beings of my life, those close and far.  And in sending forth that love, I will also be offering it to myself.  "There is no one more deserving of love and compassion than yourself," said the Buddha, and I am going to keep that thought very close in the weeks to come.  Because love is the root of everything.

In the darkness, grateful for what comes...

In a corner of my life I care for people who are dying, and my participation in this community called Zen Hospice Project has taken on large meaning for me.  Sitting at the bedside of someone who is working hard at breathing and finding comfort and peace is a reminder of where we all are going, a huge teaching about the importance of living fully in our present moment, breathing as much life into that moment as we can....
All that we really have is this.  My trip to Venice is gone, likewise my adventures in Africa, India, and Bhutan, my 60th birthday, my marriage, the great movie I saw last week, my most perfect dog, the meal I ate last night.  Poof!  Everything goes.  Returning to the present moment appears to be the only real experience we have.
Tomorrow I will have a birthday and it is with mixed emotions that I anticipate it, probably because I see this arbitrary number as something that is in itself "real," that signifies a certain place on the continuum of life, and reminds me that the continuum is moving more and more rapidly toward an uncertain end.  If I were to look at that birthday as a reminder of the amazing fact of being born into this life, instead of an arrow pointing the way to its end, I would feel quite differently, perhaps even celebratory!  I WAS BORN 66 years ago, and have had some remarkable events and conditions in my life that have filled me with thought, emotion, vision, energy -- that have in essence shaped this being I call Mag.  And always the opportunities for learning and awareness and connection have been my companions on the journey;   when I return to the present I see all of this so clearly.
This dark winter has filled me lately with melancholy, the waves of loneliness nudging me here and there in a daunting landscape that reminds me of a windy moor in a British novel.  I turn on a lot of lights in the evening, and make myself a lovely kosher chicken saute with lots of rosemary and garlic, and as I feed myself slowly I can feel the gratitude settling in, pushing aside sadness.  It is all HERE, NOW, isn't it?  The Rumi poem about treating everything as a guest comes to mind, the reminder to invite it all in, to push away nothing......

The Guest House

This being human is a guest house.
Every morning a new arrival.

A joy, a depression, a meanness,
some momentary awareness comes
as an unexpected visitor.

Welcome and entertain them all!
Even if they are a crowd of sorrows,
who violently sweep your house
empty of its furniture,
still, treat each guest honorably.
He may be clearing you out
for some new delight.

The dark thought, the shame, the malice.
Meet them at the door laughing and invite them in.

Be grateful for whatever comes,
because each has been sent
as a guide from beyond.

Jelaluddin Rumi


Blessings to all beings who each day of this year will mark their birthdays, and perhaps be able to glimpse the beauty the comes with full attention to this life right now.

Traveling on the River

The days of February seem to be moving quietly and swiftly by ... it seemed it was just yesterday the beginning of February and Venice was close in my visual field, and now I look at a full calendar of events and know that if I were to space out in any way I would quickly find myself at the end of the month, looking the March retreat at Spirit Rock right in the face.  Just move mindfully through time and space, I tell myself, and you will find the richness of your everyday life and you won't fret about the passage of time....  And yet my everyday life sometimes feels so wanting -- as though in my mind's view at least, there is something not quite full or rich or meaningful enough there.  Ever since my adventure in Venice I have felt this acute aloneness that characterizes my life, and along with it,  a questioning :  Have I chosen this aloneness, and if so, why?  If I have not chosen it, then how did it come to be?  Or, should I just give myself a break (in Buddhist thinking) and understand it as simply a part of the passing phenomena of existence?
Am sitting in my house by the beach watching the sun try to break through the clouds, spreading its warmth on this damp place, and I am reflecting on a conversation with a dear friend from last night.   We looked at our roles as single elder women in the world, and the different landscapes present in each of our lives -- hers filled with people and activities, all meaningful and fulfilling, mine just barely punctuated with people and work.  As the conversation ensued, I began to realize that I somehow must have willed myself to stay apart, to pull back from the intercourse of society.  Though I travel, eat out, go to movies, look at art, attend concerts, I usually do all this as a solitary soul.  It was this solitary soul that I encountered so directly in Venice, and for whom I tried hard to have compassion.  My dear friend described me as an "intellectual" and an "observer," as though the flow of my life is some sort of course of study for me, an opportunity to observe and understand the human condition, including my own.  There is something about this observer character that feels very familiar to me, because in fact I have been doing this for a very long time.  An only child trying to navigate a world of dysfunctional adults, I learned quickly to pull back to try to understand the lay of the land, to figure out where it was safe to go and when.  Lots of time spent sitting and watching ... and thinking ... and more watching ...  There have been chapters along the way of engagement and participation and energy :  the relationship thing, raising children, getting a college degree or two, teaching, trying my hand at business.  But, then I fall almost gratefully into a space of no structure:  of learning how to take care of this 65 year old body, of discovering the joys and insights of meditation, of immersing myself in playing Bach or Chopin on my grandmother's exquisite piano, and in this chapter there is a watery flow to my life, and fewer people in my midst.  Sounds like I'm describing one of the phases of aging  --  going from being youthful IN the world to pulling away in order to reflect and embrace it all as an elder....
One question which occurs to me:  can one have the space and time for reflection in the midst of a fully engaged life, or does it require some amount of detaching?  And if I am in fact spending this solitude reflecting on the quality of life, what is it that I  understand about it all?
What occurs to me right now, looking out at a magnificent blue ocean splashing to shore outside my window, is that life feels like one long river, with many little streams and tributaries feeding it, and many twists and turns in its timeless journey: nothing staying the same, looking the same, but just the constant of a current moving forward ..... until there is no more life force to travel anymore.  The segment of the river I find myself on now is one which looks like solitude.  Spacious and confined, light and dark, melancholy and joyous, mindful and dreamy.  Downriver who knows what the geography will look like.

Forgetting the Self .... in Venice and at home

Venice feels so very far away now.  I have been back in my San Francisco "nest" for four days or so, and slowly picking up the threads of daily/weekly life.  As I look back on my 900 photographs taken in this mysterious city, I am reminded of several things:  beauty, beauty everywhere - from the grey undulating waters to the sparkling shop windows or shimmering fish market filled with ladies in fur coats, and then of course the loneliness.  Those images pull me back to a sense I had each day of how alone I felt in the midst of this dark city, as I walked and walked and searched for connection to it.  Shooting a lot of pictures didn't necessarily mean connecting, as anyone knows who has photographed a lot.  Sometimes, you must rest and just be in the middle of things, just receive what is there.  There were times when just being made me feel so exposed, so raw, so alone, and there were times when I felt ONE with the life of Venice.  I guess I should feel good that I could at times melt into the landscape, and forget myself.  I have a little saying on my wall from the Zen calendar which goes like this:  "The basic lesson of Zen is:  'Forget yourself.'"  These times of forgetting the self are definitely ones where you are joined with your fellow beings in the adventure of life, without any script or expectations...  Your mind settles.  I discovered that the settling of the mind in Italy is often a challenge, so charged is the social climate.  The city was quiet, yes, because it was winter, and there are no cars, but the Italians are never really quiet.  They stir up the environment, as though creating little whirlwinds everywhere around them.  Settling in the midst of this is difficult.  The times when I felt myself laughing at the Italian "dance of life" were the times when I was really in the middle of it with no resistance or commentary or craving for what was ahead... I wasn't only laughing at their dance, I was in the midst of it!
The last day of my visit was a Sunday and I went to San Marco cathedral for a solemn mass.  I wanted to sit with these people in the extraordinary beauty of that golden church and just feel the energy of the Sunday service, listen to the music, and the words, and lean into understanding the place of faith in their lives.  I sat off to the side, not knowing the exact ritual of the mass -- setting myself apart of course -- and sat down and looked up at this epic domed ceiling covered with gold mosaics while the voices sang the hymns, and the priest intoned the Bible readings.   Then I would close my eyes and feel as though I had disappeared into community of believers.  I called up the Buddha and his messages of love and compassion, and I sent this forth into the vast space.   And thought about the Dalai Lama's words long ago that reminded us that all religions seek the same thing:   peace, love, transcendence from suffering, wisdom.  And then I listened again to the priest talk of peace, not only in the larger context of the world, but in our daily lives.  And I thought, yes, we really are all wanting the same thing.  The trappings and rituals may be quite different, but the intention is the same.  Buddha and Christ were certainly not that distant in their visions. The service over, I reluctantly exited the church, out into the steely grey morning, the square of San Marco now filling with the winter visitors from Europe and Japan.  And the connection I had felt inside the church was still with me, and in a watery, flowing sort of way, I moved forward into the day, with very little on my radar.  Moving through this last day as gently, kindly, and thoughtfully as possible...
And, then all of a sudden, it is all over.  And you sit in your office at home, and listen to the dryer whirring, drink your green tea, eat some toast, and ready yourself to go on to your appointments.  Venice is gone.  The present is here, but imbued now with the sights, smells, and the misty cold dampness of that elusive city.  I think the perpetual flowing movement of the water everywhere in Venice helped me let go of ideas of control and achieving, and allowed me to be in the present, moving with the water, and with the aching loneliness.  I shall try to recall all that watery-ness here in my city, and move more slowly -- stop that leaning into the future, and just BE.  It can be the one of the gifts of my journey.