Day One - Beginning On The Cushion

" Without going out of my door, I can know all things on earth, without looking out of my window, I can know the ways of heaven.  The farther one travels, the less one knows, the less one really knows.  Without going out of your door, you can know all things on earth, without looking out of your window, you can know the ways of heaven.  The farther one travels, the less one knows, the less one really knows.  Arrive without traveling.  See all without looking.  Do all without doing." ~ The Inner Light  George Harrison

 So, this is my cushion.  A coupla rolled up blankets and some candles to boot.  Part of what I'm hoping to achieve is the discipline to sit, with care for how I practice, every day.  I have meditated every day, in some form or another, for years.  If the practice was not formal - e.g. while riding the subway - it happened nonetheless.  Every single time I sit (formally) I know I am doing my absolute favorite thing and then I wonder why I don't do it more often.  That's the thing!!  THE question!!  Why don't I/we do the things that are truly fulfilling and bring us closer to our real, authentic self/selves more often? 

Tired right now but I thought it might be nice to end with a photo of Mike, my lab, that I took right as I was finishing up my practice this morning.  I took this over my shoulder.  He stays there the whole time and just watches. 

This Very Year

"At least once a year, I imagine that I am about to die. Looking back as truthfully as I can at my entire life, I give full attention to the things I wish hadn’t occurred. Recognizing these mistakes honestly but without self-recrimination, I try to rejoice in the innate wisdom that allows me to see so bravely, and I feel compassion for how I so frequently messed up. Then I can go forward. The future is wide open, and what I do with it is up to me."
From "No Time To Lose" by Pema Chödrön

My birthday just passed, December 1st.  I love that day, that date.  If I could have picked my own birthday, I really believe that December 1st would have been my number one choice.
I'm in the midst of a practice that I mentioned in an earlier post but I'll reiterate it for the purpose of, well, getting to my purpose for writing this at all.
Two months ago I began a practice called "Living Fearlessly: How to Live This Year As If It Were Your Last" with the Zen priests Robert Chodo Campbell and Koshin Paley Ellison from the NY Zen Center for Contemplative Care. Some of the practice includes required reading and suggested reading, meditation, exercises done at our meetings that often include looking in to the eyes of a total stranger and communicating on levels that are unsettling at the very least.  But the connections are deep and they are real and they are profoundly moving.  I have moved in the direction of what I fear my entire life.  It has always served me well and it has always been obvious to me that if I didn't take that path I would get stuck in some sort of emotionally debilitating quicksand.
Death has been a part of my psychic vocabulary since I was a very little girl.  Dreams, fantasies, even the time at around age 5 when I watched a Tarzan movie with my Dad and realized that it was made ten years before I was born.   I remember sitting in the tiny rocking chair made for my 5 year old behind and being acutely aware that Tarzan, Jane and Cheetah were swinging, at that moment in time, on a vine in a world that existed without me in it.
So I decided, right around my birthday last week, that aside from my Zen practice, I would write every day for a year about just about everything.   I want and need the discipline of a public commitment plus I'm sure it's the only way I'll get to the bottom of all the thoughts that pour out of my head daily and collect, unceremoniously, atop the compost heap of my best intentions.  This is my journey for the next year. 

A Year To Live...

"The first way of thinking is rational; the second is magical. One can claim that growing up, which psychoanalysis is supposed to help us do, means abandoning magical thinking for rational thinking, yet one can also maintain that nothing should be abandoned, that what is true on one floor of the mind may not be true on another, but that one must live on every floor of the mind from the cellar to the attic." ~ Emmanuel Carrere from "Lives Other Than My Own"

My parents are both in their 80's and it all seems to have happened pretty suddenly.  They're old.  My Dad's hair is white and his mind is still very much in tact but his heart is taxed and tired.  My Mom still dyes her hair an ash blonde color in spite of the fact that her dementia has moved in to high gear.  Neither of them looks their age and lately, I kind of wish they did.  I feel like it would help me grasp the fact that they're, well, elderly. My father talks about his death often and mostly in terms of the things he's going to leave behind for me and my siblings.  He's already given several of his more treasured things away to us.  I think he's a little afraid to die - not because he thinks he's going to live forever or even that he'd like to -  it's because he doesn't ever want to miss his next meal, a Yankee game or a rerun of Gunga Din on AMC.  My mother, on the other hand, will go out swearing and hanging on to the bed post with all four limbs, dementia and death be damned. 
I have very recently begun a practice called "Living Fearlessly" with the Zen teachers Koshin Paley Ellison and Robert Chodo Campbell who are the co-founders of the New York Zen Center For Contemplative Care. The practice, in a nutshell, is to live from now until June of next year as if these were the last months of my life. There are approximately 22 people in the group and we met for the first time last Wednesday. 
One of the early benefits I'm experiencing with this Zen practice is that I'm very aware of who and what I want to spend my time and energy on.  My time is extra precious.  On this there is no longer any room for compromise.  I've always thought of myself as someone who has a keen awareness of when and how I'm being drained and filled up and while that may be true, I don't think I've always honored that awareness.

My Dad told me stories, while we were on the phone a few days ago, about dead bodies he saw when he was a cop.  I'm not sure how we got on to the subject of death but it seems we often do.  He's being matter-of-fact and, I know, trying to prepare me for the fact that he's going to be dead some day, probably sooner rather than later.  He said he had one wish and that was that he'd like to be buried, not cremated -( unlike my mother who has,at least a hundred times, said "don't spend the money on a friggin' coffin!  just cremate me and throw the ashes wherever the hell you want!") -  and on his headstone he wants written,
"I TOLD YOU I WAS SICK."

The Grand Scheme Of Things

"Hope is a revolutionary patience."
~ from "Bird by Bird" by Anne Lamott

Walking my dogs earlier today I felt the promise of Spring. It's not necessarily a change in the weather - it's more a feeling I get when all the trees and the birds and even the sidewalks that are so familiar to me begin, perhaps, to cast their shadows a bit differently. And things seem, well, more alert somehow.
I take the bus home from work on Friday and Saturday nights and, for the most part, I enjoy the ride. It's late, 2am-ish, so the streets are fairly empty and the bus careens along like an express train. It takes me 20 minutes to get home. The same ride during the day would take an hour because of traffic, double-parked cars and having to stop at every other corner to pick up passengers. At this late hour in Brooklyn most everyone riding the bus is either drunk or coming home from work.
I'm often very tired so I play little games in my head to keep myself awake. Last night I was deep in to my book and one of the games I often play while reading is one where I try to figure out where we are along the bus route, without looking up to see, just by trying to mentally/sensorily connect the terrain with the exact street location as we ride along. For example, the streets running alongside Greenwood Cemetery were super bumpy due to construction for the longest time so that was an easy identifier. Now, I've refined my ability to include subtle inclines, or declines, in the street like the one that happens right around 36th street.
Well, as luck, and exhaustion, would have it I was sound asleep long before we reached 36th street last night. I had an awareness of the fact that I was sleeping somewhere deep in my subconscious -
I could hear my smarter self saying "waaaake up, waaaaake up - loooooook out the window - you don't want to miss your stoppppppp...it's realllly cold out"
I recall looking up at one or two points and, at first, seeing the street sign for 51st street and then, just a minute later, 63rd street. I knew that waking up was crucial at this point because we'd be at 80th street, my stop, in a minute or two.
I,eventually, opened my eyes again at 89th street. I jumped up, trying to look casual, and took a quick look around the bus and saw that I was the only passenger. I walked up to the front and said to the bus driver,
"Can you let me off on the next corner?"
He does...
"Thanks a lot", I croak. Have a great night!!"
DAMN. DAMN. DAMN.
It was freezing and windy as I've ever known New York to be, EVER.
I couldn't believe I overshot my stop. I couldn't believe the bus driver didn't wake me - not that he would have any reason to. I hunkered down and braced myself against the wind and walked. Now, I don't know about anyone else but at times like this I have a tendency to go far in to the recesses of my mind. All kinds of things come up for me and I'm not talking about things like what I'm going to eat for breakfast tomorrow. I go directly to the deep end of the pool that is my mind.
The most predominant of these thoughts last night was -
"Was this really necessary in the scheme of things? Is this really, truly where I am supposed to be right now??? Would my life play out differently if I had not slept past my stop????"
The good thing is that I tend always to think positively regarding the twists and turns in my life so aside from being a little grumpy, tired and cold, I was open to these late night ponderings.
It brought to mind the time three and a half years ago when I left my apartment on, yet another windy, cold day to run an errand at the pet food store a few blocks from my apartment. On my way back, as I was waiting to cross the four lane avenue right up the street from where I live, I noticed, directly across the avenue from where I was standing, an elderly man with a walker waiting to cross towards me. He seemed under-dressed to me. No scarf, his coat open at the neck leaving his throat and chest vulnerable to the elements. My internal discourse cranked up a notch and as the light changed in our favor I wondered if there was something I should do to help him. He started to move, very slowly, and it was immediately apparent to me that he was in serious danger of not making it to the other side before the light changed again. As I started across I sensed that the drivers were aware of him and willing to wait. I reasoned that this man got himself out the door on his own and maybe stopping to help him would offend him in some way. I walked past him, still strongly questioning what I should do. As I reached the sidewalk, I started to walk towards my corner and took one more peek at him and then hesitated a few more seconds before I made a sudden u-turn back in his direction reasoning and rationalizing my decision still. The weird thing is that I had a sense that the timing of my decision was important.
I took two steps off the curb when, out of what seemed to be the clear blue, a car sped by me close enough that I felt the door handle brush by my arm. While all the other cars sat still at the now green light, this guy never realized what was going on as he approached the intersection from a block further back and suddenly switched lanes to get around a truck that was stopped and waiting for the old man to cross. He couldn't see around the truck, so he never would have seen me. It was all too obvious to me that if I'd made the decision to make that u-turn three seconds earlier, I would have been hit by this speeding car and it would not have been fun.
I got to the old man and asked if I could walk with him and he looked over-joyed. His eyes were tearing from the wind. We walked together and I asked him where he was going. He said,
"Oh, just up the block to the local diner for my breakfast and then to the barber for a haircut."
He said he came here from Greece over fifty years ago. He missed his family but he loved it in Brooklyn. It was his home. I couldn't tell if the tears in his eyes were still from the wind or not. I was, I think, still feeling the shock of the close call with the car as we walked. I knew, however, without a doubt, that I was meant to meet this man. I offered to walk him up the block to the diner but he really wanted to walk it alone. We stopped on the corner and he offered up some very kind words and thanked me as he walked away.
I walked down the street to my place and truly felt like I, at that moment, existed in two dimensions. A "Sliding Doors" sort of feeling - (this is a film the premise of which is how a woman's life plays out in two scenarios - one, where she makes a train and the other, where she just misses i)t.
I know this might sound odd but when I opened the door to my apartment, I could feel the emptiness of the other scenario - the one where the car and I impacted.
Life slows down when real life presents itself. I know that when my Dad had his open heart surgery fourteen years ago I can remember walking out of the hospital in to the stream of "real" life - day to day life, the one where we are plodding ahead, ahead of where we actually are with no real connection to the moment we are in - and feeling like I was standing still as everyone else shot by. I couldn't find a place to safely merge back in to the lane of life.
It's that feeling that I felt today when I felt the promise of Spring. A feeling that came to me because, at some point, during some past Spring, I stepped off that moving sidewalk and looked around me long enough to notice where I was, and it came back to me.

Our Father, Who Art In NJ (and Florida)

TAE A FART
Oh wit a sleekit horrible beastie,
Lurks in yer belly efter a feastie,
nae maiter wit u dae,
abdys gonna hiv tae pay,
even if yae try tae stiffle,
it's lyk a bullet oot a rifle,
hawd ur bum tight tae the chair,
tae try n stop the leakin air,
shimmy yersel fae cheek tae cheek,
n pray tae god it disnae reek,
Oot it comes lyk a clap o thunder,
Ricochets aroon th room,
Michty me a sonic boom!
God almichty it fairly reeks,
Hope I huvnae shit ma Breeks.
~ Robert Burns

My father lives for his next meal. Yesterday he called me from a restaurant in Florida, somewhere near his Winter home, while he was having his lunch, to tell me all about what he was eating.
"Ohhh, Dawn. You would love this place. The food is so healthy."
"What are you having, Dad?"
"Ohhhhh, I'm having a delicious bowl of tomato soup, a Caesar salad (crunch, crunch, slurp, slurp) and an iced tea. Mmmmmm, delicious."
"Sounds yummy, Dad."
"And tonight, for dinner, I'm either going with Danny and Maria to the VFW Post for fish, because it's fish night there tonight, OR I'm going to this little restaurant I found about a mile away from my house. Tonight is North Atlantic salmon night there! You get delicious salmon, a baked sweet potato and string beans! (more yummy sounds) and it includes TWO decent glasses of delicious red wine for the price of one! But, I told Danny and Maria to let me know early whether or not they're going to the VFW for the fish because I like to eat dinner between 5 and 6pm. They don't eat until 7:30 or so and I don't like that. By 7:30 I like to have my tea and my popcorn and some marshmallows as a snack. I don't like to eat later than that unless I'm out with friends and then I'll make an exception."
I like that about you, Dad. You know what you like."
"Yeah, and you know what I'm having for breakfast tomorrow? There's a little diner just down the road from me..."

He's eating his lunch, discussing his dinner and planning and dreaming about tomorrow's breakfast.
I don't know what it is about me but when people are that passionate, especially about food, I could listen forever. It's a hit of verbal valium - sort of like when I was small and my mom would doodle while she was talking on the phone. Sitting there watching her draw, through the smokey haze of her ciggie, had a very calming effect on me. Same with this.
My Dad recently had a defibrillator implanted in his chest and he ran in to some complications soon after. Sitting in the ER one night all he kept saying to my sister and I, in between doctors and nurses poking and prodding him, was -
"If they let me out of here tonight I know a great place where we can get Chinese food."
If memory serves me, he's always been this way. When I was a kid, and even now, nothing excited him more than the sound of the tea kettle whistling. He would rub his hands together and make goofy giggle-y sounds while heading in the direction of the stove.
He is a true Scotsman. His parents, Mary Adam and James Moir D'Arcy, came here on the ship named Caledonia some time in the late 1920's/early 1930's with four children in tow. They lived two doors down from us on 63rd street in Brooklyn. At four o'clock every afternoon they sat at the kitchen table and had high tea. They never used a tea bag, always fresh loose tea, and they brewed it in a silver, English teapot. There were always crackers, Dundee marmalade and Scottish shortbread. It wasn't intended to be fancy, it was simply their ritual and the only way they knew how to do it.
My Dad modernized his at-home tea ritual and downgraded to tea bags. He used two "balls" as he called them. He had a knack for calling things by names that would make us laugh and then act like he didn't know why we were laughing.
He came to meet me at work recently and I took him to the vegetarian restaurant across the street to get "sandwiches". He was totally miffed by the fact that the "meatball" sandwich had no meat in it -
"So, if it's not a meatball, what the hell is it?"
He finally ordered a smoked mozzarella and tomato panini.
"Is it mozzarella? Are they tomatoes???"
He gobbled it down with relish, not uttering another word all throughout our meal.
On our way out the door, I turned around, all smug, and said -
"Sooooooo, you liked it, huh?"
To which he replied, as he picked his teeth with a postcard announcement of a local art opening,
"Nope. I was hungry. ."

Bothered and Bewildered

“I do not at all understand the mystery of grace - only that it meets us where we are but does not leave us where it found us.”
~ Anne Lamott

My mother gave me three pieces of advice/words of wisdom over the course of my life that I am eternally grateful for:
1- the Summer of our 11th year, when my cousin Cindy and I set across the road to the lake to shave our legs for the very first time, armed with a bar of Ivory soap and my Uncle Mike's razor, my mother shouted from the porch steps, "whatever you do, don't shave above your knees!"
2- the time a few years ago when a very well-respected, and renowned, psychic came over to ME, singling me out over hundreds of people, to give me an unsolicited "reading", and I skulked out of the venue (a massive church on Park Avenue), in a state of panic, while the Medium's back was turned. I apologized to my sister and my mom for disappointing them as well as myself. My mother, in a moment of supreme motherly wisdom offered, "Don't be disappointed - you simply weren't ready to hear whatever it was she had to tell you."
3- on a sweltering August night at the lake house ,when I was around 7 years old, as I lay tossing and turning in bed, twisted up in my baby doll pajamas unable to fall off to sleep, she calmly instructed me to see how absolutely still I could be, which, oddly enough, didn't have the effect on me of stiffening up in an effort to lie motionless but, rather, made me look at the places in my body that were still restless and resistant. In essence, and certainly without knowing it, she gave me my first instruction on how to meditate.
It's hard to say if my mother was clinically depressed or if it's just my perception of her. In retrospect, I think it's more than safe to say that she suffered from some form of clinical depression. Then again, it's not that far-fetched to think that she might have been really, truly happy and content to watch Murder, She Wrote day and night. I think it's a bit of both.
When I was in second grade, I can remember hearing myself describe my mother's looks to Paul Showaks and Madeline Brennan when I suddenly realized I was actually describing the actress Elizabeth Montgomery and not my mother, at all. I said that my brown-haired mother who wore her hair in a short "mommy" cut had "long blond hair that she wore in a flip or, sometimes, if it was a hot day, she would pull it back in a ponytail and tie a ribbon around it."
Judith Ianelli's mom was a hairdresser so Judith came to school with the most elegant hair-do's every single day. I imagined her mother to look like Marlo Thomas.
My mother never openly complained about anything. She never exhibited jealousy around other women, either. But, strangely, my perception of her was certainly not one of confidence and self-awareness.
I do know that long hair on a girl was very important to my father. I had very long hair that he "never" wanted me to cut. I had no idea as to how much of my identity was tied to my long hair until I saw a childhood friend that I hadn't seen in thirty or more years and the first thing he said to me was -
"Dawn, you cut your hair!!"
Even at a very early age I had the impression that my mom was not enough of something. I wanted her to grow her hair so that as we watched Tarzan (Johnny Weissmuller) my Dad wouldn't think long-haired Maureen O'Sullivan (Jane) was prettier than my mom. I had no obvious reasons for feeling that way. My parents never, and I mean never, fought and I never heard my Dad criticize or demean my mother in any way. I was hooked in to an undercurrent in their relationship and I would build upon that right up until the night my parents had their first real fight and their marriage took a sudden turn in a direction that would inform my life for years to come.

Grambo

RAIN
I opened my eyes
And looked up at the rain,
And it dripped in my head
And flowed into my brain,
And all that I hear as I lie in my bed
Is the slishity-slosh of the rain in my head.

I step very softly,
I walk very slow,
I can't do a handstand-
I might overflow,
So pardon the wild crazy thing I just said-
I'm just not the same since there's rain in my head.
~ Shel Silverstein "Where The Sidewalk Ends"

My mother has always been obsessed with mystery and murder. She lives for Sherlock Holmes and Agatha Christie and looks forward to "her" TV shows: Jeopardy, Wheel of Fortune and all of the Inspector so-and-so English mysteries on Channel 21. Murder and CSI-type shows stop her dead in her tracks giving her face that glazed over look much the same as the look small children get when watching Sesame Street or Thomas the Tank Engine.
My mother is the last of nine children. Eight girls and one boy. The first six, five girls and the boy, Uncle Billy, were fathered by a man named Bobby. Bobby, my grandmother's first husband, was killed in WWI leaving her a widow with six children. At some point, in the not-too-distant future, she married his best friend, Tom, and then had his three children - my mom and her two older sisters. My grandmother was 42 when my mom was born which, in 1928, was, well, old. My grandfather never missed a day of work or a night at his local tavern. Anyway, I tell this as a way of explaining my theory that my mom didn't get a whole lot of parenting in the traditional way. Her older sisters often took care of her. My grandmother was very much present and a truly wonderful grandmother and mother but, I suppose, by the time my mother came along, she was just plain tired.
This all leads me to a place of deep understanding when my mother, at 82 years old, still sometimes behaves very much like a child. It used to be a source of great disappointment and frustration for me when she'd walk away from a "discussion" and close herself off in her bedroom. Or, even worse, the time she actually put her fingers in her ears and began humming while I was trying to express a feeling.
As I've gotten older and, especially, because I have children of my own, I can see that parenting is not always an automatic leap in to maturity. Especially if you're still in need of parenting yourself.
When I was a teenager, and especially after my Dad left, my mother was a scary woman. I look back at that time and think that she must have been the woman on our block that the neighborhood kids thought of as the "witch". She never did anything terrible to anyone, she just never spoke to anyone and spent all of her time inside the house surfacing only when she was going to or coming from work. When my kids and my nephews were younger, they sometimes sat on the front porch of my mother's house, ducked down low like special forces commandos or pre-school Maxwell Smarts, to watch for her as she turned the corner of the block on her way home from the train station after work. The "sentry" would, upon sighting and a postivie ID, shout "GRAMBO," and then they'd run, as if their little lives depended on it.
She's turned some kind of corner in her older age, though, and I'm not so sure I'm completely comfortable with it. She stops on the street and makes remarks to drivers that she thinks are in the wrong, as if she's driving her own car right there on the sidewalk. She talks to everyone now, especially little babies. She likes to reminisce. Her stories are very detailed and I know, in the re-telling, that some of those conversations and interactions from her past are happening the way she'd have liked for them to and not so much how they really occurred. Yesterday, I took a walk to the local pet store with her to buy some food for my dogs. As soon as we entered, a very precocious, somewhat misbehaved 5-ish year old boy was shouting and stomping his feet. I knew enough not to make eye contact with him but my mother immediately smiled and bent down and said,
"Ohhhh my, what a BIG BOY you are."
To which the bad seed replied,
"I am NOT a big boy. YOU ARE. You have a MOUSTACHE!"
As I turned toward my mother I could see her face morphing into a combination of the old Grambo plus her own unique version of Bette Davis at her Baby Jane worst... and before I could stop her she looked at the kid with her arthritic finger pointing and snarled,
"I DO NOT HAVE A MOUSTACHE! YOU DO!"
I took hold of her arm and said,
"C'mon mom,"
and as I was leading her to the back of the store she wheeled around, utterly intent on getting in the last word as the boy skipped out of the store sticking his tongue out at her as far as it would go as my mother shouted,
"OH YEAH, YOU HAVE A BEARD!! AND YOUR FEET STINK!"
We walked quietly most of the way home as I could practically hear her internal discourse. Finally, as we neared my corner she said,
"You know what I should have said to that little brat? I should have said,
your MOTHER has a beard!!!"