Bobcat!!!!

We were sitting having lunch, and out of the corner of my eye, I see a cat hop up on the brick wall. It moved like a cat, but then, WOW! It was very much larger than any cat I have ever seen, and immediately I recognize it is a BOBCAT!!

The most unexpected things happen around our desert home! Last year I peered over the fence expecting to see birds bathing in a puddle formed by the neighbor's irrigation leak. Instead I saw four perky coyote pups hopping and romping in the mud, obviously cooling themselves in the 100 degree heat. Very endearing to watch.

In the same moment my heart is both warmed and chilled, because these animals are cunning preditors, and sometimes in the night, we are awakened by the shrieking of a coyote pack celebrating a kill, or by the screaming of an animal caught by another. There are days when this is more truth than I really want to experience, but today, the surprise entrance of the bobcat was just a delight.

More on Fievel

Back to "Somewhere Out There." This time the original: http://youtube.com/watch?v=jhCP40PpW0k

This little mouse is all of us yearning for connection (on any level- human, divine), feeling small, feeling lost, possibly doomed, but yet still able to express hope in a tiny voice. It seems beyond silly to be so touched by this image, like the image I saw a while back of the tiger nursing little piglets (an earlier post).

Silly, but inevitable if I can feel my emotions; necessary, if I am to practice any kind of compassion in the world. I do not mean the kind of "compassion" one expresses with intellectual or political activity. I mean face-to-face encounter such as I experienced in the little church on Hawaii. It is compassion that does not result in analysis or conclusions, just presence.

In zazen, Roshi encourages me to "be there" with whatever state is occurring, not necessarily for the purpose of developing compassion (though that is a possible outcome), but just to learn to sit alongside my various states of mind without having the need to waste energy avoiding them.

I felt I lacked compassion in my drugged state. Thus, this medication issue is a spiritual one. I also feel I had a wake-up call, a reminder, of something missing in my life not just because of medication, but also for lack of a spiritual community. These are things I will be sitting with in my upcoming four day zazen, or possibly laying with, as the case may be.

A Hell of a Choice

A big decision is hanging over my head. Several months ago, I cleared my body of several medications: hormones, and certain drugs in the pain cocktail. I felt the latter were robbing me of the full spectrum of emotions that are my navigational aids, plus my piddling little bit of organizational ability, distractable as I am.

The hormones are back, that was a no-brainer. The cost/benefit ratio there weighs far in favor of using. I do believe I have outlived my evolutionary life span, and the extra years science has afforded me are much better with hormones on board. It took no time at all to figure that out.

The other drugs are the problem. I am of course now in much more pain, very fatigued, and often addled. Ironically, the fatigue is not relieved by sleep, because I can't sleep long, due to the pain. In this diary, I write about spiritual issues, but there are of course, the physical ones as well. "I am not an animal, but I AM using one for transportation."

I would like to think I am emptying in response to a spiritual call, but the horrible thought has occurred to me that it might be because I have no choice.

Drugged (relative) comfort vs clear-minded suffering. For those of us enduring chronic pain, it's a hell of a choice.

Somewhere Out There

The vicar at the new church writes a blog! http://ovchickpriest.blogspot.com. Besides being a very cool and well written blog (though sparsely populated with posts due to reasons which are made clear in her most recent post), it has a portal to some other blogs, and each of them had the same. It was thus a doorway into a new (for me) spiritual realm- Liberal Christianity.

I realize that this is what I was doing in those four college courses I took on Bible history a few years back. But those courses were the intellectual wanking part. There are actually people out there celebrating Communion in the Lord in the revelations of a modern reading of the Bible. So there must be communities out there, too, surrounding the people who are writing these blogs!

Am I Alice, peering down the hole and about to fall in, or am I Fievel, singing at the moon with all the hope in the world that I will find my family again. Is this what my emptying will open the door to? I wait, suspended between despair and hope.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PZRavGg4uRc&feature=related

Strike One

OK, I went to church, and wherever I went, there I was. Strike one is this: I said I didn't like it when people had their coffee talk and then somehow identified themselves on the spectrum of Christianity.

That's exactly what I did when I e-mailed the pastor (vicar, in this case), to see about getting together with her. I identified both me and my husband with a label. Well, awareness is the first step, isn't it?

First Destruction, Then Reconstruction

Sadness abounds. I am doing my best to be patient with it. My studio is a shambles. It is like having something ripped from me, but this is the way I chose. I told my art buds today that something is knocking on my soul's door, and I don't know what it is. All I know is that I have to make room for whatever it is before I can open the door and let it in.

Yes, I know that sounds like Oprah, but is the whole truth of how I feel. I am motivated to get things back in order, with a new rule: if it doesn't have a place, I can't keep it. AND, I have removed a lot of the places. I am looking around me, and despite the million Ladies Home Journal and Martha Stewart magazine articles telling you how, I don't know a single person who is able to organize their (too many) things in a more orderly way. No matter how you do it, if you give up stuff, there is going to be loss. I will sit with this in the zendo on Thursday.

What a Sabbath

Appreciated the church immensely. It was very much like the one on Hawaii. The choir lacked big egos, no "Jesus Show," just three people singing as best they could. My Corn Thin was consecrated along with the bread. Communion is celebrated every week, which is what I seek. I am so ready for a formal liturgy worship service. Let us just speak the words prepared for us by better writers than ourselves, and give ourselves completely to the wonder and mystery of Jesus.

The talk was heartfelt and moving by an elderly priest (Episcopal) who recounted some of his experiences and inspirations around Martin Luther King Jr. It reminded me of the fact that I was in Washington DC during the Tent City, and all that surrounded the freedom marches. It was a passionate age both for me and for our country. This is something of which we elders feel a particular ownership. A reminder to keep our sleeves rolled up to answer the call when it comes, as King did.

There were thirty or so people there, so all could greet one another. More men than women (very unusual), and most of the group was our age or older. In adult ed., a young man, a physicist, talked about the Theory of Relativity and similarities to this knowledge found in the Gospel of John. His was also a humble and heartfelt effort, received gratefully by an obviously well educated group of people.

After church, Jada came and took a truckload of my crap out of the casita. This was all I could handle in one day, and I collapsed into a nap. The Dharma wheel is turning. What a Sabbath!

Wherever You Go, There You Are

(Post title borrowed from a book by Jon Kabat-Zin)

Two subjects: My upcoming visit to a new church, and my recent purges.

I can't wait to walk into a new church this Sunday with a new set of expectations. Then I will find out if the assortment of phonies, bigots, consumer Christians, and the offensive "Jesus Show" was really, after all, me. The target is mu. There is no difference between me and the target, and it will be through mastery of my own movement that I will create relationship with the Divine in a community setting. I am not skilled at this.

The Zen books are in paper bags at the doorway waiting a convenient trip down to the Zendo. I have read and assimilated them, and now they are an obstacle to my practice. I have not given up listening to the Chicago Zen Center, where the teacher is very articulate (Is this the "Zen Show?"). BUT, that is the extent of my current intellectual wanking with Zen.

I tried to tell Roshi about my recent in vitro enlightenments, but it was too late. The moments had passed. I could not recount them adequately, though he did acknowledge that I had seen the one side of mu- emptiness. So what the hell is the other side??

This weekend Jada (my long-time art bud and teacher) will come with her truck and strong back to divest me of much of my pottery crap, moving it to a new art center in which she is teaching. This will hurt, but it must be done.

Wherever I go, there will be a new, lighter (emptier) me. And this intention MUST be accompanied by action, because thoughts of whether and how to do this have themselves become burdensome.

Most Beautiful Encounter

Had quit church-going, I thought forever. Could not abide the endless intellectual and political wanking about things so far removed from the object of worship, that it seemed an offense just going there.

Then, at Donna and Lawrence's invitation, I went to a very small, intimate Episcopal service on the Big Island and had one of the most beautiful church-going experiences of my life. There were thirty to forty in attendance at most, a few singers singing humble but heartfelt songs. The pastor, a woman my age, spoke walking among us, not standing over us. Her topic- just some musings about baptism and the kind of talkstory one might have after dinner with comfortable intimates. At no point did she feel the need to raise her voice or use rhetorical forms.

Commmunion was open, and for the first time EVER, there was a gluten-free host on the tray along with the wheat loaf. After the service, Donna and I walked the labyrinth, while Lawrence sampled the guitar of a choir member.

Then the sweetest moments of all- a truly I-thou conversation with two women completely absent the usual best-foot-forward coffee talk, and placing of oneself on the spectrum of Christian identities. One woman was there from Seattle with her husband, who had decided to spend his last days on the Big Island, for reasons that seem utterly obvious to me now. He has lung cancer. The other woman, a fellow celiac diet observer, had noticed that we shared the same bread preference.

I figure this was a call. I will answer it by venturing out to a small church in Tucson, bringing with me my Hawaii experience and leaving behind my pride and previous memories.

Calling All Angels

I am experiencing a brilliant demonstration of how our cognitive lives are an aurora borealis of illusions.

I was listening to "Calling All Angels" when I first looked out of the airplane window two nights ago at 4:30 am. After several hours of flying over Pacific water, on a dark and very starry night, I looked up and was thrilled by the sudden appearance of spectacular lights- San Francisco. It was an epiphany moment. Listening to the song again today, I am right back in that moment.

I experienced in the very same instant, these things: First, I saw the glow of lights in purposeful patterns surrounding the San Francisco Bay- the roads, the buildings, the pinnacle of human intellect manifested in this magnificent city, its technology, infrastructure, and functionality. Second, I imagined, because of the variety of structures from which those lights eminated, that below the lights, every manner of human experience was being lived right down close to the earth. Third, I saw, because of my distance above, the huge energy manifestation, drawing its glow from deep inside the earth, the clock ticking unto the day when this city will go dark again.

I lingered without judgement in this simultaneous elation and sadness until I realized that the demise of glowing cities is not tragic, but an eventuality in the sequence of cause and effect. Different than offhanded or intellecutally spoken words, it was a profound, experiential realization.

I turned my mind to God, realizing that we are not created to live forever, as individuals or as a species. Does this seem trite? Every previous moment in which I have had this thought seems trite, but this moment was not.

"Calling All Angels" http://www.andiesisle.com/Calling_All_Angels.html

Shooting at Buddha

This week Yukari enlightened me greatly on the subject of mu. Mu, like most Japanese words, suffers in translation for lack of cultural context in Western language. However, my sits with mu have cracked the door a bit, and Yukari opened it a little wider this week.

I watched Yukari perform her black belt Kyudo (archery) forms. She evidenced the inward focus of mindful action. Later she told me that the target of Kyudo is mu. In other words, the target does not exist as an entity in the discipline. The target is nothing!

AHA!!! That puts the entire event in the body and mind of the archer. The target is not separate from the action. The archer practices the physical act of shooting the arrow with so much mindfulness, that eventually the arrow and the target become one, not through an intentional action which has an object, but through minutely subtle experience with the bow and arrow with the result that the arrow enters the target.

After 30+/- years, I finally get the whole idea presented in the book, ZEN IN THE ART OF ARCHERY. My appreciation of mu is expanded. Cannot wait to tell Roshi about this. Chao-chou says "mu" to the monk who is still shooting at Buddha as if at a target.