It Dawned on Me

"You can't hold back the dawn." - A.L. McCormick, Professor of Psychology at U.C.O., circa 1982.

Day 179. I rode 57 miles today. If my ego wasn't so successfully sublimated, I bet I would be pretty proud of that.

I left before sunup, not because I am turning into one of those nauseating morning people who tout their moral superiority, but because it's been getting frickin' hot by 9:00 a.m. I altered my route from home, pedaling north along a former favorite street that has now succumbed to Oklahoma developers' credo of: "Replace all green earth with asphalt and strip malls." I looked to my right as the sun broke the horizon. I haven't witnessed many sunrises since my days in the youth group at the Methodist church, where you were soundly ostracized if you missed the Easter morning sunrise service. This sunrise was lovely; it literally looked like a blazing orange ball of fire peeking over the earth's edge. Smokey pink wisps of cloud wafted across the sun - so picturesque it looked like an expertly executed paint-by-number. I looked away (pothole patrol) for a few pedal strokes, and again turned my head eastward. In the flash of those few seconds, the entire firey orb had risen past the horizon, and was now resting on a strip of azure summer sky. "Wow," I marveled, "You really can't hold back the dawn."

The quote is sacred to me. It was uttered by a memorable mentor during my undergraduate years. Tucked underneath the sloping ceiling of his office in the oldest building on campus, we frequently engaged in meandering conversation. One early spring day of my senior year, we were discussing his certainty that I would be accepted into a prestigious graduate program. I was dating Montford Ira at the time. Molten lust ravaged my veins, posing a catastrophic threat to my 3.95 grade point average (damn that B in French my freshman year!) I had my doubts about gaining entrance into the highly competitive Ph.D. programs my professors were recommending. This was at the height of my dad's alcoholism, and I was horrifically under fathered. I had no idea of what I was capable of.

It was mind boggling to receive my professor's validation and willingness to advocate for me. The short version of this story is that I was accepted into a prestigious graduate program - one of five out of several hundred applicants. Late in the summer of 1982, I met with an adviser at the lofty institution to plan my classes. I walked out of that pompous asshole's office and elected to accompany Monty to California rather than grace his campus with my presence. It was a defining moment of my life.

I stayed in California just long enough to accumulate some really good catamaran stories. Dr. McCormick's words had lodged deeply in my psyche: "You can't hold back the dawn." I came to realize he meant that my true nature would surface and - despite my profound lack of parenting - I would ultimately actualize the capacity of my mind and aspirations. He was right. I completed my Ph.D. in 1988. Having someone believe in you is a powerful incentive.

As I pedaled along while the day awakened, I was completely absorbed with each moment. Images were surreal in their vividness, like the colors on a high definition television that never exist outside of digital enhancement. I topped an incline and, against the yellow gold of the sun, I observed the crisp black silhouettes of two eastbound runners. A half mile further, my gaze was drawn upward as a flock of geese, flying west in their perfect V formation (drafting was invented by birds in flight) was ironically juxtaposed upon the glint of an eastbound airplane. Dawn rocks. Cycling through it with my senses heightened in exquisite harmony is pretty cool, too.

Dawn progressed to mid-morning and my attention became consumed with avoiding overheating. I remained mysteriously centered, satiated with a serene calm in the knowledge that, like the dawn, my awakening cannot be held back. Life flows on, like first light trickling over the countryside. Alongside that blazing orange orb in the east, I am lighting up, too.

Gassho,
CycleBuddhaDoc

True Nature Two

Whatever is, is right. - Alexander Pope in the Zen Calendar (August 9, 2004).

Day 178. I just made 17 trips to and from my son's car as he spans the three weeks between his summer campus apartment and his fall campus apartment. Who says you can't go home again?

I've remained fixated on the concept of True Nature . In yesterday's post I mentioned that my mom has two favorite stories about me with which she effectively initiates every person I risk bringing to her home. I shared the tale of the Wayward Toddler. I'll call the second legendary yarn Daddy and the Dump.

I was four (that was a very big year for me) and my mother had me all prissed up to accompany her to a wedding at our church. As she tells it, I was turned out in full 1965 dress up regalia: pink taffeta dress adorned with a freshly starched pinafore and matching satin sash, rustling crinoline slip, pale pink ruffled anklets lining shiny, black patent leather Mary Janes. Fittingly, the ensemble was topped off with my springy blond curls fresh out of sponge rollers and tied back with a pink polka-dot ribbon. For some little girls, getting all dressed up for a storybook wedding in a rosebud sprinkled church would be a Dream Saturday. I'm pretty sure their True Nature differs from mine.

We stepped out onto the front porch, my mom admonishing, "Try not to wrinkle." I looked toward the driveway. Triumphantly grinning from the top of an enormous mountain of tree clippings piled in the bed of a pickup truck stood my dad. I was aghast as the implications of the scene sunk into my four-year-old mind. While I was being primped and curled and fussily poured into pink, my dad had been doing yard work. Mowing and chopping and cutting things. Dragging limbs around and hurling them into his truck. Getting dirty and sweaty, and - best of all - wearing yard gloves. MY idea of a Dream Saturday. With trembling lips and a foreboding sense of dread, I asked, "Daddy, where are you going?" His answer cut to the core: "To the dump, honey." I went rigid with horror. I was in a dress, headed to a wedding, and my father was bound for the dump.

There have been countless times in my life when my mother committed grievous parenting errors. This was not one of them. Tears of sorrow welled in my eyes as I stood stock still on the porch. Mom looked at Dad, who leveled her with a meaningful gaze and a shrug. Gently, my mother leaned down to her crestfallen daughter and asked neutrally, "Julie, do you want to go to the wedding with me or the dump with your dad?" To date, this may be the most rhetorical question ever posed to me.

I disappeared into the house like prairie dogs at a zoo exhibit on field trip day. Quicker than you could say "community mulch" I shed my clothes in a frothy pink mound on my bedroom floor. Jerking up the elastic waistband of my navy blue shorts, I stumbled pell-mell out onto the porch, where my mom slipped the Johnny Quest T-shirt I clutched over my unruly curls. She handed my dad the muddy Keds that were sitting by the front door as I hopped up into the cab of the truck. Dad got in, started the engine, and put her in reverse (I can still picture the "three-on-the-tree" shift lever of that old truck). Mom leaned in through the window and kissed the top of my head. "Have fun at the dump," she said. I imagine she sighed as she watched the truck back out of the driveway - tree limbs akimbo in the bed and a beaming four-year-old in the cab.

I have mentioned my personal track record in matters of marriage. Two marriages for a total of three years. Not exactly my forte. By some bizarre unconscious association, the word "funeral" inevitably (and totally unintentionally) comes out of my mouth when I mean to say "wedding." I guess it dates back about 45 years. True Nature is a formidable force. There is a great likelihood I would again choose a trip to the dump if faced with the same dilemma today, and I still fancy wearing yard gloves.

I think I was a budding Buddhist way back then. I didn't like excessive, demonstrative displays and avoided frills of any sort. I had those robust obsessive compulsive genes, so ritual and repetition came quite naturally. My active imagination kept me so absorbed from within that my ego was fairly malnourished. I even liked wearing the same thing every day, albeit not a maroon robe.

Contemplate your True Nature. Bring your life in alignment with it. That's the recipe for bliss.

Gassho,
CycleBuddhaDoc

I Yam What I Yam

"I'm having fun. I'm a kid. It's what we do." - A.B.'s 8-year-old niece from the top of the ferris wheel at Frontier City.

An adult is one who has lost the grace, the freshness, the innocence of the child, who is no longer capable of feeling pure joy, who makes everything complicated, who spreads suffering everywhere, who is afraid of being happy, and who, because it is easier to bear, has gone back to sleep. The wise man is a happy child. - Arnaud Desjardins in the Zen Calendar (November 16, 2006).

Day 177. I really do like seven's.

Today a client who is lucky enough to have a very wise eight-year-old niece shared the above quote. I usually sense when I am in the presence of greatness, and quickly told my client that her niece would be quoted on my blog. And she is!

For the rest of the day I have been torquing on the True Nature of things. My gut tells me this is the place from which all happiness radiates. I began to pay attention to people, animals and insects, noticing which beings were in tune with their True Nature. People (the ones over the age of five) are the worst at it, hands down. Dogs are probably the best (along with two-year-olds); June bugs, cicadas, and moths run a very close second.

I contemplated my own true nature and one of my earliest memories surfaced. I was between the ages of three and four, playing in the nursery at the old Methodist church my parents still attend. It was a Friday night, and my parents were attending a function with their Sunday School class. This was the mid 1960's, when parents had no qualms about leaving their children with two elderly care givers on a weekend night at an unlocked church in the inner city - my, how times have changed! While rambunctiously building a fort out of huge wooden blocks with the older kids, I looked around for my friend Jeff and couldn't find him. I went up to Miss Crump (that was her real name - no relation to the teacher on Andy Griffith as far as I know) and asked her where Jeff had gone. She explained that he had grown very tired and was in the "baby room" across the hall, sleeping on a cot.

I was intrigued by this news and became obsessed with a longing to lie down in the baby room myself. With three-and-a-half-year-old logic and cunning, I kept wandering around Miss Crump's chair (as I recall, the care givers rarely stood up), emitting exaggerated yawns, drooping my eyelids and loudly sighing. It had to be the most comedic impression of a tired toddler ever performed. The astute Miss Crump eventually inquired if I was tired. I answered with an enthusiastic "Yes!" and she led me to the darkened room across the hall, laid a baby blanket on one of the low green cots the church probably still has, told me I could lie down, and promptly left. I lay still in the darkness, pleased with my sleepiness impersonation. I distinctly remember laying there (I didn't sleep then, either) for what seemed like hours until I heard Miss Crump opening the door and my parents' voices as they wondered aloud about my uncharacteristic fatigue. I feigned sleep and did my best impersonation of drowsily sitting up to be carried out to the car.

What kind of freak child wants to leave the company of other children in a brightly lit, well-equipped play room to lie alone in the dark? (I have absolutely no memory of Jeff in the room - he must have been asleep). Evidently - ME! I recall several other occasions where I pulled the exact same stunt (whether there was another child laying down or not), never fell asleep, and waited patiently in the dark until my parents came to get me. (They didn't party every weekend at the church; this was probably three or four times a year). The really freaky thing is that as an adult, I absolutely empathize with that little girl laying on the cot. She is me, and I am still her. Though I have a bit more sophisticated coping skills now (most of the time!) I still get way overstimulated in brightly lit rooms filled with gaiety and my peers.

Fun stresses me out. I am in my element when my mind is entirely occupied with a task requiring cognitive torquing, focus, and attention. I thrive on accomplishing things. I suspect I stayed in the nursery while we were designing and building the forts, roads and tunnels with the big blocks. However, when it came time to actually PLAY in them, I was probably done. Worn out from bossing around the older kids regarding the engineering specs. If we weren't going to build something else, if productivity was being replaced with senseless frivolity, I was out of there. Headed for my green cot and some quiet time. My True Nature is to be deeply occupied or serenely alone. Not much in between. It was so when I was three, and still so now.

My mom inevitably tells two stories about my True Nature when I bring people home to Meet the Parents. In one of them, I am eighteen months old and she has just put me down in the back yard at our house on 67th Street when the phone rings and she dashes back into the house - "Just for a second." When she came back outside - "Less than a minute later" - she looked around the back yard and I had disappeared. She glanced at the yard to the east: no baby girl. Swiveled her gaze to the west and spotted her errant daughter - making a break for it and already two doors down. The minute her back was turned, I had race-toddled to the chain link fence, climbed it, crossed the next-door-neighbor's lawn on my nimble toddler legs, climbed their fence and was halfway across the next neighbor's property. I'm assuming she intercepted me before I reached the corner. She was, after all, a highly responsible mother.

That was, incontestably and veraciously, the essence of Me. I still can't be fenced in. I'm a wanderer, an explorer, an adventurist to the core. In all honesty, I still hop a mean fence. (Though there was that time I jumped over a gate while selling Campfire candy at the age of 10 and broke my arm. My responsible mother took me to have it set three days later. We've never let her live it down). My True Nature is a whacky combination of obsessive attention to duty and fearless physical exploits. When I am manifesting either or both, I'm having fun. I'm a Buddhist. It's what we do.

Gassho,
CycleBuddhaDoc

Fix Me, Please

Right now, at this very moment, we have a mind, which is all the basic equipment we need to achieve complete happiness. - Howard Cutler in the Zen Calendar (February 23, 2006).

Day 176. I had lunch today with a friend who works as a nurse at an acute care facility. She told me she was "sore" after performing chest compressions on a dying patient for 45 minutes yesterday. Her comment gave me some perspective on the work I do each day. I was oddly, briefly jealous of the concrete physicality of her work. It is, literally, urgent and immediate and often a matter of life and death. Measurable and definitive to some degree, as gauged by heart monitors and pulse rates and brain waves. My work can be so abstract. I, too, feel sore sometimes after work, though it is difficult to garner empathy for performing compressions on a person's psyche.

Take today, for instance. It was a long one. Most of the time, my work is inspirational and deeply rewarding. Occasionally, however, it is depleting and demoralizing. Sometimes clients don't get better, but they don't necessarily get the release of my friend's patients when chest compressions don't work. There are impasses along some therapeutic journeys where we just hang out and hurt. Solutions elude us. So there we are: stuck and suffering. This is not a favorite point in therapy for most of my clients.

All afternoon I fought the urge to pour Zen Buddhism over my clients like salve. "Just this!" I wanted to shout. "Surrender, let go your hold, embrace nothingness, become empty, release your attachment, simplify, learn your mind, get your butt on your cushion!" While battling a forceful desire to impart these bits of "wisdom," I abstained from actually roaring the words. Indeed, I was avoiding an obvious ethical violation, and I also recognized that these platitudes, in the absence of actual cushion time, mean very little when spoken aloud.

I am in the infancy stage of ethically, effectively transferring my sitting practice to my psychology practice, though there are several books written on the application of Buddhist principles to western psychology (one of my favorites is "The Couch and The Tree"). It fascinates me to observe Americans' bizarre expectation that it is possible to avoid pain and suffering. Sidhartha couldn't pull it off, and he was an entitled prince. So many people actually believe that, if they search hard enough, there is a pill, a method, a strategy, a technique that will stave off emotional suffering. Sometimes there is, and when applicable, I try to offer it to my clients. They are usually eager and impatient to employ the "solution" and quickly restore happiness.

It is challenging to convince clients that sometimes sitting with our pain is the best way to alleviate it. Watching, attending to, learning from, accepting and honoring our emotional suffering may be the only option in some situations (I am thinking of a certain collegiate football player with an inoperable hand injury). It startles me to watch how dependent on external answers we have become in the last couple of decades. This reliance on outside sources makes us prematurely surrender personal authority to an "expert," and deprives us of opportunities to cultivate resiliency within. I watch for this tendency to relinquish internal strength in my clients. It is a titillating invitation to my ego to supply authoritative proclamations of psychological sagacity. I exercise restraint, and try to cultivate my client's autonomy by inviting an exploration of their intuitive solutions and conclusions. They usually come up with some pretty good stuff.

I know there are more subtle ways to integrate zazen with my clinical work than bellowing Zen Calendar quotes at my clients. Though I probably will mention that the basic equipment we need to achieve happiness can't be purchased on e-Bay.

Gassho,
CycleBuddhaDoc

Catalina Bound

She would be quiet now, she decided, and she felt the familiar satisfaction of that choice, its small internal tug like the strings pulled tight on a cloth purse. She'd keep her secret in the bag, keep her eyes on the trail, try to listen. Try, also, to keep her eyes away from the glossy animal movement of his dark hair and the shape of the muscles in the seat of his jeans. But the man was just one long muscle, anywhere you looked on him. - Barbara Kingsolver in "Prodigal Summer."

Day 175. What a nice round number. Hurtling toward my half-birthday on August 3rd. Tonight, I am filled with nostalgia. It would have been my Silver Anniversary had I remained married to my first husband.

We were married outside on my aunt's acreage on July 27, 1985 after a three-week engagement. I'm sure everyone thought I was pregnant (I saved that status for my second marriage. A wedding 20 weeks into a pregnancy is a surefire way to have cleavage in your wedding dress - a bonus I had not anticipated!). The real explanation for the short engagement (we had dated for over three years) was that we were avid wind surfers and the wind usually dies in July. We had nothing else to do.

The proposal was unique: he walked into his room where I was lying sprawled on his bed following an evening of wind surfing until way past sunset. He said, very off handed and matter-of-fact, "Let's set the date." Me, in typical Julie oblivion, replied, "The date for what?" (Aquarians are not known for romanticism). He said, "The date to get married." I paused (having never considered it - not once) and said, "Oh. Okay. I like seven's." We consulted a calendar, and conveniently, July 27 (7/27!) fell on a Saturday that year. We bought a little ring a few days later. Our moms did the rest. I recall remnants of Madonna and Don Johnson in our attire.

Ah, Montford Ira the Third. I wish I could say I had fabricated that name to protect his identity, but, alas! That is his factual namesake. We met at Ernie's Polka Palace in December of 1981. He was recently home from Marine boot camp at Pendleton in San Diego. Cropped hair, a USMC bulldog freshly tattooed on his bicep, and a body to die for. Two dances confirmed that we were the best two-steppers in the place. There is nothing like love when you are 18 and 20 (I was an older woman). For the next seven years, we cavorted in a wild dance of our own, interwoven with passion, love, lust, intensity, and insanity. Probably not the ideal ingredients for a lasting marriage. I was never bored.

Monty was a sailor. His family owned two catamarans: 16-foot and 18-foot Hobies. We sailed them like we danced: precision and expertise on the edge of potential disaster. Unbridled wildness in the service of going ever faster. I worked the jib, and learned to lean out on the trap so far and so arched that my pony tail skimmed the water as we planed over it. We dumped it all the time because Monty would fly a hull so high that the inevitable gust of Oklahoma wind would send us catapulting over. It made motor boat skippers extremely nervous. They would see us spill over in a violent cascade of multicolored sails and a ricocheting, bikini-clad body (that was me, crashing in off the trapeze) , circle around, and come back prepared for body recovery. Instead of unconscious blobs floating in the debris, they would find two laughing youngsters, congratulating ourselves on another cool wipeout while we righted the boat. Good times.

While living in Long Beach, we launched the 16-footer from the sand in the bay and, in the naive splendor miraculously granted to two- and twenty-two year olds, sailed west to Catalina Island. The mountains of our destination were blurred outlines on the horizon that we glimpsed when the smog lightened. Far out into the Pacific ocean, a school of dolphins accepted a silent invitation issued by the catamaran hulls as they glided through the waves. The dolphins swam and danced and jumped and played close enough to the boat for me to lean out off the tramp and touch them. They grinned like jesters, accompanying us for several miles.

We blasted into Isthmus Harbor in the late afternoon - me (terror stricken) stretched out on the trap summoning all the ballast I could from my 120-pound frame. We didn't want to flip the boat in Isthmus Harbor. It held our food and water and matches. I remember a specific skipper - tanned, round-bellied and sipping a margarita while Jimmy Buffet strummed in the background. He leaned over the gleaming teak edge of his 43-foot Hans Christian sailboat and did a double take. "You sailed over from the mainland on that?" he shouted incredulously. For an answer, Monty and I executed a tight tack, missing his hull by mere inches, and headed to shore. Good times.

We were told near shore that you had to pay money to beach your boat on Catalina Island. In our innocence, it had never occurred to us to research the socioeconomic status of most people in Isthmus harbor. We had no money with us (ah, youth!) so we promptly turned around, sailed out of the harbor, down the island, and found our own private blue lagoon where we beached the boat and crawled into a sandy cave to spend the night. Made a fire and ate salty smoked salmon that Monty's mom had carefully packed into a tiny cooler for us. I'm assuming we had water in addition to our beer. I can't remember much else about the cuisine that night. We were living on love.

The sail home the next day was tedious and lengthy because the winds had totally died. We almost got run over by an enormous freighter in the shipping lanes off of Long Beach. The captain had the audacity to blast his horn at us. As though a freighter smashing a 16-foot Hobie would ever even feel a bump. We loaded the cat on its trailer and drove home to Monty's parents' rented cottage at Surfside. His mom welcomed us with an enormous bear hug and a sigh of relief. I didn't get it then. My son is about the age Monty was when we embarked on our Catalina escapade. I get it now.

I didn't sit zazen back then. It wouldn't have occurred to me. Being with Monty was the best lesson in living in the here-and-now I have ever known. I could write a year's worth of blogs on our adventures, but I think I'll end here and relish them inwardly instead. I haven't had contact with him since 1989, though I know he still lives in southern California. I suspect he never found a First Mate quite like me. Shine on, Montford Ira. Thanks for the memories.

Gassho,
CycleBuddhaDoc

Just Baggage Enough

Simplicity is making the journey of this life with just baggage enough. - Charles Dudley Warner in the Zen Calendar (August 13, 2006).

Day 174. I found fourteen cents during the first block of my walk this evening. Walking is much more lucrative than cycling. It is inadvisable to watch for both coins and potholes while pedaling the streets of Oklahoma. There are precious few of the former and dangerously many of the latter.

I have nothing to say tonight, and I am strangely okay with that. A rare spell of contentment has enveloped me, and I'm reluctant to sway my equilibrium. Simplicity wafted in and out of my thoughts while I walked. It feels harmonious to distill my life to work, cycling, blog, and meditation. Lather, rinse, repeat. Throw in a little parenting now and then, but only when asked.

The distillation of a complex life to a simplistic one is a much more intricate process than a decade or so ago. On a daily basis, I witness my clients and friends struggle with the core question of what to keep and what to keep at bay. There are so many things to say no to. With clients who are about 30 and younger, I love to point out the ways culture assisted with perimeters when I was a girl. There were only four TV stations, and they went off the air at midnight on week nights (remember the test pattern symbol and the "ant races?") and - I can't recall - one or two a.m. on the weekends. There were very few stores that stayed open 24 hours, and even fewer that opened on Sundays. Etiquette dictated that you didn't make social phone calls after nine or ten p.m. No computers, no videos to rent or download, no electronic games, less than half the population of our present planet. It was quiet at night. Our human hearts beat in closer rhythm to other living things.

I have not observed that a busier life begets happiness. We all know this is so, yet so few of us act with the necessary rigor to create and sustain a simpler way of being. On a daily basis, zazen provides me with an indisputable experience of contentment with less. I am shedding baggage like the airlines charging exorbitant fees per suitcase. My baggage has been reduced to a dictionary, thesaurus, cushion and bike. I'll also keep this fossil of a computer. At least for six more months.

Gassho,
CycleBuddhaDoc

Frolicking Ego

When you are fooled by something else, the damage will not be so big. But when you are fooled by yourself, it is fatal. No more medicine. - Shunryu Suzuki in the Zen Calendar (June 7, 2002).

Day 173. A north wind blew through this evening, dropping the temperature from 95 to 82 in a half hour. It made me preposterously happy.

As did my bike ride this morning. I rode behind my partner on a 40-mile jaunt that included two magnificent newly paved roads and some well placed hills. When I first tucked in to his "slip stream" (thank you Phil and Paul for the reminder that British words trump U.S. vocabulary every time), I briefly forgot how to draft. Within a mile, it all came rushing back. My partner is the best draft in the galaxy. Whizzing along the flats of Franklin Road, I looked down and gasped to see I was cruising at over 20 mph with the energy expenditure that usually accompanies a turtlesque 15-16 mph.

I followed so close to his back tire, I doubt you could slip a piece of rice paper between us. Our synchronicity on the bikes is such that I am reminded of those breathtaking couples who figure skate and ice dance together. When I watch the performances of the best ice dancers, I always assume that, off the ice, they are either hot lovers or brother and sister (hopefully not both). How can we be so compatible on two (four?) wheels and so incompatible on every other substantive issue existing between two humans? Would twer that bicycling is life! Oh, wait. It is!

Somewhere in the first 20 miles, my ego busted out and frolicked. I have been riding by myself for about two months now, and it is very difficult to gauge cycling performance when you don't have a comparison group (especially if said group has historically been comprised of maniacal white males who log a gazillion miles a week). The team has always reassured me that riding alone makes you stronger (with the proverbial qualifier "if it doesn't kill you"). I am a sample size of One that utterly confirms this hypothesis. I rode extraordinarily well this morning, and it certainly wasn't because I had fresh legs (I am referencing the last three miles of yesterday's ride, in which roadkill appeared to be moving faster than me). As I blasted up a couple of climbs, I swear my ego gloated on the handlebars, shouting, "Look at me! Look at me!" For this born-again (but as yet unenlightened) Buddhist, it was an embarrassing state of affairs indeed.

Fortunately, cycling and zazen share a knack for whopping egos off handlebars. Enough hills, and/or enough minutes on a cushion hushing Monkeys will inevitably be humbling. Sort of like doing a fair amount of therapy on any given day. There will always be a client or two who effectively ratchets me down a few notches. I am beholden to them all, for I earnestly believe that my growth as a therapist is catalyzed by those moments when my well worn synaptic pathways are jarred off track. Those same entrenched neuro-connections are similarly zapped by the moments in meditation when all goes silent. Ego is simultaneously bewildered and obliterated. It is a beautiful thing.

I am no longer concerned about the occasional instance when my ego is sprung and makes a break for it. There are too many reliable sentinels in my lifestyle for it to go far.

Gassho,
CycleBuddhaDoc

Just Doing It

The shortest answer is doing. - English Proverb in the Zen Calendar (April 7, 2003).

Day 172. Forty-five solitary miles today. The first 41 looked pretty good. The last four . . . ummmm . . . not so much. Compared to last Saturday, there were some improvements in the stats: considerably fewer dead snakes on the road (though some from last week have become indelibly imprinted upon the asphalt), zero times on the verge of puking, no cramping body parts, only two salt tablets consumed. Zero liquid left when I pulled into my driveway. Good thing I decided to wait until next week to go for 50 miles.

Peak Experience! While pondering possible volunteer activities over the past several weeks, my thoughts kept returning to Habitat for Humanity. I checked my e-mail for the first time in several days and lo! and Behold! There was an invitation to join an upcoming Women Build in Cleveland county. It included a site link on which I could sign up to be contacted when they begin their organizational meetings. I jumped on it. I sling a pretty mean hammer, and the idea of doing something physical is especially appealing since I spend all day torquing around with my brain.

I continue to marvel at the way a strong sitting practice impacts my life. At a fundamental level, the most influential aspect is the stark, simple fact of getting my butt on my cushion every single day for almost six months. When I write about sitting still for 35 minutes and breathing, it sounds so inconsequential it is almost absurd. Yet the concrete reality of actually DOING (so far!) what I set out to do is profoundly empowering. I have always emphasized and valued the execution of my ideas and promises in the real world. In all honesty, however, the ratio of what churns in my head to what manifests in my actions is about two to one.

Zazen is changing that. I vault the abyss between the imagined and the experienced much more frequently. Something about sitting meditation shortens the leap between my ideas and my actions. There is an immediacy and clarity in my thought process that is remarkably conducive to bringing hypothetical musings to fruition. It makes me feel sane. From riding bike routes I envision to planning a trip to Durango to outlining the novel I've carried in my mind for over ten years, I am actually DOING!

I don't have to be Mistress of my Unconscious to know that working for Habitat for Humanity is an approximation of my desire to emulate Greg Mortenson's work in building schools in Pakistan and Afghanistan. For now, it is clearly a more realistic goal than plopping my blue-eyed self down in Korphe (Baltistan). A beginning. A step. Movement on the road to enlightenment. A damn good way to spend my Saturdays.

Gassho,
CycleBuddhaDoc

Timely Reunion

Develop interest in life as you see it, in people, things, literature, music - the world is so rich, simply throbbing with rich treasures, beautiful souls and interesting people. Forget yourself. - Henry Miller in the Zen Calendar (June 5, 2002).

Day 171. When Henry Miller uttered that quote, I bet he was having an evening like I just did.

I have been 24 hours in the company of the friend I was reunited with (after 32 years) in April of this year. The one I met when I was 10. It is astonishing to reconnect with her: our compatibility is so complete, our dispositions so attuned, our history so colorful, our temperaments so well suited. We are not cheesy and smarmy and perfect. She is frothy and opinionated and blunt. She has also led a remarkable life effervesced with music, travel, art and a collection of eclectic, eccentric characters for friends. Interestingly, she led the life I suspect I would have indulged had I refrained from parenthood.

The universe led us back to one another at precisely the right time. She is gasping for breath, suffocating under the onerous wet blanket of life in small town Oklahoma while she carves out the first year of marriage with a man she truly loves. Recently liberated from my own soul crushing relationship and my son's convenient change of residence, I am available to rekindle her lively spirit and fan the flame of her true nature. Together, we are shooting sparks from smoldering embers. We light one another up. The desolation and deprivation characterizing our lives before reconnecting infuses our reunion with magic. And gratitude. As she whispered in my year that evening in April when we embraced for the first time in over three decades, "Sheer joy."

I remain astounded at the graciousness of the universe and her ability to fill me up in exact proportion to the emptiness I create. It is the most sublime of all equations (this coming from a person who can calculate standard deviations by hand!) Of the gifts offered by my practice to date, this one is paramount: I need not flounder in exertions to fulfill my innermost needs. When I quiet my mind and open my heart, fulfillment finds its way to me.

Gassho,

CycleBuddhaDoc

Love's the Only House

Love's the only house big enough for all the pain in the world.
Love's the only house big enough for all the pain. - Martina McBride from "Love's the Only House"

Day 170. Twenty-one miles alone on the bike. Even with the strong south wind (imagine that!) I averaged over 17 mph. I'm getting stronger. It feels good.

When I clicked on "Publish Post" after last night's blog, I felt like a limp dish rag. The theme from "Rocky" was, literally, blaring in my head. I read over my post, teared up, then began to weep. Then sobbed. It felt incredibly liberating. When I quit crying, a subdued sense of relief came over me. I felt calm and relieved and courageous. To be honest, I felt like a writer. For the first time. I felt like I wrote from my gut - like Natalie Goldberg teaches - without a critic on one shoulder and an editor on the other. While I wrote, I was outside of myself, like the rare and precious moments of zazen when I transcend my Self.

I've invested deeply in maintaining my blog, and try to approach it, like my cushion, with sincere intent each evening. It's just that sometimes I write like crap. Probably, most times I write like crap. I may have even written like crap last night, but the product seemed irrelevant. The process of the writing paralleled all that is best about sitting zazen. Like those amazing bike rides that mimic deep meditation. I wish I lived like that all of the time. I think it's how we were originally intended to experience life. My everyday existence pales in comparison. Hard to imagine why the hell we cloak our Aliveness with so many layers of bunk.

I hadn't been on my cushion five minutes last night when loving kindness washed over me. Depositing my anger onto the computer screen left a vast open space for love to find me. Funny how important "creating space within" is. In the aftermath of my writing purge, I entered meditation immediately, already resplendent with emptiness. With no effort, no mantra, no aspiration, a great and gentle sense of peace and well being flooded through me. I sensed, rather than thought, the Great Love that is our origin and our nature. Knew at the cellular level that all sentient beings begin and end with Love. It is our gift, our grace, our essence. Tears welled again. I believe they were tears of gratitude for the reminder that I have all I need within me. I arrived on the planet that way, as we all do. This is the place from which all solutions originate. I need look no further.

Love is the only house big enough for all the pain in the world. It is our salvation and our home. I hope to make it my permanent address.

Gassho,
CycleBuddhaDoc

Zen and the Art of Mowing

"What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life?
The world would split open." - Muriel Rukeyser

Day 169. Before I list all the prerequisite qualifiers to this blog, let me first say that readers may want to skip this post. Just because I need to write something doesn't mean that others have to read it. I am pissed, and angry women aren't highly thought of in our society. It makes both genders squirmy. Men are allowed much wider perimeters when it comes to being mad.

I'm recalling a seminar I attended featuring Harriet Lerner, brilliant author of The Dance of Anger. She led the audience in an experiential exercise before she began to talk about her book. Dr. Lerner asked us to call out all the derogatory names for an angry woman that we could think of. The list covered three columns on her blackboard (this was in the mid-80's). She then asked us to call out derogatory names for an angry man. There was a long pause before someone shouted, "Son-of-a-bitch!" As Lerner wrote the words on the board, she noted mildly, "Interesting. The name isn't derogatory to the man himself. It blames his mother."

The qualifiers: I know that there are mindful, compassionate, considerate, dedicated males who work hard to advocate for women. I know that the sample size I am referencing this evening is relatively small, and I must be careful about to whom I generalize my experiences. I know that in my psychology practice, the women who are married to amazing men do not comprise my clientele; rather, I hear disproportionately about problematic relationships. I know that becoming a "man hater" contributes nothing useful toward gender equality and is a reversed replica of the sexism I loathe. Most importantly, I know (or strongly suspect) that any male who regularly reads this blog, including this post, most likely falls on the Pretty Cool Guy side of the equation. I offer my sincere gratitude to you. Gassho to you all.

Something infuriating and confusing and distressing has been unfolding for me in the past two months. It feels like when I put on my first pair of eye glasses and the green blobs on top of the trees turned out to be leaves. It feels like the threshold at which I became familiar enough with my son's rap music to discern the lyrics. It feels like the moment I grasped the concept of the normal curve in my first statistics class, and could suddenly calculate standard deviations. I'm talking about paradigm shifts. Those moments when things come into focus. Those breakthroughs when a baffling fog suddenly lifts and you view things with sunlit clarity. They never look the same again.

My shift has to do with male-female interactions. It's as though I abruptly became able to observe and experience a detailed subtext underlying the conversation. I've had glimmers of it before, however, now I am aware of a much more unconscious, insidious, and pervasive process. My hunch is that I've slammed headfirst into the patriarchy. Like carbon dioxide emissions, it is everywhere, permeating every facet of my being. There is an implicit, unconscious assumption - often on the part of both sexes - that the male version of reality is the Right one. The correct one. The superior one. The truer one. The best one. Unquestionably. Unequivocally. Irreversibly. It pisses me off. Because it isn't true.

This is a trivial and inadequate example, but it's the one bursting from my fingertips. The grass in my backyard got very high and very thick due to a sequence of events preventing myself or my son from mowing it. Contributing factors included rain at inopportune times and my difficulties with heat. Last week, I noticed a lawn service mowing my next door neighbors' yard. I asked for a card; the guy gave it to me; I phoned him and we arranged a day for him to mow. I then received a polite text saying the lawn was too high for his mowers. He provided a referral. I called that guy. Two days later, he hadn't called back. I asked the first guy for another referral. He gave me one. That guy called me back, but the moment he heard me say, "tall grass" he said he wouldn't be able to do it. He suggested another couple of services. They didn't return my calls.

I realize my difficulty finding someone to mow my lawn could be explained by the cliches regarding the caliber of people that run lawn services. It has also been very hot, it is late in the season, and mowing services are very busy. I get all that. What I don't get is the disproportionate number of women I see out mowing their own lawns. Perhaps all the guys are busy with their lawn businesses, where they are paid to mow.

I am building context for my epiphany this evening. I pulled into my driveway after work, and noticed my partner in the back yard. He had come to mow. He had the weed eater fired up, and was half-heartedly swiping at the jungle. He was clearly chagrined, apparently at my gross negligence and incompetence at yard maintenance. I had not asked him to come and mow. He said with absolute certainty that it would cost "three hundred and fifty dollars" to get someone to mow this yard (it's a fairly standard sized back yard; maybe a little bigger since the house was built in the 1950's). I found it amusing that he set his worth at mowing the lawn at $350; my price was going to be about $50.

I turned and walked into my garage. Put gas and oil into my mower. Raised all four wheels up as high as they would go. Attached the grass catcher. Wheeled the mower into the back yard. With a look of utter disdain, he pronounced, "You can't mow it with that. You'll have to rent a mower." I ignored him. Started the mower. Began to mimic what I watched my dad do with unruly yards four decades ago. Mow a tiny swatch at a time. Overlap, overlap, overlap. Lift the front wheels when the engine started to cut out. Mow a line, then go back over it. Tedious, boring, repetitive, sluggish, monotonous drudgery requiring patience, tenacity, perseverance and steadfastness. Thankless and tiring. Woman's work.

I was in my element. I kept thinking about zazen and how I can continue to sit on my cushion while my entire lower extremities go numb, the Monkeys chatter up a storm, and the minutes pass like leap years. I thought about giving birth to my nine-pound son - naturally - with no drugs, no epidural, because I didn't want my infant arriving in the world exposed to chemicals he didn't have a say about. I thought about the weeks and months I spent with him in the hospital when he was just over a year old. The weeks and months neither brother nor my father ever visited because it was "too hard" for them to see my baby hooked up to all those tubes and wires. I thought about driving by myself over 45 miles of mountain road when my son was 14 - not knowing if he was alive or dead - only that he had been flown off the ski slopes with a head injury and "might" still be at the hospital in Durango before he was flown to Grand Junction, where they had a Trauma One unit. I thought about dodging the wrath of an alcoholic dad. I thought about the dozens of guys willing to sexually exploit me while I lay frozen with trauma triggered from previous sexual abuse. Kind of puts mowing a tall lawn in perspective.

Women are strong. We are the vessels trusted by the universe to contain and sustain precious new life until it can survive outside of the womb. That takes around nine months. The universe assigned seed implantation to the males. That can be accomplished in seconds. Don't tell me a lawn can't be mowed when what you really mean is that it is going to be frickin hard work and you'd rather someone else do it. Don't tell me my methods are wrong simply because I don't do something the way you would. Don't ridicule my way if it takes longer, involves the cooperation and contribution of other women, and is accomplished with grit and determination rather than loud machinery. Don't expect me to buy that your truth is truer. Don't expect me to wait until you figure this out and perceive on your own that something needs to change - that the patriarchy will crumble as, one by one, women shift our paradigm.

I can't yet find my loving kindness on this matter. I keep hearing the words of Jesus on the cross when he exclaimed, "Father! Why hast thou forsaken me?" I write these words while a war wages within: doubting, fighting an urge to apologize and take it all back, fearing the repercussions of being an angry woman. I know this isn't about mowing. Something much more than grass needs to be cut. I'm just trying to find the right blade.

Gassho,
CycleBuddhaDoc

Beige Badlands

Badlands, you gotta live it every day.
Let the broken hearts stand as the price you gotta pay.
We'll keep pushin 'til it's understood
And these Badlands start treating us good. - Bruce Springsteen in "Badlands"

Day 168. The immutable heat is stupefying. I'm living in my own personal Badlands. My brain says, "Move! Do! Act! Create!" My body lies supine, immobile with lassitude.

My preferred version of reality includes fluid, vivacious words bursting from my fingertips the second I sit down and summon the blog screen. I want to tell stories with sentences ending in exclamation points. Curiously, the only sentences flowing from my present stream of consciousness end with . . . .

. . . . Only nothing follows. My practice has gone beige. I sit as usual on my cushion after performing my ritual side stretches and bows. I approach zazen sincerely, and seem to have mastered no aspiration and no expectation. I'm still working on no thought no feeling no perception. Even the last five of my thirty-five minutes is less tortuous. I suppose these increasing signs of detachment are what the whole thing is about, but I feel vaguely troubled. I've never been much good at beige. Ask my family members (the ones who also have the attention spans of gnats) and they'll tell you: I run hot and cold. Magenta and vibrating turquoise. Beige is a welcome mat for anxiety. I tolerate it poorly.

I'm wallowing in the conundrum of Buddhism as a way of Waking Up! and feeling More Alive! while I simultaneously trip up the Middle Path, carefully stepping over the Leaves of Attachment. Perplexing, to say the least. I vacillate between revelations pristine as Swarovski crystal and the blunted, neutral affect of an English headmistress. It's hard to tell what is real anymore. I guess they both are. Traipsing about in Big Mind reminds me of those little balls tumbling around in the cage spun by an old school Bingo caller. You get real excited just before the number is called out, only to find that it's not listed on your card.

I miss my Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind. The novelty of early sitting was challenging and invigorating and stimulating and (novice that I was) full of promise. Blog material washed up on the shores of my consciousness like BP oil balls. Now zazen is comprised of arduous minutes passing like months while my feet go numb and my back aches. It's a lot of Practice and no Big Game. No wonder Americans are so lousy at this. You can put in a LOT of hours with not a payday in sight.

I'm not going to quit. I'm still terribly curious to see how this all turns out. I'll just keep pushing until it's understood, and these Badlands start treating me good.

Gassho,
CycleBuddhaDoc

Do You See What I See?

One must always tell what one sees. Above all, which is more difficult, one must always see what one sees. - Charles Peguy in the Zen Calendar (June 10, 2003).

Day 167. I am filled with sorrow. Two cyclists were killed by cars in Oklahoma City over the weekend. One was a hit and run. I feel so much anger at this backward state that will not build bike lanes or educate motorists about the rights of people on bikes. We write letters and go to city council meetings and have "Rides of Silence" each year to raise awareness over the number of cyclists injured and killed while pedaling their bicycles. Meanwhile, Oklahoma remains in the top ten list of "most unhealthy" states, with Oklahoma City the Number One most unhealthy city in the nation. Yet another statistic to be outraged and embarrassed by. Perhaps some green space and bike lanes would lend themselves to people watching less Fox News and moving their bodies a little more. Yeah. I'm pissed.

I promised myself I would abstain from waxing political on my blog. There are writers blogging away on politics who are much more proficient. I prefer to study and emulate models like Greg Mortenson and the Dali Lama. Obviously, they are not totally apolitical; however, it appears that they keep a needle-sharp focus on achieving acts of loving-kindness in the real world. Politics can be very stymieing if the goal is to actually get something done.

When I pause to think about it, most substantive acts can totally circumvent politics. The human condition defies political affiliation. So much unites us. We need air to breathe and a piece of earth to lie upon. We need enough to eat and drink. We need shelter from the elements. We need meaningful ways to occupy our time. We need preventive care to avoid illness and medical care to treat it. We want our loved ones to be safe. We want our children to survive to adulthood. We want to affiliate - to belong to a community. We want to practice a form of spirituality that is congruent with our hearts' desire. We want to transcend death.

I increasingly feel that I must tell what I see. I see fear. Fear masked as anger and bravado. Fear disguised as righteous indignation and unsubstantiated justification of hate and violence. Unnecessary fear, based on illogical conclusions and inaccurate, incomplete data. The admission of fear has become taboo, while impulsive, angry words and actions are rewarded with press and prestige.

It is mind boggling to watch our culture regress so horrifically. Why is anger and the acts it precipitates held in such high regard? Developmentally, the inappropriate expression of anger is immature and infantile. Most of us have mastered hitting and biting and spitting and saying "No!" and "Mine!" by the age of two. These are not evolved behaviors. They are not difficult or impressive or indicative of wisdom. What happened to kindness, patience, self-control, intellect, and selflessness as traits we esteem? How can we expect to cultivate these attributes in ourselves and our children if they are no longer valued?

It feels daunting to continue to "see what I see." I see my desire to respect and refine characteristics that society no longer values. I see that I must challenge the absurdity that madder is better. I see that modeling an approach of acceptance and kindness is often ridiculed and rejected as weak and ineffectual. I see that sitting on my cushion is necessary but not sufficient for effecting change in my world. It is painful to see so much, especially when all I really want to see is more bike lanes.

Gassho,
CycleBuddhaDoc

Bruce Mode 2

You better listen to me baby:
Talk about a dream, try to make it real.
You wake up in the night, with a fear so real.
You spend your life waiting for a moment that just don't come.
So don't waste your time waiting . . . . Bruce Springsteen in "Badlands"

Day 166. Yes, I'm squirmy at typing that number. I'm also trying (without too much ego) to demonstrate my progress at being unattached to it. This will take more time. It has been difficult to find Zen teaching that literally addresses obsessive-compulsive tendencies. I have to read between the lines. Fortunately, Zen is so obtuse that it lends itself readily to subjective interpretation. When I am a more advanced scholar of Zen I may feel differently.

I am still in Bruce Mode. I had planned to write some personal associations to this section of my favorite Springsteen song. The Beast of Reality, however, has intervened, and I am preparing for a sorrow instead. The song segment is still relevant, however. I just hung up the phone following a long conversation with my son. He sustained a serious hand injury during spring football and has been working with an orthopedic specialist and a hand surgeon to heal it enough for surgery (I know, the irony of "getting better" enough to be cut upon is stark).

This week the hand surgeon broke the news that my son's hand (the left one, mildly dispensable for most of us, but he is left-handed) would not survive another serious blow without the risk of sustaining irreparable damage. The ligaments and tendons were torn off the bone, and shredded to the point that they can't be reattached. If injured again, his finger would have no movement and just atrophy against his hand. My son described it like this: "It's like my finger would be amputated but it would still be there to be in the way." Gifted (and reality-based) child that he is, he was quick to recognize that the chances of playing strongside safety on a D-1 college football team and not taking blows to your hands are calculated at nil to none. Neither of us ever imagined that the body part implicated in a career-ending injury would be his hand.

Springsteen sings, "Talk about a dream, try to make it real . . . You spend your life waiting for a moment that just don't come . . ." This man/child has hoped to play college football since the ripe old age of four, when he insisted that his formal portrait for the year be taken in his Dallas Cowboys jersey holding his Dallas Cowboys helmet. He worked a gazillion times harder to get to play than the scholarship athletes surrounding him. It's looking like that moment of playing in a game for his university just isn't going to come. Sometimes, Reality bites.

I'm thinking about the resiliency workshop I attended on Friday, especially the part where the presenter mentioned the probability that a "resiliency gene" has been discovered. I think we have that gene. Tonight's conversation with my son meandered from denying the injury, to magical thinking, to sorrow, to grief, to spirituality, to gratitude for his brilliant mind and the option of "starring" in academics, to (trust my son to come up with this) the possibility of trying out for his school's soccer team. We talked about our common themes of trusting the Universe and allowing all the feelings that surround major life transitions to wash over and through him. With his typical maturity and uncanny wisdom (he's the oldest soul I know), he told me that his best friend and girlfriend (both of whom play varsity sports at his school) were behind him and totally supportive of him giving up football and that " . . . their love keeps (this) in perspective and is what really matters." I threw my love into the equation, and we concluded that the tragedy was survivable.

I'd love to take credit for my cultivating my son's resiliency, but I suspect he arrived in the world already extraordinarily strong. I will take credit for loving him with every molecule of my being. Together, we'll survive this junction. With Bruce and the Buddha at our beckoning, how could we not?

Gassho,
CycleBuddhaDoc

Bruce Mode

Lights out tonight, trouble in the Heartland.

Got a head on collision, smashing in my guts, man.

I'm caught in a crossfire that I don't understand.

But there's one thing I know for sure Girl:

I don't give a damn for the same old played out scene

Baby I don't give a damn for just the in between,

Honey I want the Heart I want the Soul I want Control right now. - Bruce Springsteen in "Badlands"

Day 165. I rode alone this morning. The EZ Riders, turned out in the blue and yellow, were riding at the Norman Conquest. Eight minutes into the ride, I felt lonely. Felt lonely again at 10 minutes. I pedaled through it, and then missed my first turn to the west. Backtracked a quarter mile and was on my way. Noone else was on the road today - I guess everyone was at the Conquest.

I blogged and blogged and blogged as I rode. I thought broadcast some of my best stuff. Trouble is, I never can remember it once I get off the bike. That's odd, because it sounds utterly unforgettable in my mind. My goal was to ride 40 miles today. It's been a while since I rode that distance alone. Somewhere around mile 10, I eased into a rhythm and began to enjoy myself. I started taking a tally of interesting stimuli. Interesting to me, at least.

Number of dead snakes smushed on the road: I stopped counting at 10 (ewwww). Number of stupid/careless/inconsiderate drivers (especially the car with not one, but two teenage girls talking on their cells phones - I'm hoping not to each other): 4. Number of courteous, thoughtful drivers: All the rest. Temperature at 8:13 on a smoldering Oklahoma July morning: 91 humid degrees. Twitches of hamstring cramps: 4. Number of times I rode uphill too hard and felt like I might puke: 6 (figures). Number of times I thought about the EZ Riders and the fact that I wasn't riding with them: approximately 27. Number of times the Buddha randomly changed a red light to green so that I wouldn't lose my momentum: 3 (very cool!) Number of times I checked my odometer between miles 18 and 20.5 (the predetermined turnaround point): 147. This may be a slight exaggeration, but not by much. It took FOREVER to get to my halfway mark. Number of Peak Experiences: 1 (see below). Number of salt tablets swallowed: 4. Amount of water/Gatorade remaining in my Camelback when I pulled into my driveway: 1.5 ounces. Average speed for the ride: 16.8 (not bad for a solo rider who simultaneously avoided a heat incident). Length of my nap after breakfast: 2.5 hours.

Such are the thoughts of a solo cyclist. I'm certain there was some Monkey Chatter interspersed with calculating these vital statistics, but I chose to ignore it. My peak experience occurred when I reached the 20.25 mile point (the extra quarter mile factored in the half mile I rode out of the way when I missed my turn; if nothing else, cyclists are precise. So much so that when I turned into my driveway my odometer read EXACTLY 40.00 miles. Who needs a Garmin??) I digress, though I may have to change the Peak Experience count to two because it was sublime to reach home at exactly the 40 mile mark! Focus! When I looked down and it was (finally) time to turn around, I found myself at the entrance to a gated community a little west of Will Rogers Airport. Tuscany Something (recognizing that doesn't distinguish it from about 50 other subdivisions on the outskirts of metro OKC. What's the deal with developers' abrupt attraction to Italian themes?)

So there I am, in the shade of lovely landscaping by the Gate of the Gated Community. Safely off the road, some welcome shade, no traffic, exactly halfway through my ride - time for a big drink, dousing of my head, and a couple of salt tabs. Peak Experience! I must confess that I found it vaguely satisfying when one Gated Community Resident, and then another, hit the button on their shiny and sophisticated SUV, swung the enormous, decorative wrought-iron gate open, and drove through, only to see my sweating, slimey, salt-crusted, red-faced self grinning at them while I dripped bodily fluids on the perimeter of their fence-fortified compound. Come to think of it, THAT was the peak experience!

Presently, I feel like my well-being is balanced on a dime, and I am constantly teetering off that tiny coin into the realm of despondency. I've been here before, and I always listened to a lot of Springsteen to help me survive. I call it being in Bruce Mode. It's gotten me through a lot of painful crap. Challenging though it is to switch from group riding to solo, I wouldn't have it any other way. Everyone should spend some time alone. I see things and think things that I miss when I'm in the company of others. It's a great way to find out what's really inside my mind. It's also an opportunity to apply the fruits of my sitting. When painful emotions flicker across my consciousness, I just watch them, honor them, and reassure myself confidently that they will pass. That, or I will be distracted by swerving around the next dead snake.

Here is my final tally: Number of times I arrived home safely after a 40-mile ride today: 1. Number of times I thanked the Buddha for the gift of learning how to live my life: Boundless. Innumerable. Too many to count.

Gassho,
CycleBuddhaDoc

Oxygen Moments

"You have been blessed with a burden, my daughter." - Steve Gruwell to Erin Gruwell (Scott Glen to Hilary Swank) in Freedom Writers (2007).

Day 164. Peak experience! I went to an amazing workshop on resiliency today. It focused on the "Heroic Journey" as a method for teaching clients resiliency. The presenter uses movies to explain the elements of the archetypal heroic journey. She kept recommending the movie "Freedom Writers." I was channel surfing during the commercials while I watched the Tour, and lo! and Behold! Freedom Writers was just starting. Think the universe could have been ever so gently suggesting I watch it? The movie just ended. I watched the whole thing. If zazen has taught me anything, it is to pay attention to the universe.

One of the exercises at the workshop was to think about an "oxygen moment." It was defined as a time when we felt one or more of the following: empowered, competent, confident, peaceful, hopeful, cared for, safe, did our best, or felt scared and faced down the fear successfully. In groups of three, we shared our "oxygen moments," including vivid sensory detail of them. At the time, I spoke about one of my many mountain biking oxygen moments. The ones where I faced a really technical section of riding and survived without bloodshed.

After watching Freedom Writers, a more resounding oxygen moment came to my mind. It happened this week in a session with a client who is very precious to me. We first worked together 12 years ago. She was 17 at the time, the daughter of an extremely wealthy businessman. She had a brilliant mind, keen intellect, and lively brown eyes. Before or since, I had never worked with a client who had endured such profound and ongoing verbal, psychological and physical abuse. Before or since, I have not worked with a client who acted out her abuse in such violent and extreme ways. Against herself. Through a raging eating disorder and horrific acts of self harm. We connected. We worked together a very long time.

My client lives in another state now, where she attends graduate school with the loving husband she met during her undergraduate program. They are back in Oklahoma for about a month to assist his mother, who is undergoing chemotherapy. She called and asked if I "remembered her" and could see her for a few times while they are in the state. It has been about two years since we last saw one another. I said of course, and we scheduled an appointment last week.

My client had grown into a young woman. She and her husband plan to pursue mission work when they complete their studies. After catching me up on the past few years, she requested that we have a few sessions to focus on some anxiety difficulties associated with being in graduate school. She had been diagnosed with a chronic illness a year ago, and also asked to work on some coping skills for dealing with her symptoms. She then brought up the issue of payment, noting her student insurance did not pay for out-of-state services. I asked her to think about an amount that would be manageable for her and her husband, and let me know next week.

We met for a second time this week. After explaining that she does not receive any financial help from her (millionaire) father, she hesitantly said that after speaking with her husband they thought they could afford $25 per session. I said okay, I would set her rate at that for the four or five times she could come before returning to school. Tears welled up in her eyes, and I quietly asked what she was feeling. She said, "Gratitude. I thought I could only see you one time, because that is all we could afford. It means so much to get to see you again."

Tears welled in my eyes as well. I believe in doing pro bono work at my practice, and sometimes err on the side of barely making our monthly overhead. This interaction, however, was about so much more than applying my "principles." It was about a connection. A lasting connection. A relationship forged, literally, in blood, sweat and tears between us. A relationship that had nothing to do with the hundred dollar fee her father paid me at one time. It had to do with a commitment to my client. The fidelity of our relationship. The explicit and implicit promise dating back 12 years that said I would be faithful to our work as long as she was. And sometimes when she wasn't. Sometimes I was the Hope Holder and the Promise Keeper when she couldn't be. Neither of us knew that our connection would span over a decade. We couldn't anticipate that she would find her way back to our work as a young woman struggling to maintain her financial independence. She asked; I answered; we made it happen. We both felt grateful.

I hope that I am blessed with a burden like Erin Gruwell. The burden of caring - passionate caring - about something that matters. A burden that carries the risk of changing and growing and hurting and moving and losing things that are important to me. Like the Buddha. Not to become famous. Not to become rich. To become alive.

Gassho,

CycleBuddhaDoc

Languidly Launched

And all the loveliest
things that there be
Come simply,
so it seems to me. - Edna St. Vincent Millay in the Zen Calendar (September 11, 2003).

Day 163. Head butting on the Tour. Now I've seen everything. Let's just say Mark Renshaw was a little too attached to launching Mark Cavendish. Can't believe he got sent home. Bye, bye Renshaw.

The Lone Pedaler was out on the PBJ this evening (no head butting to speak of). Rather than feeling like I was at death's door, it felt more like I was just standing on the front porch with the knocker raised. Progress. I'm feeling cautiously optimistic. There are no adequate adjectives (or expletives!) to describe the heat. It's difficult to build much strength on the bike when my energy is so consumed with not stroking out. When I saw hitchhiking Monkeys on the side of the road, I sped up. A couple of times I swerved directly at them and exhaled a super big "OM!" as I whizzed on by. That sure kept those pesky primates at bay. Cycling is an excellent form of practice (though the seat is much harder than my sofa cushion). So much transfer from zazen to the saddle. Both are optimal when I stay in my breathing and out of my head. I'm learning that a surprising number of things go better if I don't think. Or speak. Breathing and watching serve me so much better. Try it and see.

I am exceptionally fatigued this week. The good news is that my exhaustion is obviously caused by external demands rather than internal system failure. I will rest at some point. Languor has an interesting effect on zazen. There is never a threat of falling asleep on my cushion; my prelude to unconsciousness is historically prolonged. Last night, however, my weariness contributed to a new experience on the cushion. During the few occasions when I have entered a deep state of meditation, it felt like a gradual descent into the quiet emptiness. More like going down a ramp than stepping into a void. No so last night. It was as though a switch was flipped between Monkey Mind and Nothingness. I just dropped into the abyss. I noticed on an inhale that my mind was wandering, and on my exhale gently guided my attention back to the space behind my mudra. Instantly: deep meditation. Not deep enough for my mind and body to fall away, but very quiet indeed.

I didn't track time, and forgot to hate the last five minutes. A foot was thoroughly numb, so I knew I'd done my time. So many astonishing things to learn when I get my butt on my cushion. Take that, you Menacing Monkeys!

Gassho,
CycleBuddhaDoc

Better than None

"It takes a damn good man to be better than none." - Lee Byrd and Yvonne Kranz in the For Women Who Do Too Much Calendar (October 20, 1997).

Day 162. Are we there yet? Is it over yet? Can I quit can I stop am I done?

This blog has been on my mind for weeks. I've been avoiding it because it is complex and enigmatic. I don't want to take it on. But the issue has appeared, in one way or another, amidst about 90% of my case load at work. When the universe is screaming something at that decibel level, it is hard to ignore. I haven't yet figured out what it has to do with Buddhism, though I'm sure the solution lurks at the intersection of acceptance and non-attachment. That is where all solutions lie.

Couples around me are disintegrating like coffee grounds in a compost pile. Friends, friends of friends, clients, clients' friends, and numerous others who are no more than one degree of separation from me are splitting up. Not to mention my own relationship conundrum. It appears that my generation is experiencing a colossal collision of gender roles. Couples a generation older have foreclosed on traditional, stereotypical roles with firm parameters and explicit expectations. Women cook and clean and arrange and organize and remember and celebrate and nurture and care for and attend and participate and commemorate and accommodate. Men sit in their chairs and criticize the way the women do things, while swearing they can't live without them. The arrangement is outdated and unbalanced, but at least everyone knows the rules.

Couples a generation (or two) younger are coming of age with exposure to exponentially increased challenges to traditional gender roles. They watch tampon commercials together, casually say "condom" in any setting, purchase baby slings with straps long enough for Dad, and earn in an economy where the wage differential has gone from women making 72 cents on the male dollar to 76 cents (if that ain't an optimistic indicator, I don't know what is! And it's only 2010 A.D.) Men go to supermarkets alone. Girls take vacations together. Forty years ago, Gloria Steinem told us (in between setting her bras afire) that when women achieve economic independence, men will change. Staying with your man because you want to rather than have to is a drastically different scenario. Opens up a hell of a lot of options.

My generation is caught in the crossfire. We watch our dads sit in their chairs and complain while our mothers scurry around them (and complain). Meanwhile, we listen to Bionce sing "You should have put a ring on it" and watch women in professional sports leagues and judge's robes. Through conversations with countless women who do therapy with countless other women, I'm identifying some emerging truths. The rules are shifting. We aren't willing to turn into our mothers. Our mates desperately cling to the old rules. Can we blame them? Left unchallenged, they are the ones that would get to sit in their chairs and continue to have their truths be truer, their methods be righter, their opinions be weightier, their narcissism be legitimate, their entitlement be deserved, the wounds they inflict be justified. Why would they want to change? For centuries, they have been the benefactors of the system. The burden of change has always been left to the wronged. White people didn't voluntarily get up to offer Rosa Parks a seat.

I teach my clients "manspeak," or, as I like to call it "manguage." It goes something like this: "Honey, I work outside the home the same number of hours you do, and I bring home 52% of our household income. Can you please explain to me, in logical terms, the rationale for your expectation that I alone also spend two to three hours per night on household tasks?" A brilliant client with whom I've worked for several years blew me away with a response she gave her verbally abusive and explosive husband over the weekend. She called him back after he hung up on her and said, in a neutral and kind tone, "Please don't hang up on me. You think you are right all of the time. Sometimes you are not. Let's talk about this more when I get home. Good-bye."

My partner is muddled by my increasing unwillingness to adhere to traditional female roles, particularly the one dictating that I passively accept his every utterance as Truth. He has no precedent for a man and woman discussing things like mutual grownups speaking from a level playing field. It is much more familiar if the woman wilts in a puddle of tears so that he can comfort her while nestling smugly in his conviction that she is irrational and emotional and he is right. It bewilders and agitates him because, at heart, he is a good and logical man. He squirms when he cannot produce logical answers to questions I pose such as, "How can you be more of an expert on my feeling states and observations than I am?" He doesn't like it when I point out how he responds to a comment about the noise our tandem derailleur makes when it is issued by a male teammate, while ignoring the exact same observation from me two minutes earlier. He has no response when we are at a social function and I ask him to count how many times my male colleagues are addressed as "Dr. so-and-so" while me and my female business partners, having earned the title of "Dr." in the exact same field, are addressed by our first names (or worse). Incidentally, the count is inevitably in the double digits. There is a high likelihood I will remain single. Men my age who reside in Oklahoma don't like it when I point out these truths.

I will not apologize for seeing and speaking and writing about things happening before my very eyes. I am not a man hater. I am not a raging feminist. I believe in romantic love and the beauty of mates carving out a union that celebrates and benefits them both. Loving kindness has and always will be the Way. I meditate on non-attachment every day. And there are some aspects of present Reality that I am not willing to passively accept. Because I believe they are wrong.

Gassho,
CycleBuddhaDoc

Hitchhiking Monkeys

I don't know. I don't care. And it doesn't make any difference. - Jack Kerouac in the Zen Calendar (June 11, 2004).

Day 161. I know. The quote I chose isn't exactly a warm fuzzy prelude. I was saving it for some extraordinarily profound writing because it is one of my favorites. Instead, I'm just sticking it in here tonight because it applies. There is a good chance we will see it again before the year is up. I wish I was credited with saying it, rather than Mr. Kerouac. It's the ultimate Zen pronouncement.

It was 98 today - in degrees and percent humidity. The weather from hell. I realize it is conducive to growing rain forests; however, it is beyond tolerable weather for riding bikes. At least, when you're prone to that minimally interruptive condition called heat stroke. So I aired up the tires on Black Beauty (the creaking old bike mounted on my trainer), dusted off my Train Right DVD's, reconnected my VCR (with only one call to my son - a mini Peak Experience), cranked the ceiling fan up and the thermostat down, and climbed on. It bit. Hard.

Cranking the pedals around on Black Beauty is never the pristine experience of pedaling the PBJ (my gorgeous, pink, Giant T-Mobile, a.k.a. the Pink Bike of Julie). I was prepared for that; ready to sacrifice some PBJ time for air conditioning and no helmet. I was totally unprepared for the riotous group of primates that hitched along for my ride. Rude, insolent, offensive Monkeys. Busy little buggers that I couldn't shake off.

Riding a trainer affords the opportunity to focus on specifics that evade my awareness when I am on the road because: a) I can't see the numbers on my computer through my sunglasses, and b) even if I could see my computer, taking my eyes off the roads in Oklahoma for even a split second carries a high risk of disappearing into a pothole, running over a barking dog, or failing to swerve when an impertinent driver passes too closely. I haven't been on my trainer for several months, so I was oblivious to ongoing data about my performance. Thanks to the fancy and pricey Garmin computer, the tandem captain had up-to-the-nanosecond data on our tandem rides. After using the Garmin numbers a time or two as sarcastic fodder for the blog, I lost interest. Talk about ignorance being bliss.

As I pedaled Black Beauty, creating a steady stream of quantifiable information on my little odometer screen, the Monkeys went wild. They screeched, they howled, they bellowed. "You're slow! You're weak! Your cadence is barely 100 where it used to be over 110! THAT's the gear you're pedaling in the big ring?! Your average isn't even 16 mph; hell, you used to be over 18! You're slowing down to 13 mph in between intervals - you might as well have training wheels. You've lost fitness; your cardio strength is shot; your legs hurt and they're barely moving. No WONDER you can't ride with the team! Of COURSE they drop you in a heartbeat. You'll never ride outside of your living room again." Rotten primates. Blast them all to hell.

As though that barrage of ridicule and insult wasn't enough, the Monkeys spun out on anger and resentment regarding my months on the tandem. I was stunned by their bitter vehemence. They focused on the differences in "transfer" to the single bike between my captain and I. Since he has control over all executive functions on the bike, he determines our cadence and selects the gears. He is a "masher" i.e. a muscular guy that grinds big gears that are incredibly difficult to push. My quads were rivaling Mary Lou Retton's as the Spring wore on. In contrast, when I can control my own gears, I am a "spinner" - preferring to pedal smaller, easier to pedal gears. This exerts less strain on the leg muscles, and builds greater aerobic conditioning.

The problem arises when we get on our single bikes: he can continue to mash the big gears, which, even in the absence of a high heart rate, enables him to ride fast and keep up with our teammates. I, on the other hand, cannot pedal those gears alone on my bike; I don't have the leg strength. I need to pedal an easier gear at a faster cadence. This means my heart needs to beat really fast. When I haven't been riding in those heart rate ranges for many months, I don't have the cardiovascular endurance to keep up. So I get dropped.

After sitting zazen for almost six months, I was under the illusion that I had mastered Loving Kindness. Not so. Not if you listen to the Monkeys. They generated stinging, hostile, vicious attacks on my captain. Attributed malicious intent where I am certain there is none. Slung imaginary competitive, harsh, retaliatory comments his way. I was dismayed at my inability to curb the wrath. Wanted to do better. Wanted to BE better. Failed. It was like I was heaving Monkey Chow their way. Bearing bananas to fuel their tirade. It was humbling and humiliating.

I can tell you that hitchhiking Monkeys are a force to be reckoned with. They weighed me down, hindered my progress, rained on my parade. It was one miserable ride. I have so much sitting to do. Remember this: Hitchhiking Monkeys May be Escaped Primates. They are dangerous and unpredictable. When you pass them on the side of the road, don't slow down. Your journey is best completed without them.

Gassho,
CycleBuddhaDoc

Teeny Piles of "Keep"

If we don't turn around, we just may get where we're going. - American Indian Saying in the Zen Calendar (April 22, 2004).

Day 160. I'm a lot less disturbed by . . . uh . . . the number that comes after five. If I keep sitting, perhaps all my neuroses and obsessive rituals will dissipate. Uh, huh - right - and any day now Oklahoma will become a blue state. Dream on.

This evening I was sorting through yet another orifice in my home, creating enormous "give away" piles and a teeny "keep" pile. Non-attachment is the best organizing method since feng shui. I'm considering renting out my emerging closet, cabinet, and drawer space to assist with my son's bursar account. The only thing increasing faster than money owed to his university is membership in the Tea Party. They are both exceedingly frightening phenomenon.

My donation frenzy triggered a memory from over 20 years ago. I was staying with my friend David in California one summer, and we went to visit a couple who had recently moved to a small beach house. I recall them being slightly older than us, which would put them at the ripe old age of early 30-something. I was both intrigued and appalled by their house. It contained almost nothing. They had a few pieces of mission style furniture, a futon in the bedroom, and a couple of chairs in the kitchen. The walls were white; the floors were wood, unadorned with rugs; the light and plumbing fixtures minimalist and stark. A couple of plants and a clear cylinder filled with seashells were the living room's only ornaments. A few plates, bowls and cups sat in the kitchen cupboards, which had no doors. Six wine glasses were suspended from a homemade rack near the sink. Two cream colored towels hung from hooks in the bathroom, where the only visible products were one bottle of shampoo and a box of baking soda. Inwardly, I wondered if their previous home had burned to the ground and/or what religious cult they belonged to.

Leading us into the living room, our host and hostess poured white wine for David and I. They motioned for us to sit on the wispy sofa while they plunked onto the floor. With barely concealed pride, they asked what we thought of their new house. David, recovering first from the awkward pause (and confirming every stereotype we hold about gay men living in California), said brightly, "It's really airy and spacious." Sensing our discomfort, the couple laughed heartily and offered a memorable explanation.

They spoke at length about the huge house they had purchased in L.A. county and the ensuing enslavement that accompanied home ownership. With humor and perspective, they lamented for almost an hour over the nightmarish frenzy of home improvement they embarked upon. For over two years they were captives of their "dream house" - caught up in a senseless whirlwind of the 1980's version of flaunting their competitive incomes through lavish and excessive home decor.

They expected to be rewarded for their effort and expenditure. They had been promised contentment, gratification, admiration and (hopefully!) jovial jealousy from their yuppy peers. Instead, they accrued mountains of debt, exhaustion and burnout from maintaining their palace and premises. Contentment was marred by ceaseless comparison of their home to the houses of their similarly enslaved friends. Someone inevitably had one of what they had -- only newer and bigger, louder and shinier. Nobody had time to pay a visit and offer admiration; they all worked 80-hour weeks to keep up the mortgage payment. The pool was never swum in; the hot tub cover remained solidly snapped shut; nary a drink was served from the granite-topped wet bar.

These friends of David's were quick learners. After three years of "playing house" - 80's style - they sold everything and moved to the 750 square foot cottage near the beach. With utter conviction, they informed us that they adored their simple, sparsely furnished abode. Cleaning it consisted of sweeping every couple of weeks and swiping up some - you guessed it - baking soda off of counters and bath tile. They worked short days, electing to spend their time collecting shells, sharing wine with like-minded, emancipated friends, and having frequent and highly gratifying sex with all the energy they no longer expended on home improvement.

Back then, I was skeptical about their home interior. I found it understimulating, and the bareness made me anxious. Now, I know they were on to something. I think they were incredibly enlightened, achieving a spectacular revelation at an impressively premature age. They concluded that "stuff" was burdensome and shedding it was liberating. It's taken me 25 additional years, but I've arrived at the same revelation.

I'm discovering I have much more to shed than material possessions. But I'm not turning around. And I just may get where I'm going.

Gassho,
CycleBuddhaDoc

The Sea of Life

Life is like stepping onto a boat that is about to sail out to sea and sink. - Shunryu Suzuki in the Zen Calendar (Septembre 5, 2002).

Day 159. I rode 30 miles alone today. I am aghast and dumbfounded at how terrible I feel physically. My legs felt like someone stuck a straw in my thighs, sucked out all the bone marrow, and poured in molten steel. Most of the ride reminded me of those interminable minutes at the end of zazen. Those hell minutes of meditation are teaching me something though. Lessons applicable to the bike. On every incline, through every diabolical headwind and crosswind, as the sweat poured down until my socks were squishy, I just kept the cranks turning. I didn't have thought about it one way or another. The essential thing was to pedal. Everything else got relegated to nonessential. Makes me feel a bit invincible.

I always thought the Nike slogan "Just Do It" was way over simplified and disrespectful of the mysterious unconscious dynamics underlying our choices and behavior. Now I'm not so sure. I guess my unconscious disappeared right around the time I mastered emptiness and nothingness. Reality doesn't appear to give a flying flip about my unconscious. Great. Yet another tectonic plate shift in the infrastructure of my being.

At some point in the past 158 days zazen became permanent in my life. The Monkeys still chatter, my back, knees, ankles and wrists alternate bouts of numbness, the cushion sags, a thousand distracting things clamor for my attention, I am a social outcast because, like Cinderella, I prematurely halt all evening activity to allow for sitting and blogging - and still I sit. I am cringing while I write this, but I Just Do It. It is amazing what one can accomplish once the distinction between real and unreal becomes apparent. The trick lies in not mistaking all that roaring hubbub between one's ears as real, much less relevant.

Tonight's quote floated to the surface of my pile in the perfectly serendipitous way that meaning has of seeping into my existence. I probably wouldn't step onto a boat it I knew ahead of time that it was destined to sink into the depths of the sea. Yet here I am, tucked into the hull of my sitting practice, sailing breezily upon the sea of enlightenment. Like most novice sailors, I've underestimated the treacherousness of my crossing. My life, my love, my cycling, my future, my dreams, priorities and goals, my perception -- all are churning like flotsam in a tsunami. Zazen is my only anchor. More than I bargained for. Much, much more.

The bizarre thing is that, most of the time, the dramatic flux is accompanied by miraculously little emotion. I feel detached; serene, calm and content. Paradoxically, memory murmurs of painful and significant life events are stirring. My hunch is that, in the service of healing, I am revisiting important touchstones in my life from this emerging perspective and wisdom. Like a second chance to sort through them - this time with clarity and compassion rather than terror and shame. Sounds like a lot of work. Makes me wonder about the thousands of dollars I spent on analysis. Especially since sitting is free.

Natalie Goldberg tells me to write with "original thought" about very specific experiences. This terrifies me. It is so natural to escape into glittering generalities. There is nothing glittery about growing up in an alcoholic home, embarking upon a series of bad choices in men that rivals M*A*S*H in longevity, and raising my son - the one with a proclivity for ICU stays - alone. Yet another zazen-induced paradox: it feels necessary to revisit my past in order to be able to dwell fully in the present. Must I make everything so difficult? I'm a shrink; it's what we do.

Let me get this straight. I've sailed out to sea only to sink into its depths. Puzzling. But I'm damned curious to see what lies on the ocean floor.

Gassho,
CycleBuddhaDoc

The Wealth of Sanity

"I used to assume that the direction of 'progress' was somehow inevitable, not to be questioned . . . I passively accepted a new road through the middle of the park, a steel-and-glass bank where a 200-year-old church had stood . . . and the fact that life seemed to get harder and faster with each day. I do not anymore. In Ladakh I have learned that there is more than one path into the future and I have had the privilege to witness another, saner, way of life - a pattern of existence based on the coevolution between human beings and the earth. . . I have seen that community and a close relationship with the land can enrich human life beyond all comparison with material wealth or technological sophistication. I have learned that another way is possible." - Helena Norberg-Hodge in Ancient Futures, quoted in Three Cups of Tea by Greg Mortenson and David Oliver Relin.

Day 158. I rode my bike for the first time in 10 days. I KNOW I am not the only cyclist to imagine Phil Liggett and Paul Sherwin announcing my performance at the Tour de France as I pedal along. I am, however, probably the only one who would admit it. According to Phil and Paul's commentary in my head, I won today's stage. In the mountains. I have a very active fantasy life.

I am studying Three Cups of Tea as if I will take comprehensive exams on it. I have referred to the map of Pakistan and Afghanistan in the front of the book so many times that I am considering becoming a tour guide in the region (right after I purchase my Land Cruiser). It is an amazing read for so many reasons. The characters become people you would recognize at a bus stop. Greg Mortenson's clarity and certainty that the way to end terrorism is through education, especially among girls, makes the dollars spent on bombs as absurd as the gallons of oil mucking up the Gulf. The masses don't consider root causes. The consideration and contemplation required to understand the unavoidable complexity of human behavior takes time and patience - neither of which are in abundant supply in Western culture. So we keep reflexively firing bombs and missiles - literally and metaphorically - at anything we fear and misunderstand. At the governmental level, learning from history appears to happen about as fast as me pursuing enlightenment.

The quote from Helena Norberg-Hodge resonated like a high voltage electric shock. There are so many occasions when I feel like I have been severed from my tribe because I don't want to own things, and I drive an old car, live in a small house, and avoid electronic means of connecting (present endeavor excepted). Frequently, I feel like a failure to my gender because I hate being "worked" on, resulting in unpainted nails, rarely styled hair, minimal makeup and clothes from the 80's. I don't watch much TV, miss just about every movie Hollywood touts, and my IPOD has less than 200 songs on it.

I like looking at the stars and the smell of dirt. I like dwelling in time that is not measured by a clock. I can stare at the flames in a fire pit all night long. I like reading books that I hold in my hand. I like the sound of tree frogs and crickets and locusts. I like laying on the floor with Ruby, staring into her golden eyes and scratching her belly until we're in a trance. I like conversations with contented people, especially when they teach me things. I like empty drawers and closet space and broad expanses of natural wood flooring. I like surfaces of polished furniture with nothing on them.

It has been fascinating to watch my appetite change as I continue to regularly sit. The longer I sit, the more I want to eat rice and drink tea. I find myself increasingly desiring foods consisting of one ingredient. Nuts, seeds, raisins, oatmeal. Vegetables dipped in humus. Pieces of fruit and a glass of water. Greek yogurt. Cooked beans, eggs and quinoa. Dietitians throughout the land are declaring this to be the healthy and preferred way we should eat. That has nothing to do with my choices; in fact, historically I have always rebelled at eating the "right" way because it irrationally felt like I was submitting to authority. Until now, I have been barely conscious of the gradual changes in what I choose to eat. The echoes of zazen are mysterious and far reaching. I am subtly gravitating toward the primitive and basic. Returning to the earth. Instinctively, I am selecting simplicity over complexity, primal over cerebral, ancient over modern. Simultaneously, I feel happy. Solid. Clear.

I know my tribe is out there. Maybe my blog will reconnect me, and I will chuckle at the irony of technology assisting me with finding my way precisely as I write about shunning it. If this is my path into the future, it feels saner and truer, like the culture Norberg-Hodge describes. Co-existing closely with the earth and my clan feels like an inevitable consequence of my zazen practice. I've never striven for material wealth. Now I know why. There are riches that far surpass it.

Gassho,
CycleBuddhaDoc