Loss

I am thinking a lot about loss these days ... a good friend in New Mexico failing in her battle with cancer, another friend suffering brain damage as a result of chemo, the intimacy I hunger for with another like-minded being, a lion hunted down in Zimbabwe and decapitated, the massacre of the magnificent elephants in obscene numbers, the loss of flexibility and reliability in my body, even the loss of my mother, and all the old stories of my past that I can't tap into now because they are like dust.

How do I hold loss?  How do I ride out the journey of continuing to lose what I love? This is a hard one because it demands that I stay steady and willing inside the lightening speed momentum of this life, not looking behind me or in front of me.  I've been reminded time and time again that there really is no past and no future, and much of the time I agree, but I am still likely to float into these realms out of habit.  So, what do we (I) do?  I guess we (I) try to understand what it feels like to lose.

I haven't lost a good friend recently so it's hard to know how to talk about it.   I have been lucky in this, as most of my contemporaries are still kicking.  We all know that losing one another is around the corner, but we don't often talk about it... and we go on our way trying like hell to live in present time.  So, I'm faced with the "idea" of losing, I guess, that projection of an experience that will undoubtedly come, one that will feel sad, empty, achy and bleak.  And once I cross that landscape of grief, I'll be left with nostalgia, looking back at the good old times when none of us ever gave a thought to mortality.  I remember my grandmother in her late eighties talking about losing all her friends, about feeling terribly alone in the world and less hopeful about what lay ahead.  In some way she was telling me she was ready to move on.  Our friends provide a sacred community of people whom we have chosen and with whom we have rich and interesting things to share.  Now that I'm seventy, I understand as I never did before what she was saying about the void left in life with the departure of old friends.

When I gave up my last "romantic" relationship that had soured quickly and yet drove me to endure, I knew that I would probably live out my days without a partner.   When I set out on my own,  I didn't give it a thought, but now I do.  Now I watch couples in restaurants and on the street and I feel a tugging in my heart.  I want what they have.  Closeness, laughter, understanding, a life together.  The more I look back on my story the more I realize I am ill equipped for intimacy, that what my mother modeled and what I embraced in my twenties and thirties and beyond, had led me to a very distinct place of renunciation.  I was sure I wasn't good at intimacy and speaking about love, and therefore I needed to content myself with the solitary journey of an elder woman.  There is loss here, yes, and sometimes there's acceptance, as well as deep sadness.  But there is also the pleasure of old age wisdom!

The wiping out of wildlife in Africa has been breaking my heart lately.  Like a sponge, I tend to absorb all the news, and I speak to others about it when it makes sense, and yet it remains one of the deeply troubling pieces of being alive in this world at this time.  Animals have been a part of my life for as long as I can remember, and I think I have always felt as though I was related to them, part of their family, whether they were cats, dogs, birds, or even the epic elephant roaming East Africa.  So when I read about the murder of elephants and lions, I feel as though someone in my family has been ripped away.  There's heaviness in my chest, a weepy feeling inside.  And a whirling sense of outrage at the injustice of it all.  What then?  I must hold this, not look away.  I need to speak the truth, and try to believe that humankind has the capacity to become more humane.  That is all..

I am seventy years old and my body is starting to become unreliable.  I've been told it is strong and vital, and that deep down I am healthy.  This makes me feel lightheaded for just a while, and then I return to the stinging pain in my ankle as I walk, the clicking and wobbling of my knee, and the occasional feeling that I am standing on a very unsteady surface, and it is then that I understand what I am carrying.  The body is speaking its truth, and what is good about all this is that I am finally able to listen to what it is saying.  If I'm lucky this paying attention brings good will and compassion, as long as I'm able to stay in the present moment.  The past houses the narratives that are blurry and distorted, and the future holds only random dreams and dark fear.  So instead of mourning loss, I can attempt to offer love to my aging self.

The loss of my mother still lies heavily on me.  You'd think I would have outgrown or moved on or something, especially since she had always been such a shadowy presence in my life.  How do you mourn the loss of something that was never really there?  There is an idea I hold about her as a mother, and then there is the mysterious relationship that actually unfolded starting in February of 1945.  In fact, there's a lot I don't know.   There was always hunger and yearning and a sense of being in the shadows, but there had to have been other times of sweetness, or so I tell myself.  No way to know now.  I do know that I still feel this deep dark relationship to her, and I suspect I'll be stuck with that for the rest of my life... In narrating my own story I have unearthed this intimate connection between the two of us, this complicity in secrecy and self destruction, and in the telling of it I have felt her come alive in a way.  But everything that is alive does wither and die, and so there is that path to experience a loss of love, imperfect as it was.   I surround myself with her bold paintings, some pretty furniture and decorative pieces, and find myself more times than I can count speaking in her tongue, using her vernacular.  "Bob's your uncle!" she used to declare, and I love saying this too.  I'm not quite sure why...  Am I calling her back, or just making way for her to show up every once in a while in present time?   I don't know.   This is a heavy loss still, and I am still trying to figure out how to live with it.

Memory has given me problems for some time now.  I can't see the texture and substance of much of my young life:  living in North Beach when I was in 6th grade, going to the mountains for my 10th birthday, what I did with my friends at Miss Barrie's in Florence, or those beautiful sunny afternoons I went horseback riding in the Sonoma countryside with my great friend Sue when we were self-conscious teenagers; there are so many other little scenes that don't come in clearly, and all I see is the sweep of an experience, much like the floating smoke from my mother's cigarette ... When I decided to write a memoir, I wanted to be able to flesh out some of these small chapters of my childhood and tell vivid, detail-filled stories, complete with lots of interesting dialogue.  As I cast my mind back, I rarely saw the particulars, nor did I hear the conversations.  I became frustrated, I worried about memory loss, and then finally decided to fabricate here and there in order to offer a story, and this usually worked.  Aside from the challenges the book offered me, there is a much larger conundrum, that of ultimately losing the bulk of memory and becoming unhinged and confused.  Yes, I'm thinking of that elephant in the room called dementia.   A total loss of personhood.  The ultimate nightmare, even worse in my imagination than losing my eyesight, which I used to believe was the worst possible deprivation I'd have to face.  I used to play different word games in order to sharpen my brain power, and I persevered with piano study because I've learned somewhere that playing a musical instrument may be an antidote to Alzheimers.  No, in truth I play the piano because I love the sound of Bach on the keyboard of my grandmother's piano, and feel proud to offer it up ...  But now I do take solace in the notion that the discipline of piano practice might be therapeutic for my overworked mind.  I think I know how to live with this loss:  just stay in my life fully, attending to what comes and holding all the difficulties with love.  No other way...

What is going to happen to me will happen no matter what decisions I make, and today has its share of wonder and beauty that must be seen and felt.  Because we are very lucky to be alive in this strange and complicated time, adding our own portion of goodness.

Life as a Fugue ... Musings from the Carmel Bach Festival

I gave myself a break for a week and didn't prop myself up in the chair and order myself to work on this blog...  Thought more time passing would help me see some ideas things more clearly, like whether it matters or not  if a lot of people read this, and whether I could resist beating myself up for not performing my weekly task.  Did pretty well with the not beating myself up, and as far as the other goes, I'm not sure how I feel.

This has been a complicated time for me and a number of people I know and love, and because I am in some ways an emotional sponge, I end up carrying around other people's weighty stories, which often gets me confused.  Let's see what was going on before things got complicated ...  I was motoring through a second draft of my memoir so I could send it to another wise writer to read and give me feedback.  Crunching through those 220 pages was tough at times but I plugged away and completed it.  Done for now with version 2.  I meditated regularly and learned a new kind of diaphragmatic breathing that creates more space in the body and brings calm, I kept up regular piano practice and had a thoughtful lesson with my wise young teacher last Friday.  I visited a few doctors to talk about a painful tendonitis in my ankle, hoping I'd get reassurance that the affliction would eventually pass (like everything else).  Ah, the non-stop tending we must do when we are aging... I repeat this to people and try to act as though I find it curious and amusing, but deep down I find I'm out of sorts and discouraged.  I so want to be brave and accept adversity, and often feel I lack the tools.  And I wonder a lot if it's like that for everyone else...  I am still spending more time alone than I'd like, but when my ankle was acting up and I really needed to stay off my feet, that of course provided a good excuse to sink back on the couch at home with some yummy delivered food and a good few episodes of MASH on Netflix.  It's pretty easy for me to retreat like this.

When I'm not watching something on the tube, I'm often thinking about my oldest daughter who is going through a very tough time with estrangement from her daughter and an old friend, and my old friend from the 70's who is facing a big move and the giving up of an old and beloved home in order to find a simpler way to live.  These two women - one 50 and the other 80 - are suffering these days and I see myself wanting to make a difference while I know my power to do so is limited.  I let go of daughter #1 a very long time ago, or at least I thought I did, and she has been hugely resourceful and forged a rewarding purposeful life; she has kept me at a distance often so that she can work out her problems on her own because that has been her nature.  But now it's becoming harder for her.  My friend is a highly intelligent and stoic woman who rarely asks for help, and yet I see fatigue and worry in her face each time we get together and talk about our lives.  The themes repeat themselves over and over ... our families, the books we're reading, maybe the news and politics ... with the unspoken thoughts lurking under the surface.

For the last few days I've been listening to Bach here at the Carmel Bach Festival, closing my eyes and following the notes of the cellos, violins, the harpsichord, the basses, and lutes, and feeling at home again.  JS Bach brought the world an unusual new musical form called the fugue, and this morning when I sat in the beautiful old Carmel Mission listening to a series of preludes and fugues for the organ,  I had this dreamy notion that the fugue form is a lot like our life.  The different voices from the organ were dancing in counterpoint, and I tried to follow them in the cool dark church.  It was like trying to track the images in a kaleidoscope in a way.  I am currently learning one of his simpler fugues for the piano, and what I keep coming back to is that this is a tough job for someone like myself who never could juggle or multi-task.   It is hard, and I am going to learn it (hear the intellectual imperative here?).  In the fugue, a "subject" is introduced in the beginning, and repeated in a mind-tingling counterpoint by a number of different voices as the piece moves forward.  A response to the subject follows and is woven into the composition, also in more than one voice.  What makes Bach a genius is his ability to build this composition so seamlessly that you hear BOTH the totality of the voices and each individual voice clearly and at the same time.    Interestingly, I have learned that there is a whole other kind of "fugue" that signifies a psychological disorder in which a person loses awareness of his or her identity when fleeing from a familiar environment.  In a strange and perhaps obscure way, this definition relates to the musical form (you have to give up first subject to take on the next or offer the response ... identity has to be relinquished ... you cannot hold on).

Both of the above definitions make me think of our journeys through life.  As a child, we are on the receiving end of a "subject" (or subjects) handed to us by parents and relations, those multiple voices, and of course there is our response to the subject that follows.  As we go through life a multitude of subjects arise, and we carry them with us in our bodies and minds as we grow up.  We respond and we voice our own subjects.  While I worked at fathoming and responding to the subjects handed down to me, such as "be seen and not heard," or "be a good girl," the themes that I gave voice to as a girl, such as "I need to know the truth," "I need to be heard," "I want to be loved" often met with no response, and so the piece of music lacked harmony and solidity.  Later in life, I believe we modify the themes and create our own, and cast the music in a different "key," perhaps.  I think this happens when we have a clearer sense of self, and we cease reacting so much to those around us.  We carry the profound old subjects like: love and connection, doing no harm, and being of value in the world, but we come to understand those in new and interesting ways.  Many of us have also had times in our lives when we run away from home and temporarily forget who we are, where the only way to see ourselves more clearly is to leave the familiar behind and perceive ourselves in a foreign context.  My memoir was born from that understanding.

This book has shown me the "subjects" or themes of my life more clearly, and allowed me to get closer to my life, into the dark corners and forgotten spaces so I can see them.  I used to think it looked like a mosaic or kaleidoscope, but now it appears to me more as a tapestry, with the different strands of "through line," or "subject" creating an interesting colorful piece of fabric.  I'd also like to think now of the journey being played out as a multi-voiced fugue with its varying voices speaking their own truths and answering each other and sometimes coming together in stunning harmony.  

Random Thoughts on Healing

When I had my nighttime panic attack on retreat recently, my brain tried to convince me I was a bad Buddhist.  After all, it said, you've been meditating over 17 years, can't you get it right every once in a while?
Here are some other weird and perverse stories that I have carried:
When I got ulcers about 8 years ago, I was convinced it was because of all the hard drinking I had done in high school when I was trying to numb out and pretend I wasn't angry at my mother.   I had effectively worn away my insides from being irresponsible.
When I had a month's siege of headaches four or five years ago, I was convinced I had a brain tumor and my mind fixed on the fear factor and kept me spinning.  Working in hospice and seeing people with brain cancer brought this into focus and feeling I had inherited my mother's innate frailty with life, I was convinced.
When I couldn't remember elements of my childhood while working away on the memoir during the last couple of years, I was sure that it was because I had done drugs and alcohol in my youth and destroyed most of my brain cells responsible for childhood memories.
When I heard from two orthopedic doctors that I might need knee replacement, I immediately thought it had to do with carrying too much weight around for too long, which of course led me to proclaim that I didn't know how to live a healthy life.
When I sit in the midst of feeling lonely and sad, which has been happening a bunch lately, I begin to question my innate ability to love others, to be lovable, to know how to be in relationships, thinking frequently that I"m too aloof and know-it-all  for my own good.  Since that was a childhood defense for me, it's logical it would continue.  Mostly I think I"m pretty good with family, but as to the rest of it -- the friendship and lovers, I'm not so sure...


There are many more instances of my judging mind than the ones mentioned above, because my brain has been busy for a very long time monitoring my behavior, ever ready to give me failing grade for not being good enough.  Being mindful and seeing this as I do, my job is clearly to head this off at the pass, to close the door to the judgment and stories, say "no thank you," and get on with the adventure of living, as opposed to evaluating.  A conversation I had yesterday with a gentle healer went a long way to opening up the concept of trauma to me, and I want to bring this to bear on all of this.  Trauma takes many forms in our life -- it can look like child beating, or just plain neglect and contempt.  It can be wartime blood and death, or it can be getting clobbered by a car while crossing a city street in my neighborhood.  It can be rape and incest, or a continual negation of one's character.  Our body is an amazing vessel that carries all our life experiences, storing away the more painful into a deeper place often, and as we age, get a little more tired, we slow down and become quieter, and this body begins to reveal the truth.  There is pain, and it has a history.  We can respond in a couple of ways:  we can continue doing what we're used to, telling stories and making judgments, or we can approach the difficulty with love and compassion.  If we choose this, we can heal ourselves and begin to feel normal.

It turns out that the primary faculty that leads to healing the heart (and by association the body) is love and affection.  I enjoy saying that because it reminds me of the Dalai Lama who said that his religion is kindness, and this feels profoundly true to me.  So, despite whatever suffering (trauma) we (I) have endured, we (I) need to summon kindness and compassion so we can continue with the adventure of being alive.  I have come to this wisdom late in life, but no matter, because I see the fruits of this kind of attention.  I have discovered my own ability to stop and rub my fingers when they ache as I practice the piano for hours, and say to myself gently, "there, there, it's just stiffness."  I've found my vital breath in the midst of a storm of mindLESSness and been able to return to balance.  I've looked back at the trajectory of my life and seen all the beautiful humans and animals I have loved and been loved by.  Or ... just recently I've looked at my swollen knee and just seen a creaky sore joint that is now 70 years old, then touched it with care.

The road ahead for all of us is getting shorter each day we are alive, and it only seems reasonable to apply love, which is the root of being a human, not stories and judgment which lack form and truth.  I write and I tell stories because I must, it is part of inhabiting my life, but those stories are part of a much larger trajectory which is, in fact, about telling the truth and creating beauty.  I think that's why I'm here.

Last Week Rainbows, This Week Uncertainty ...

Last week a rainbow arced over San Francisco as we saw happiness arise in our hearts and minds when the Supreme Court made legal affirmation of equal rights to marriage throughout the country.  For some it was the formalizing of what had always felt to be a normal and natural right, and for so many others there was the huge cathartic experience that at last equality under the law pertained to them.  I felt tears rise to the surface as I imagined people's relief and joy at attaining this "inalienable" right, and I felt proud of the country for just a little while, this place so weighed down by the cruel legacy of racism, prejudice, and excessive reliance on firearms.  I was so relieved to feel this happiness for my fellow human beings.

Lately it has been hard for me to feel any pride in being an American, though my brain tries to assure me that we live in a land of great opportunity.  I do my practice, I sit in meditation, and send lovingkindness to all beings, and yet there are times when I feel I'm caught in a web of unkindness and ignorance, and I can't see the way out of it.  When our fellow humans are shot down in churches, when black churches are burned to the ground in the South, when black males are targeted by law enforcement, when gays and lesbians are subjected to hate crimes and humiliation, I see a landscape, indeed a whole world that is hostile and hateful, with little courage manifested in the face of this darkness.

The Supreme Court ruling stated last week that those who are of any sexual orientation have the right to be married because they belong to our American society that was born out of principles of equality.  And yet many more fights for gender equality will be necessary before gays and lesbians can count themselves on equal footing with the white establishment.    As a result of Martin Luther King's tireless work in the late sixties, various laws were passed assuring basic civil rights to the African American population long shunned and denigrated.   But we have come to see that despite the good intentions of such legislation, we live in a racist culture where various members of the population whose skin is dark are considered inferior and expendable.  And lately we have see an inordinate amount of hatred unleashed on African American men, not to mention the continuing campaign of the conservative Republicans in Washington to defeat and humiliate our black President.  A veil of deception has fallen over much of this agenda.  There is no ownership of the hatred, and because there is no ownership it can metastasize and continue to spread ill will.  And all this in a country that was founded on the individual person's right to "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness."

How do we hold all this with equanimity?  How do we hold the pain of the world, whether it be elephants being slaughtered in massive numbers in Africa, women kidnapped and raped in Nigeria, the homeless dying on our city streets, and the be-heading of regular people by terrorists.    Is it enough to meditate and try to spread lovingkindness, to write your own dark truths as best you can, to practice gratitude and generosity in all ways, to feed wild birds, practice speaking a foreign language, or be a  model of righteousness for our grandchildren?  I would like to think so.  The Dalai Lama said that all change starts with the individual, and that the creation of peace starts with finding it in yourself.  I believe him.  And yet …  I feel so small sometimes, so separated from the community of civil, kind, hardworking human beings.  The disconnection is scary, sort of like the darkness I wrote about last time.  In the darkness we can't see or feel our relatedness and we float fee, and sometimes we're scared.  A good friend shared this insight with me last evening over dinner:  this primal fear of the dark is in fact our fear of death.  This is normal, she reminded me.  Most of us want to hold on to our precious lives for some time to come, to not "go gently into that dark night," even though it looks way better when you say you are prepared to die.  There's something so tenacious about this human life, and I think we all share a deep wish to be in communion with this imperfect process of being human, knowing as we do that the journey into death is a solitary one.

When I'm going with this, I don't exactly know.  I do know these things:  everything shifts and changes and we are called upon to be with that, that we are social creatures who want to be in community with one another, to be supported and attended to, that as mortals we are beset with occasional fears that our journey will soon end, that we possess hearts capable of great love and even joy for our fellow humans, and that this joy is infinitely precious…  I see these truths and know that our way isn't easy.  But, here we are, after all, and it does make sense to show up for our lives.

And for the burning and the mayhem … and for rainbows of justice that occasionally spread across the sky...

Fear and Loathing in the Dark of Night

As a child I was scared of the dark.  In some of the bedrooms that I inhabited growing up, I had a night light on the wall that glowed in the darkness so I could get my bearings, and when that wasn't possible, I would always open the door a crack to let light from the rooms beyond reach me.  There have been times when I have had to adjust to lying there in total darkness, and believe me, it has been very difficult.  There was a time in Bhutan when the village we were staying over in lost all its power just as we were eating our dinner.  Makeshift flashlights were produced and I soon navigated my way to my room, but I remember feeling a sense of dread that soon I would lie down in bed and disappear in the darkness.  It was blacker than black outside in Punakha, tucked away in the towering Himalayas, and I suddenly felt fear where it had not existed before.  There is also isolation that comes in the dark... I felt farther away from my homeland and my people than I had ever felt, and I lay in bed and longed for night to pass quickly.  Recently on retreat at Spirit Rock, I lay in my little bed in my very quiet room in the darkness and unfortunately recalled a time long ago where terror, a fear of dying in my sleep, took me over.  This old memory began to possess me, for no clear reason.  I tried deep breathing and "noting" the fear, I used all that I had in my toolkit then for coping with fear, and it didn't work.  My body seemed to vibrate with anxiety.  I even imagined staying awake until it became light, when I was sure the fear would drift away...

I have been thinking a lot since then about fear and where it comes from.  Is this debilitating fear of mine rooted in childhood trauma, perhaps?  And if so, must I find that, understand it, see it for what it is in order to become free of it?  This is entirely possible.  Like so many others, I had a childhood of instability and essential loneliness.  Ignored by my alcoholic mother most of the time, I created a cocoon of other-ness in self defense.  My opinions, my feelings were rarely attended to, and so I pulled into myself.  And became used to loneliness, and the weird irrational feelings that come with it.

There is another possible root to this irrational fear that visits.  It is part of my response to the darkness of the world we live in.  I confess I spend a great deal of time reading the news and thinking about what is going on, and in the last several years my heart has felt more and more beat up, and there has been more and more anger at the greed, hatred, and ignorance of those who take guns into their hands and murder others.  Along with the hurt and the anger comes the horrible feeling of helplessness.  A classroom of children assaulted and young lives snuffed out, people in a movie theater, just living their lives, gunned down by a madman, so many black men attacked in many of our cities because they are black, and now a congregation of black people in an historic sanctuary in Charleston shot down by a frightening young man with racist intentions....  The fabric of our country's high moral, egalitarian values is now shredded to bits, as lawmakers in Washington sit in trepidation of the NRA and our supposed right to bear arms.  There aren't words to describe this state of helplessness and anger and deep despair.  So, I (we) sit with this horrible, sick feeling that our world doesn't work anymore, that we are all lost without anchors because no one seems to have the guts to stand up for victims of terrorism and violence here at home.  And it is a dark place we sit in.  And it is scarier than any of my nighttime dances with fear.

Where are we going as a country?  How are those who are disadvantaged, poor, hurt, sick and dying, invisible ... how are those people going to be cared for?  When will the system recover its conscience and courage, and fulfill the vision of this being a government "of the people, by the people, and for the people"?

I worry for my precious grandchildren and the world they are becoming adults in, but then I guess that's the prerogative of all elders.  I remember my own grandmother expressing her distress at the way our world was becoming more violent and chaotic and cruel, and that was over thirty years ago.  So the wheel of my life is turning, and it is my turn to stand at the edge and look out into the great sprawling, uncertainty that death offers, and feel fear in my heart for the landscape my beloved family have to travel.

The Buddhist teachings tell us fear is just a feeling that comes and then passes, like all sensations, thoughts, and phenomena.  Yes, I understand.  I saw that when night ended and it became light, and the fear of being dead moved on.  My job apparently is to hold this fear as best I can when it appears, and to try to love my fragile self in the process.  We are all vulnerable, and we also know there are those who are exceedingly more vulnerable than we are.  We humans have a shared frailty and uncertainty and we must feel it and speak about it, and somehow we must endure through the dark times.  Gandhi once said of India's relationship to the British something like, "we will not fight, but we will wear them down with our capacity to suffer."  I'm thinking that we must suffer through this inexplicable and violent time without giving up, even as we are visited by the dark fears, the sleepless nights, and outburst of rage and tears.

I guess I will continue my practice of making sure there is some light shining in the darkness when I am trying to sleep...

What Matters

I have just returned from a week at Spirit Rock Meditation Center in the dry golden hills of Marin where I sat in silence with 50 fellow meditators, all "elders," as we considered aging, dying and awakening.  For some a daunting topic, yes, but for those of us who have slipped past the half century mark, not at all irrelevant.  During these days of retreat there were expansive moments of stillness with only the wild turkeys in the distance cheering us on (or so it felt), an ever changing climate from grey and foggy to bright and steamy, the turbulent workings of our hardworking brains, thoughtful inquiry into what is real in our lives now that we're old, and ultimately a lot of love and compassion born out of the community, our shared experience of both diminishing capacities and accumulated wisdom, as well as the need to participate fully in our lives.

What matters to me now?  We talked about this together last week quite mindfully of course, closing our eyes occasionally to dig deeper.  The road ahead of us is shortening day by day, and we take that to heart.  Each day carries weight now because we see more clearly that our journey could end at any moment.  So ... what does matter?  How will we give ourselves to this life from here on?

Beyond the obvious -  which for me is family, my sweet community of human beings that I've seen grow from the beginning and who feel like bedrock for me - there is an array of things that matter, spreading out in front of me like a colorful mosaic.  I'm going to let these things tumble out now and see what I want to say about them:  Music - the making of it on my grandmother's piano from the age of eight and the listening to it in concert halls, churches, and in the privacy of my living room, Art - the creative expressions I have worked at ever since I was a child making objects out of clay, followed by the years I poured out words on paper in endless journals trying to make sense of my life, and later when I pieced unusual beads together into necklaces in order to tell a story and finally called myself an artist, and finally the return in this final chapter to my first love:  words, and the promise of a completed book.  Service, working for the benefit of others - now there's something that matters; this attraction took different forms and finally brought me to Zen Hospice Project and the great learning at the bedside of those were were dying... and there is Generosity, driven by my grandmother's words to me as a child about the moral responsibility of the well-to-do in life that always lived in my mind, taught me to give whenever possible to those who were in need ... And of course, there is Speaking the truth, born out of a young life surrounded by those who cloaked reality and buried dark secrets, that speaking of the truth leading me ultimately to landing on the Buddhist path where I could feel at home seeing what is real and true, understanding suffering and freedom from suffering.  Animals matter to me: those four legged furry beings and winged creatures who witness us, who display their beauty, humor, and intelligence, and remind us that we are all brothers and sisters.  The pages of the Books I have read matter a great deal to me, from the time I was a young girl and escaped into literature to find my place, to understand other worlds and be thrilled by the beauty of language; for an only child who grew up before television and electronics, books fed my mind and heart.  Friendship and community come to mind as well... the sharing of our loves and our ideas, telling our stories again and again, laughing when we're on the verge of crying, and crying when we need to, safely ...  inhabiting that safe place of like minded human beings.  Contemplation and practice ... that spacious landscape where I have been able to find real peace, self love, the truth, and the preciousness of life itself.

These things that "matter" have been with me for a long time, they have helped form my character. I first experienced beauty (art, music) when I was a child of six or seven, which was about the same time I began learning about how we were connected (and responsible) to those around us because I listened carefully to my grandmother.   I don't know exactly when I saw that telling the truth was exciting beyond measure ... I was too busy trying to get people to listen most of the time! I do know I always felt related to all the cats that we had, that they were highly intelligent animals with a distinct need to be witnessed.  And when I first saw the elephants in Africa I felt in an instant that we had a connection, human to animal...  In my seventy years there have been a few friends who have felt like partners in this life adventure (one of them from the age of three!), women who witness, speak the truth, and are capable of holding love in their hearts throughout this perilous ride ... It seems to me that it isn't until we get to be "of a certain age" that we allow ourselves to pause to appreciate the things that matter.  Once we affirm it, we can do no less than continue living our lives according to these values, paying careful attention each day to what we love.  There is only now, of course - no past and no future.   No time to waste.

I love this subject, and invite anyone reading this to join in the conversation with me.  It is a way we can remember who we are.  What matters to you?

A Beautiful Horse Race and some Tears

Yesterday at my granddaughter's birthday party I watched the Belmont Stakes along with every other member of the family eager to be witness to racing history.  Oddly enough, no one in our family pays much attention to racing during the "season,' and it is only when the push comes to shove that we all sit there breathlessly waiting to see if this one mortal animal called American Pharaoh could capture the first Triple Crown since 1978.  Well, this sleek mellow looking brown horse did the job as he pulled away effortlessly from the pack of contenders in the home stretch.  Glasses were raised, there were rounds of cheering, and adrenaline flowed through ...  and then tears came to my eyes.

Why the tears?  First off, I am a sucker for happy story endings when it comes to animals.  My eyes dribbled tears when I watched the movie "Seabiscuit," and back in the olden days when we all watched Lassie, of course we teared up, our hearts warming and settling because once again Lassie was going to be o.k.  Many of us turn animals into heroes, it seems, investing them with romantic stories that we make up because of course they can't speak their own experience; these tales show us that overcoming hardship, bad luck, and even cruelty is possible.  And when the animals rise up and prevail they carry us with them to a place where the world feels like a kind and good place...  We need that, of course.  When we have pets, we weave narratives in our heads about what they're thinking, imagining, and feeling, and then we behave accordingly -- or at least I do!  Cats are hard to do this with because they are so bloody inscrutable; they don't really wish to be understood.  Dogs are pretty transparent and available, but still ... still I don't think we really know what they're feeling.

Horses are a different deal, I think.  The horse is a mythical and elegant animal who parades, then streaks across our landscape as if he (or she) was destined for greatness.  When we saw American Pharaoh race to the finish yesterday it was as though he was fulfilling his entire purpose in life in that very moment.  It was a giant and grand moment, never to be experienced again...  even more magnificent than the orgasmic finale of the best Beethoven symphony.  And when you find yourself in that split second of vibrating joy, why wouldn't you cry just a little?

I cried also because I thought of my mother yesterday.  She would have raised her glass and shrieked with pleasure along with everyone else at the young horse's victory.  She loved horse racing, and used to host Kentucky Derby parties in her grand apartment in Pacific Heights.  In her inner fantasy world where she became an F. Scott Fitzgerald flapper, a famous bohemian artist, or just an exquisite grand dame sipping her Scotch and telling funny stories, she was also perhaps the well heeled owner of a few stunning thoroughbreds whom she adored.   She grew up in Long Island around people who made money from horses and became prideful in the process; she knew that life well and was attracted to it.  Was it the excitement of possessing a beautiful animal who performed superhuman feats and made you lots of money?  Was it the adoration that could come with glory?  I am not sure.  It may just have been that it was a world where everyone dressed well, was surrounded by beauty, and always had plenty to drink...

Tomorrow I head off for a silent meditation retreat where the topic for reflection will be aging and death, and my mother is already lodged in my mind in readiness.  She seems to show up when I need to learn more about impermanence and compassion, such as the time in Cambodia after a long day of visiting the Killing Fields when I had a dream that brought us together.  She died in 1991, but in many ways she still rests in my heart in present time, waiting for the right time to show up again.  All those thoughts I used to have about her death "freeing" me from our fractious and painful relationship are like so many stormy bad weather clouds that toss us this way and that and then move on.  I'm glad for this impermanence of feeling, because really and truly I don't think I ever wanted to get rid of her...  I have this funny feeling that our conversation is far from finished.