The View from Here

In Memoriam

2011-12-13T18:24:00.000-08:00

Suzee Cameron was my friend long ago and far away, when we were not 60 something old ladies, but topless little girls, three something, sitting spraddled in the hot beach sand at the edge of the Pacific in our underwear, vigorously stirring sand soup and shaping sand castles and then going to swing on the tall beach swings of the Hermosa Beach Strand, pumping our short legs in earnest effort, higher and higher and higher, then leaning entirely upside down to feel our blonde hair tickle across the sand as we swung through the arc. As seven and eight year olds, we explored tide pools together in front of Topanga Canyon, naming the baby octopi we captured, poking sea anemones and screaming as they sucked our fingers in with their retreat. We slept all in a tangle with her sisters in a big bed full of sand and little girls as the hum of adult conversations and laughter by the fire in the main room faded from our consciousness.

The Camerons and the Hamptons were comrades in adventure in those days, living in shabby beach apartments, or in the Cameron’s case, even camping out on the top of Mt Tamalpais. I remember living richly with few dollars. I remember classical music playing at top volume, raucous volleyball games, exploring in the mountains, and for us children, a world made vivid, magical, smelling of salt and beer and suntan oil. So very full of possibilities.

There is a long break in my memory. The Camerons went away, and came back. And then I remember Suzee, briefly, as an awakened butterfly, a tall slender thirteen year old emerging from the dark dreams of encephalitis coma and discovering she had become a truly beautiful young woman. Dark haired. Laughing with delight at her new self. We visited. We parted to our now different countries. And for many many years I did not see Suzee again, or very rarely.

I caught glimpses of her life sometimes as she passed by where I was living, or I managed a short trip to Canada. From her middle years, my mind holds images of Suzee as a pregnant traveling hippie, a frantic novice real estate agent, a happy young wife with Peter sitting in a sidewalk café before a jazz concert, a warm-hearted house mother to foreign students, and friend to a circle of women, and finally a powerful career woman, thriving on coffee and adrenalin and teleconferencing as she organized for the Neil Squire Foundation. But other people know those parts of her life far better than I.

I can’t say we were close friends in those years. Indeed we only barely knew the outlines of each other’s lives. And yet, for two days, since receiving the news of her death, I have had to fight tears all day long, submerged in tsunamis of grief and trying to understand how this astonishing woman with her tangled wondrous life came to mean so much to me, far more than I understood.

I did correspond with her in her forties and see more of her in her late fifties. She wrote from solitary campsites in the Canadian wilderness and visited several times to California, sitting on my porch in her white shorts and lace T, smoking her stogies and looking thoughtfully out to sea. Gradually, staying a few days at a time, she filled in some of the rest of her story. I wont tell it all again here. But only try to understand what there was in it that made her so extraordinary, and now, so deeply missed.

Suzee was not always easy. She was strong willed, sure of herself sometimes to a fault, and I often found myself pulling back from her certainties about a spiritual path or an approach to health or finances, too cautious for such exotic experiments. She filled a gallon jug with water on one visit and pronounced it innately pure from the secret ingredient she had added. I was to keep filling new ones from it. She generously urged a low acid diet I was to follow, avocado shakes leading the way. She explained that nearly all that ails a person could be cured with a solution of silver – until I looked up the negative side effects of this on the Internet. She passionately supported causes that left me skeptical or bewildered.

And yet when she arrived it was very much like the sun coming out. Suzee had a presence of joy, of boundless generosity that overcame all doubts in her relationships. She did not enter a room, as her mother writes, she exploded into it. She filled it with radiant charisma, and she did this in the face of challenges that would have defeated a lesser person a hundred times over. She suffered terribly the loss of her beloved son, and yet came to my door still smiling, determined to break the hold that alcohol had on her in a retreat in Arizona. Months later, on her way home, life slammed her down again and she broke her pelvis and much else in an automobile accident on an icy road in the Canadian winter. And yet again she came south with that smile still there. Still wonderful in its power. Her battered body not even limping. I believe Suzee was as courageous in her life as any champion on any battlefield. Fierce and kind and bold in all she did. Generous to all she met. And she had something else that touched me. In fact I think that is the quality that has left me with this grief more than any other. Suzee was free. Half her spirit belonged always to the forest and the sea. Half gave itself passionately and generously, and without reserve or caution, to everything and everyone she came to love. She never succumbed somehow to the velvet traps society sets to capture us, to direct our labor to its purposes. It is determined to name us, define us, number us, bind us with caution and the hope of small salaries doled out each month. Suzee chose a life outside society’s safe walls. In this way she embodied a person part of me yearns still to be.

Suzee, like her father before her, was a free spirit in the truest sense of the word. When she came to visit, she did not save for months first and set out with an itinerary listing hotel reservations in hand. She just came. Living light. Traveling in a trusty ancient car, sleeping in public campgrounds with the least gear possible. She trusted each new day. When she was broke, she would exchange labor for a living. When she was alone, she opened her heart warmly to each new person she met, and made new friends, loved new lovers, tried new roads. Rich or poor, she had style, and elegance. She was self-educated, a poet and a teacher. She was a spiritual wise woman, and she was an ardent mother. She never retreated in fear or found a comfortable home in depression, for all that life threw at her. She was just astonishingly vital and bold. Indeed, when the news of her death came, it truly seemed to me as if a law of nature itself had somehow been violated. How could such a dynamic person ever leave us?

And yet she has, and I and all who loved her so deeply must live with that. We hope there is a heaven. She surely earned it. As a Buddhist, I hope she goes on to another life, as radiant as this one, and more at peace. My father’s loss six years ago taught me one sure thing we can hold to. What such a rare human being leaves behind is the changes they have made in the people they loved, the inspiration they gave us, the lessons they taught, the sweet memories we made together. Those are not gone. And holding those gifts close, we go on.

Travel well old friend. You will be remembered long upon this earth.

Cesca

Twelve Links

2011-07-24T01:12:00.000-07:00

Out of the dark

we come circling,

blind and reaching

the monkey mind, waking.

There in the dark, a light,

slick wet

and the potter’s wheel spinning,

black river flowing, and we reach,

and find we have hands

look, and find we have eyes,

stand within a house with six windows

and see a world out there,

birdsong and zephyr

lovers embracing,

and we cannot stay quiet,

with spring in the air.

We run to meet it.

We hope we love we wrap

ourselves in sunlight and

too late learn shadows

for we are caught now, devoted to tomorrow and tomorrow and…

we can have it,

so near, just there, beyond, soon,

try again, drink life dry, hurl the bottle, tear away the fruit,

fight for it!

There is no stopping now.

Now we must come again.

A womb will carry us back

to be born in blood and yearning,

and then we are here,

existence required,

aging with each breath,

death stamped on our passports,

and dread dark at every exit.

**The Twelve Links of Dependent Origination and their associated imagery on thangkas depicting the Buddhist Wheel of Life.

1. Ignorance – a blind person

2. Volitional formation (impulse due to past karma) – a potter making pots

3. Consciousness – monkey leaping

4. Name and form – body and mind come together in individual existence – people in a boat

5. Faculties and objects - the sense organs and their objects – a house with six windows

6. Contact – an embracing couple

7. Sensations, pleasurable and painful leading to desire and aversion – an arrow piercing an eye

8. Craving or desire – a man drinking beer, surrounded by bottles

9. Clinging or grasping to self and to pleasures and to a womb leading to rebirth – monkey or person reaching for a fruit

10. Becoming – forming the next life – a pregnant woman or a couple making love

11. Birth – a woman in childbirth

12. Old age and death

Dedicated to those who died yesterday in Norway, and all those who now

live with the pain of it.

Remembering David Crockett Stuart

2011-03-01T10:03:00.001-08:00

I am getting to that time of life where it feels appropriate to look back – way back – and finally start reading those old family archives my father left behind. And doing so, a little each night, I am truly sorry I did not do so while he was alive. What talks we could have had! But one story at least I will share with you dear readers, for now. You might find it thought-provoking, as I have.

My father had two powerhouse grandfathers, patriarchs who survived long lives deeply entangled with some of the most dramatic historical events of their times. One of them, his mother’s father, was named David Crockett Stuart (holding my father in the photo at left) – himself descended several generations before from a dramatic character we know less about, a Scotch-Irish man who came as a youth to serve in the British army in the Revolutionary War as a drummer boy and decided to stay in America when the defeated troops were being reloaded on transports back to Europe – or so the story goes.

I am a little cautious about those oral stories now. Davy Crockett, for example, I had always heard was a sharpshooter from Alabama for all four years of the Civil War. I was always faintly horrified by this distant man – what would the soul of a man be like after spending four years sneaking up on unsuspecting young men shaving or doing their laundry and shooting them from ambush? Sounded much more like serial murder than noble service. I was also dismayed by the news that his direct commanding officer was Nathan Bedford Forrest, infamous founder of the KKK after the war. Bad enough for my own ancestor to spend years defending states’ right to have slaves. Also, since he enlisted at 18 in the Alabama outback, I assumed he was barely educated.

What a shock to read his memoir of the war then and discover a wonderful natural narrative writer at work. He wrote detailed accounts of running battles and capture, coming home, enduring innumerable deaths of friends and family members, and going out again to stand with the last embattled few in a lost war. He did indeed enlist at 18 but he came, I discovered, from a mountain family who disdained slave holders as immoral men who were probably bound for hell. And he actually wrote a line or two to put forth his own observation that owning slaves seemed to corrupt otherwise good men. Interesting indeed – and mystifying - for the man actually did spend all four years, from the first week of the war, fighting ferociously to defend their interests. For himself, he offers only an offhanded, and almost tongue in cheek explanation for his enlistment – that a firebrand preacher came to their hamlet a few days after the start and proclaimed in a brimstone speech that if they didn’t all sign up immediately, the Yankees would start arriving almost at once to rape their sisters and mothers. Clearly not something the mature man took seriously. But why then?

I was also fascinated to discover that he had not, after all, been a sharp shooter. He was a rebel cavalryman from start to finish, who loved his horse as a best friend and was overjoyed to meet up with it again near the end of the war after being captured and incarcerated in Chicago. He barely lived through that experience, becoming so emaciated from dysentery that he could no longer walk without aid on the day the opportunity to be exchanged in an amnesty came. So he hoarded the bread he received that week and offered it to a newer, stronger prisoner for the right to hold onto the man’s shoulders to get into the train south, knowing he would die if he did not. (Odd indeed to take in the thought that if he had not been strong enough to hold onto the man’s shoulder’s and walk, I would not be here to write this.)

He did much later name one of his sons Forrest, presumably after his commanding officer, yet his descriptions of Nathan Bedford Forrest depict an officer with an absolutely over the top level of aggressiveness, a powerful leader who charged into every battle, to be sure, but at great cost to his men. He ran his cavalry day after day, month after month, until they staggered with exhaustion. He also left my great grandfather behind to be captured when one of his injudicious decisions left them cut off. He did not finish the war under this commander, nor take any part in his activities after the war, thank God.

Instead he converted – tentatively - to Mormonism and headed northwest to join the wave of settlers populating Idaho after the battles with the plains indians. But that is a story I will expore in another blog.

Sea shadows

2011-02-19T00:36:00.001-08:00

A moment of grace yesterday. When seagulls came to eat the bread I had thrown on the roof across the way. A large black shadow ricocheted across the kitchen, rippling over the sunny table, flicking stove, sink, floor, like a leaf tumbled in a hurricane, barely seen before it is gone. Another and then another. The kitten, Moon, leaped onto the sill, head outside, transfixed by their proximity, for the birds were swooping on bread only 15 feet from his nose, their bodies larger than his. They came in wary, swift, circling in arcs that covered my whole block, coming close, and feinting away, and rising again, taking in kitten, windows, trees, unknowns everywhere, and the bread, the beckoning bread, again and again. The little bright cat quivered in every muscle, his gold eyes luminous with wonder, and the shadows of sea birds shafted through my kitchen.

A Christmas time look back

2011-01-06T23:25:00.000-08:00

Bright Christmas and New Years rolling around the year again, and dear friends and family are sending beautiful cards, and fascinating newsletters full of family accomplishments. I realized I should bestir my lazy self and actually come up with something more communicative than a Jacquie Lawson e card or a cyber wave on Facebook. Friendship, I am learning, even familial friendship, needs real news to stay glossy.

So, Cesca’s year. Not quite so entertaining as those of you with large families and/or jet set lifestyles, and not even a kidnapping by good-looking pirates to report, but it was a pivotal year for me nonetheless. Last spring was my last semester of full time teaching. I started off each day, well four days, prying myself out of bed and setting off to a class of charming young to middle age mothers who studied English at Starlight elementary school in a rough but serviceable portable classroom as their children recited their ABC’s nearby. I am not a person who rises early with great enthusiasm, but it was a good way to start each day. We studied grammar and life skills vocabulary, to be sure, but we also shared lives, danced giggling and shrieking each day to 15 minutes of Zumba, watched Supernanny and discussed child raising tips, celebrated baby showers with such intriguing customs as competing to estimate the mother to be’s girth in toilet paper squares and generally became close enough friends that parting in June was truly difficult. My afternoons were a different kind of party in which I pulled out the keys to a different kingdom – I taught computer skills to seniors, and digital photography to those ready to step even further into our brave new cyber world. And wondered that anyone was actually paying me to have so much fun. Evenings, two evenings anyway, I was off to my office at Cabrillo College to prepare for a 3 hour ESL essay writing class. A little more like work, with piles of notebooks to evaluate on the weekends, but also, never dull or hard to do. Teaching has been a good path for me.

Nonetheless, I had a secret fantasy blooming inside all semester, as rosy a thought as any secret love affair. Retirement! I found myself grinning ear to ear whenever I tried to imagine it – even while swimming laps in the neighborhood pool. Smiling into the unfocused blue under water, I was adding up monthly income sources, imagining travel and writing and above all FREEDOM from the constant interruption of daily obligations as I stroked my way to the end of another lap.
And so the day came. The last spring grade was filed, the last application form sent away. And the first large retirement check sat fatly in my bank account – well large by my standards. And positively exhilarating to think they planned to keep sending them each month, whether I had worked or not.
And bless them, they have continued, and I affirm to the world that retirement – even semi-retirement – is entirely NOT over-rated. My new life requires only 3 half days of work and features four day weekends and a monthly income that may at last achieve middle class standing –though my class assignments are more tenuous now that I am low woman on the seniority totem pole at both schools. Yet so far so good. And now with Winter holidays here, I sit beaming at the prospect of 5 weeks of uninterrupted writing time.

It very nearly did not come to pass however. This has been a year when the dark angel has come close or even taken many around me – not to mention SO many unfortunates on the nightly news – and even, three times, hesitated at my door as I later learned. In August, I went traveling to see Shakespeare in Ashland with my lifetime friend Kathy and, after the long hours of driving, found myself unusually out of breath. The stairway to the lobby of our antique hotel was steep however, as are many of the hills, so I did not think too much of it. I became alarmed only weeks later, when, going out to pick up my morning paper on my own familiar stairs, I found myself forced to pant for five minutes before I recovered. Reluctantly I went off to check it out and ended the day in the hospital with a diagnosis of triple pulmonary emboli – the diagnosis that took the life of my father’s sister Irene and possibly his sister Bernice – at about my current age. The doctors had found a sizeable clot in my leg – likely a result of the long drive and having had that hip surgery in 2007. It had thrown off three small clots, any one of which could have abruptly ended life as I know it, but did not. They were trapped in my lungs and will dissolve naturally I am told. Indeed it feels like they already have. And I will be taking a blood thinner for at least 6 months to be on the safe side. All my life I have blithely assumed – with my mother’s long lived family and my father’s own successful journey all the way to 88, that I held a free pass deep into old age. I am humbler on that point now. And WAY motivated to find my way back to a healthy weight. But there are no guarantees about lifespan for any of us. How many many people wake up on a fine sunny morning, drink their coffee, start off with to do list in hand and weekend calendar full, and end on that same weekend as ashes in the sea and friends and relatives weeping for their loss? I am trying a little harder to keep that in mind and appreciate the gift of each day now. Though full health and heedless optimism have both returned for the moment.

There were other adventures this year. I had many fine dinners and/or outings with my cousins George and Patricia and local friends Janice and Elaine and Barbara and Mary and movie buddy Linsey. Dear Kathy came to Santa Cruz for a multi-day visit just last week. Jeanne and Janice came to celebrate a second Christmas after a storm delayed our original dinner. I self-published a children’s adventure novel through lulu.com and have started work on a sequel. I’m putting the finishing touches on a book of Buddhist-oriented short stories that I also may end self-publishing. (Just don’t have the patience to send out all those elaborate packets publishers love to reject with such callous abandon -so far - sigh. Don’t imagine I will achieve fame and fortune through writing, but the spirit still moves me, so we will see what happens). Another grand project is to finish digitizing family photos from both sides, and create photo books that everyone can order. Already did one on Hamp, but then discovered a treasure trove of earlier pictures that should be included. (Tobi and Leslie stay tuned!). And have been fascinated to learn more about my Fretheim and Joint family trees courtesy of my cousin David. Found myself on Google Earth standing inside one of those 360 degree bubble pictures looking down from a mile high cliff top into the immense Norweigian fjord some of my 16th century ancestors once sailed out of. So real I could almost feel the cold wind on my face and breathtakingly beautiful. Must go there some day and stand in that place for real.

I have the time at last to return to my Buddhist studies with more attention and have been overjoyed to discover two western teachers of real accomplishment (Tenzin Chokyi and Alan Wallace) who both have long years of study and intense retreats – AND degrees in science from modern universities that enable them to discuss the relationship between scientific perspectives and Buddhist insights and methods with real authority and, hopefully, may help nudge me a LITTLE further along in a good direction before I do actually kick the bucket.

My sweet mother continues to be a major focus in my life, needing a bit more care now than she did, though she is still amazingly self-sufficient and beautiful at the age of 87. Her building is only three blocks from my apartment and has an elevator, and for now serves her needs even better than living with me – though that may come to pass eventually. I have learned to let life unfold in its own patterns – it always surprises me when I most think I know what is coming next.

One cat, Freckles, has left my life (after being hit by a car on Portola) and another, the kitten Moon, has entered it. Pepper the Maine coon, has become a feline mountain but does condescend to play with the kitten, 5 seconds at a time. It is a start. And spring cometh.

I hope you too are well dear reader, and continue to be for a long long time. It is an amazing journey isn’t it?

Travel Notes from the Lam Rim

2010-08-16T14:39:00.000-07:00

(An essay requested in 2006 - and alas, rejected - by Mandala Magazine; i would like to thank Land of Medicine Buddha in Soquel CA for the statue component of the picture)

Come to think of it, my Asian travels started early. At least a certain westerliness began to manifest. It was a near midnight in Hermosa Beach, California in the summer of 1952 when I got my first yen to travel. I packed a pillow slip with bear and cookies and set out, first bidding a polite good-bye to my parents - who had the unusual presence of mind to wave back. They didn't seem to take it personally that I was leaving, and they said nothing about the lateness of the hour or the impracticability of my plan. Instead they followed at a distance, curious, no doubt, to find out what I would do next. I struck out west, to the edge of the wide beach that fronts LA, and then wandered a good three blocks along the strand of sidewalk that parallels the beach, farther than I had ever been alone at age four. At last I settled myself on a bench, stubby legs swinging, and stared out at the broad star-spangled back of the quiet Pacific. I was yearning, though I had no notion yet of geography, in the direction of Asia. Even now, 52 years later, I remember the faint tug of that view, the sense of something out there, pulling. But childish weariness overcame the urge, When I had begun to keel sideways onto my cookies and bear, my parents carried me home.

I remembered that midnight journey when I first heard the Tibetan Lam Rim - "path to Enlightenment" teachings on the rarity of a perfect human rebirth. Imagining oneself special, of course, is a common seduction of the star-spangled Tibetan Buddhist path, with the appearance of Western "tulkus" - both those formally chosen or those self-appointed - now a common feature of meditation courses in both east and west. Fortunately for me, from my first days of practice, it was plain as concrete that my cautious, ever prone to doubt mind was anything but a manifestation of tulkuhood.

The teachings on the specialness of a perfect human rebirth, however, were a little harder to resist. They provided at least a possible explanation for those first yearnings, and as they are designed to, gave me and many of those sitting around me seriously enlarged self-esteem, at least for a time. It was a state of rare good fortune the lamas described, a PERFECT rebirth the ego could pounce on like pastry. To paraphrase their favorite metaphor, "A blind turtle coming to the surface of the world's oceans at random every hundred years has a better chance of accidentally popping his head directly through the center of a single storm-tossed floating ring than your average sentient being has of being born into a perfect human rebirth." This novel thought can produce a certain psychic fatness that has to be whittled down to humility again in long sessions of meditation on endless time and death and hell and other less sanguine topics. Yet even if one has been able to leave self-patting behind, Dharma remains the sweetest and rarest of gifts, for to receive it and make use of it one must be born healthy, in a life with leisure, at a time in which the teachings of a fully awakened Buddha are still remembered, in a place where they are still respected. One must be fortunate enough to encounter a teacher who has the full range of qualifications to teach them, and have the good sense to listen when the Dharma is presented. I guess that is what still intrigues me about my own life and the lives of other Asian "Dharma bums." What distinguishes us, if anything does, from those who do not find Buddhism of special interest, is that unlikely eagerness to listen when the first real teachings are encountered. For many, there a sense of recognition, a coming home. The heart resonates. Annie Dillard in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek nailed the feeling precisely when she wrote about her own first spiritual experience, "I had been my whole life a bell, and never knew it until at that moment I was lifted and struck."

For me that moment came in Bangkok in 1973. I was alone one afternoon in the palm-fringed patio of a low-end hotel, recovering from a fever that had landed me a week in a hospital. In those years I had become one of those modern gypsies who cross Asia overland, traveling rough. We called ourselves "travelers" and did our youthful snobbish best to break free from the banal parade of ordinary tourism for more adventurous, not to say impoverished and perilous modes of travel. More frequent illness was a price we were willing to pay for experiences of otherworldly intensity. And like me, many of us traveled alone, seeking comradeship or help as needed from those we met along the way. When I had become ill on the island of Ko Samui halfway up the Thai peninsula, an Australian nurse I had met on the deck of a freighter from Djakarta made sure I made it to a hospital and loyally stayed through my crisis. Once it was clear I would be okay, she and other friends of the road moved on, leaving me alone to recover in the hotel.

Two days later, I spotted a small card propped against the hotel cash register. "Lectures in Buddhism in English" it read. "7pm Tuesday." Since it was Tuesday, and I had nowhere else to go, I memorized the address on the card. The words remain carved in my brain to this day. When the sun had set, I left the hotel to find "Wat Baworn, Banglamphoo."

What is it about one short lecture that could have so altered my life's course? Phra Khantipalo, was the name of the lecturer, an angular bald-pated 30-something Englishman in the saffron robes of a Thai Buddhist, supported by an amen chorus of robed American ex-soldiers who beamed through his talk and confided when it was over that they had seen Buddhist mantras stop bullets in Vietnam and that meditation was "better than acid." But it was not their colorful company that moved me so deeply that night. It was the Dharma itself, a simple classic teaching on Sila, morality, followed by a few minutes silent contemplation on loving-kindness toward all beings. The hour left me vibrating with joy. I walked home through the tropical dark, looking frequently back at the white bulk of monastery's pagoda beside the river, laughing out loud as a soft warm rain began to fall and soaked me through. It felt like an essential beginning. I did not yet know of what.

Over the next 15 years, I would complete three world-spanning trips all together, each lasting from one to two years, each more intensely focused on Buddhism and eventually on Tibetan Buddhism and Tibet in general than the last. Yet oddly for all this, it was the teachings I was to receive in America that helped me move forward most after that first essential, riveting contact.

Now that I seem as rooted to one spot as a barnacle, I can see that life as a "traveler" is a rich and even dangerous state of life, for your moorings have been cut. You can end anywhere. Wandering the back streets of the big cities of Asia, idling in villages that had rarely seen a western face, I flowed down my life like a small craft on a powerful river. No day was predictable, and a myriad of other lives could have been lived if a choice here or there had been different.

Not that I made any more helpful choices that first trip. From Thailand, I kept my nose deep in a book lent to me by the kindly Khantipalo, I managed to miss entirely the two men would become my most important teachers. I ignored Lama Thubten Yeshe's 1974 second course for westerners, which was in session as I passed through Kathmandu, Nepal. I remember hearing, and ignoring, advice to visit the Dalai Lama's hill station in Dharamsala. Home again, the year that followed was a lost year, life as a shadow, without direction. But karma had a second chance for me. One day an article in the LA Times caught my eye, an interview with Chuck Thomas, a "traveler" who had just returned from Kathmandu. He had become a Buddhist there he said. The lamas he studied with were in LA to give a complete introductory course in Buddhism at Lake Arrowhead.

The seed planted in Bangkok took hold, and finally I did not hesitate. I went to listen to Lama Thubten Yeshe speak, and the impact of two weeks with a fully empowered teacher on my beginner's mind was a hundred times as "resonant" as that first glimmering in Asia. More courses followed. I joined with other students of Lama Yeshe to help found centers in LA and Santa Cruz and Boulder Creek CA. We invited teachers by the dozen and the years passed in a state of dreamlike intensity as we practiced, created courses for others, and built Vajrapani Institute. It was a revolution in my normally cautious and skeptical approach to life, and I could never have thrown myself so fully into the exploration of any religion if it had not been for one key idea Lama Yeshe gave us early on that first course. "Just for awhile, pretend it is all true," Lama Yeshe advised. "and pay attention to what happens." It was permission to put aside skepticism, to live in the "now" wide open and trusting. And what a time "now" was.

Looking back with a better knowledge of history, I see there was some desperation about those first Tibetan teachings to eager westerners. Fresh from the horrors of invasion and exile, expecting cultural extinction before the end of their lifetimes, the Tibetan lamas held back almost nothing. They handed us Dharma whole, like a mother in a burning village tosses her baby into the arms of a stranger in a passing train, trusting fate that someone will love and care for it when she cannot. I compare this with the hard won opportunities of 19th and early 20th century westerners to obtain even a taste of "forbidden Tibet," and it's clear this avalanche of teachings and initiations in the 1970's and 80's was a priceless opportunity. Yet sheer bounty created its own unique aftershocks. "Hasten slowly" in learning Dharma, Milarepa warned. In those first frantic years it was impossible to go slowly.

"The motivation for practice must not become entertainment," the lamas tried to warn us over and over. Yet Tibetans can hardly avoid their own dramatic and over-awing effect on western disciples. Who can resist consorting with kings or having tea with monks who still celebrate their conversion of Kublai Khan? The Tibetans came to us out of a medieval world still echoing the legends of Shambala, trailing tales of 16th generation tulkus and flying lamas, goddess consorts and rainbow bodies, and yogic hands that burn pure love into stone. In the summer corn fields of Wisconsin in 1981, Tibetan monks raised their 10-foot long horns before dawn and lifted sleeping farmers straight out of their beds as the Dalai Lama himself came to perform the Kalachakra tantra for four days - something until then done traditionally only once in his lifetime - and awed a Midwestern community unused to the scent of incense or the sight of fellow Americans wearing the black wigs of ancient Indian goddesses, or summer storms changing their course to create a perfect circle of rainbows and thunder around the God-King of Tibet as he administered tantric vows to his awed disciples.

And yet Dharma as entertainment will not hold, and the Tibetans know it. "What you will keep in the end," Lama Yeshe warned us, "is what you have actually experienced for yourself." He was right.

I returned two times more to live in Asia after I had become a Buddhist. Researching a novel, I lived among Tibetans in both Nepal and Dharamsala, I even made my way across Tibet itself and saw the steady devotion and fearful lives of the monks and nuns left behind. The effect was to gradually release me from the spell of the exotic - though I have not lost my admiration.

I found Tibetans at any level of society, no surprise, can be as cantankerous or ordinary as the rest of us. Yet among them, Like pearls out of the abrading sand, they still produce true saints who have realized bodhicitta, and more. Travel just taught me I must wait and listen to know which they are. The Dalai Lama loves to tell the story of Atisa who waited 12 years to be sure of the caliber of a man he thought to ask to be his teacher.

I think that was what has held me. I stayed not only for my own transient glimpses of understanding, but because of the bodhicitta shining in my teachers' eyes, and the Olympic caliber humility of those who have genuine religious insight to share. Tibetans, bless them, firmly believe anyone who puts up a shingle announcing sainthood is likely to be anything but. After 13 centuries of seeing it all, they should know. "I am a simple monk," the Dalai Lama tells reporters, and despite all his clearly evident attainments, means it.

The presentation of Dharma in the West is calmer these days, more deliberate and deeper. Those who come to it now are not given quite such a magic carpet ride, but perhaps their practice will be closer to the sane pace the Buddha intended. The journey, after all, is not about the thrill of novelty, or finding oneself a bit player in the drama of history, or entertaining former royalty, still less about a fancy new way to feel above others or develop an interesting wardrobe.

These days, when I walk beside the great Pacific and look out toward Asia, the urge to go there has nearly gone, though the urge to keep following the path of Dharma has not. My manner of progress, however, is very different now. Years ago, the stretching rubber band of "pretend it's true" finally needed to relax. There came a day I knew I had to stop receiving more initiations and advanced teachings for a time. I had built too high on concepts I didn't understand well enough to remain intellectually honest. I needed to absorb and practice what had been given before accepting more. "Check everything you have heard," Lama Yeshe also told us, "as if you were buying gold. Challenge this old monk as long as he lives." When new students wonder aloud why an "old student" still asks basic questions, I wonder why they do not ask more.

My life today is so prosaic it would have terrified my old gypsy self to hear of it. Not even a Buddhist bureaucrat anymore, I only rarely visit centers. I am a teacher, writer, and photographer. A daughter to an aging mother. A friend to my friends. A frustrated Democrat and environmentalist. Yet because of what the lamas finally were able to give me, as I live the hours of each day, I try to apply the teachings on emptiness, to be aware of the processes of mind that solidify my world out of infinite possibility. I read the news and try to notice if I begin to demonize another human being. I too rarely take time for sitting practice, but when I do, I apply ton len, giving and taking on the breath to those in pain - and there are SO many, in SO much pain. Surely it does nothing for them yet, but little by little I know it will make compassion easier, more familiar. Mine is the simple imperfect practice of an ordinary laywoman right now, trying to live with morality and patience, trying not to be too selfish, trying not to harm. And trying above all trying to keep alive some semblance of dharma practice in this great Monopoly game of midlife. "Nothing will happen," the famous western nun Patricia Zen advises her students, "if you don't practice every day." And now I can see in my Dharma community that those who have lived this path daily for many years with real energy and integrity are developing truly wonderful inner qualities. And that is my goal now. Before this jewel-like opportunity of Perfect Rebirth is lost, before the next life with all its confusion comes, I want to learn to love and help others more selflessly. I want to see deeply into the way mind creates reality in every moment. I want to wake up.

Listening to Trees

2010-06-24T23:36:00.000-07:00

Walking more in the woods these days. Early summer woods, filled with grace, and I try to take in fully, as I have before, the existence of trees. All my life, the part of my life that joins in the shared reality of modern humans, I have been assured that trees are simply wood. Wood is simply what? Useful. Non-sentient certainly. Western culture views trees entirely as a resource – like corn and oil and cotton. Even Buddhist lamas are, in the main, uninterested in trees. I think we may be missing something.

As I sit in the spangled green and gold web of light and shadow that forests create, breathing the full resonant silence there, I marvel, really marvel at how much we have forgotten to notice about these remarkable living beings. Consider dear reader, how trees quietly offer so much to other species – more than any other living creature on earth – without demure or resistance. Just endless provision. What bodhisattva could do more?

Trees provide humans with wood to burn to keep us warm and cook our food, wood to fashion cups and toys and weapons and sculpture and boats and tools and pencils, and the daily comfort of furniture. Paper is the gift of trees. Paper to tidy our tender bottoms, paper to preserve our stories, our memories our collected wisdom and the vital instructions on what we have learned about how things work to all the generations to come. And of course wood provides shelter, and not only to us - trees provide protected nooks or sheltered boughs to house a myriad of small birds, insects, and animals. More anciently, trees offered hiding places, climbing places, protection from enemies and from weather. Trees provide fruit to eat, medicines to heal, shade from the hot sun. They cool the air, and bring rain where deserts would be without them. Indeed it is trees who give the energy of motion and life to every species on this earth - directly or indirectly - where there would be none without them, for it is they and other plants who weave sunlight into digestible sugar and pass it down to those on the ground. Their buried remnants coalesce into carbon and oil, still holding the energy of two billion years of sunshine behind us, and now power our cars and electric lights and planes in the sky.

Staggering isn't it? Without them our planet would not have even a livable atmosphere. This Garden of Eden we have inherited would be a rocky cold desert with a nitrogen atmosphere without trees. Without them there would be no ozone layer to protect us from solar radiation; there would be no greenhouse effect to keep us warm.

Even now, in this disintegrating, over-crowded, and over-synthetic civilization we have so unwisely made, trees provide balm for the troubled spirit, filling forest space with endlessly varied beauty and an intensity of healing quiet not found in other spaces. Trees birthed our species. Trees make possible our civilized life. They have guarded and protected and fed and soothed us. Trees in a profound and real way are the mother of life on earth, and now they even do their best to filter out our massive overload of carbon from the atmosphere to keep us from killing ourselves.

They do all this for us and other creatures and yet they pollute nothing, harm nothing, destroy nothing – save the rare incidents when a tree, pushed by wind, may fall and, without volition to do so, harm someone in its path. Even in death they offer their bodies to insects, feed a few more bears, house a few more small mammals, and finally enrich the soil. How can it be our culture never thinks of them, thanks them, honors them. Nary a tree deity to be found in any old pantheon.

Yet what amazing beings they are, standing quiet and uncomplaining through the millenia, broken in terrible storms, or radiant with bird song in the warm days of summer, whispering tree secrets to the wind that moves through their branches, reminding us below to listen, listen. And these being are alive – sometimes striving upward for as long as 2000 years and more. Are we SO sure a tree is insentient? Julia Butterfly reported a tremendous increase in sap production in the tree Luna where she moved about barefoot when trees were being felled nearby. Have we truly bothered to check? They may be sentient. Or they may not be sentient in the way we understand sentience. But it is definite that they are SOMEthing alive and something to notice and honor; indeed, they are central to all life on this earth. The heartsong of this place.

It wounds something in me when I hear trees referred to so cavalierly as board feet, or lassoed by pencil lines into cutting lots for timber companies to bicker over. The presence within a forest is something so much more powerful and graceful than any museum I can think of, A forest is truly sacred space, offering its wood and fruits to all living things to take what they truly need, but NEVER to desecrate into clear cuts or tree farms.

Trees would teach us to be alive inside again if we stop and listen to what is really here before us, gentleness incarnate, and much mystery beyond. Will you go out into the trees again and listen with me?

"Do no harm"

2010-02-13T21:01:00.000-08:00

A week different from other weeks. My landlord announced a month ago that we were to undergo fumigation – and launched a sense of heart deep upset that has lasted, as well as a to do list that has had me staggering, coming as it did in the same week that all my teaching assignments kicked in.

I guess many people have undergone this, and come out no worse for wear – and I have to admit passing many wrapped and toxic dwellings and feeling selfish gratitude that it was not I who had to live there when the wraps and the poison were striped away. Now I do, and, despite aching muscles from the dozens of trips up and down my stairs to remove food and plants and complaining cats from harm’s way as we went to play at being refugees on my mother’s couch for three nights, my own poisoned apartment is clear again, and things have finally settled back to normal.

And yet not normal. I have washed all the dishes, hauled up the plants, settled my relieved cats back into their familiar life of outdoor freedom and indoor sloth. But my friends, the spiders are gone, their webs trailing on the broom strands as I sweep them sorrowfully away. And presumably the unseen thousands of termites, the target of the assault, are also gone, corpses turning to insect dust in the galleries of their wooden cities beneath my feet.

I know only a very few, even among my friends, would share this odd sense of grief I feel – that harm was done all around me, terrible suffering inflicted on a massive scale, that I could not stop. Who worries about the pain of insects? They torture each other all day anyway right? Gnawing away in the jungle of life. I’ve seen the nature programs. And with all the miseries among us human beings, golden children of the food chain, who has time to think of these tiniest sentient beings?

And yet they are sentient. I remember the day I became aware of this when I took the 24-hour Buddhist vow to refrain from killing for the first time. It was an awkward, mysterious thing to take a real vow, to rise before dawn and set out oranges and flowers. Sit yawning on a cushion, and then dutifully kneel and try to repeat the inscrutably chanted Tibetan phrases a lama spoke, glancing at the translation on the alternate page between pauses. For twenty-four hours I was not to take what was not given, not eat more after 12 noon, not speak falsely, or cause division, or sit (inspiring self-pride) on a high seat. I would dress simply and flirt with no one, even the very handsome fellow across the aisle. And above all, I would not kill. Would make a real effort to notice all life around me, large and small, and harm none. A nun for a day.

When the morning sessions were done, I retreated to the porch of the cabin that was my little territory in the world that week (in a campground at Lake Arrowhead above LA). I sat alone, breathing the warm pine scented air of mountain summertime, feeling already a pinch of incipient hunger – probably from knowing I could not eat more that day. I concentrated instead on the minutiae of this world around me, the amazing number of small creatures alive and vibrant in the scrabble of woodland between cabins. And took notice at last of the smallest of them all, the ants.

Once noticed, I saw them everywhere, industriously hunting and gathering for their kin. Shiny black abdomens, querying antennae. And eyes. Eyes that took in the finger I laid experimentally in their path. The ant who first encountered it paused. Considered. He went back, and then forward again, feeling his way around the wall of pink flesh, wary. Time slowed. And offered a revelation. This ant SAW me. Not only did I hold the image of the ant in my mind’s eye, he held me, some semblance of me – whether by smell or sight, in his. He worried, he evaded, he found his way around. If I were to harass him further, he would speed up, react in fear, run away. If I were to hurt him…

The world shifted for me in that moment. A little.

I do not know what death from Vikane gas feels like. But I took a whiff of the ammonia I set out in a bowl at the entry where the little skunk who has been living under our apartment makes his way to find shelter from this El Nino winter. The whiff brought a lash of vomitous pain, a shock to my whole system, quickly ended as I took the bowl from my nose and breathed out. I hoped the skunk would knock the bowl over as he entered or left, and then find the smell so noxious, he would not return. And later, I found that the fumigators used a similar technique, sending tear gas through the whole dwelling, to flush out small animals and prevent inconvenient corpses before the tarps came down. A measure of compassion, whatever the motive.

But what of the others, the spiders and termites and baby mice and who knows what others who could not escape so quickly. Imagine holding your own face to the bowl, not through one horrendous breath of ammonia, but on and on, through a thousand more, burning all over with choking pain and blind panic, until you were dead. We don’t like to think of such things in our safe, sanitized human world. Yet this is the least of what we do to maintain it.

“If you can help others, help them,” the Dalai Lama said simply in a teaching I attended later. “If you cannot help, at least do no harm.” Not an easy prescription, as I learned, making my way gingerly around ants for the rest of my day of vows. Not a practical or easy thing, for apartment managers protecting investments, or hungry people who need protein, or barefoot people needing shoes. Once noticed in fact, the whole fabric of our comfortable living depends on the suffering and dying of millions of unseen others –most, though not all, insects. What a thought. And even with that effort not to harm, it is impossible to avoid participating entirely if we are to remain alive. Yet if we would be awake, if we would be wise, and someday be better than we are now, I think we must at least allow ourselves to know it. Step over that line of ants on the path when we see it. And try at least, to know and protect the sentient others of this world wherever and as much as we possibly can.

Just a thought dear readers.

First Book

2010-02-04T15:19:00.000-08:00

My first actual book looking thing. AT LAST! Available to buy online no less (see link under My Publications at top left) as a pricey print on demand paperback sent to your door or a reasonable electronic download. And some good responses from peers at the college today. Take a look, any of you avid readers out there, still game for a novel written for 10-12year olds. Its a grand ocean going adventure, it I do say so myself. Five children at odds with life, running away from boarding school to cross the vast Pacific on a yacht to Hawaii. Never a dull moment, I promise, and little sprinkles of romance and beauty and encounters with dolphins throughout, not to mention the perilous STORM scene. If any of you actually do read it, you are invited to leave a reader review on Amazon (and please do click the link on - "request to make this available on Kindle" while you're at it). Lavishly undeserved praise not required. Just your honest opinion. Enjoy.

Playing Old Maid

2010-01-03T19:13:00.000-08:00

When I was a child, a little girl among a chatter of little girls, life had the sweetness of honeysuckle and each day filled leisurely from within, a personal chronicle of exploration and delight. We swung on the beach swings, wondering at the sensation of our long hair tickling as it dragged against the sand on the down swing. We peered into the armpits of small turtles, tried the taste of ants and laughed at eachother’s sour expressions. We practiced for hours to plant our small bare feet in every chalk drawn square of the hopscotch game on the sidewalk and jump over the one with the stone without losing balance. And, eating cookies served with milk in tall glasses, we played Old Maid, a mysterious game that carried the whiff of prophecy.

I was a little afraid of this game. If I lost too often would my destiny be captured somehow? Would I become this dread thing, this “old maid”? Did that grim little grey woman on the card, left in one’s hands when all the others were paired and gone, have the power to make that same future come to pass for the little girl that held it?

The future in those days, for little girls trying earnestly to imagine it, was offered to our view in lavish photographs in Life Magazine. Grown women with swirling belted skirts, red lipped, blonde hair shorn modernly, or pulled back tight. There were gay beatnik women, (happy, not homosexual) who threw back their heads at parties where everyone flirted amidst a haze of smoke. There were housewives perking Folgers coffee, mopping with a queenly air, for the home was meant to be a woman’s little empire, where she belonged, but also where she covertly ruled and showed her manifold skills and mysterious womanly talents. Everyone was meant to fall in love, perfectly, with the perfect person who had already been born somewhere, just for each of us to find and marry. And it was almost certain that we would be able to do so. No problem. It was fated. Unless, ever so oddly and sadly, something went wrong and we became Old Maids.

So now I am 61. Never married and thus, clearly, one of these lost ones. Yet having arrived, I look about and find I am often as happy again now as I was at 6. Many things have happened in those years of course. Many stories lived and many more stories – of others – glimpsed and pondered. Years of depression as it became clear there would be no perfect mate for me. Yet being an Old Maid no longer seems the catastrophe it was from the vista of childhood. This is I think is more than the “sour grapes” perspective of one who has witnessed more than a few promising marriages turn into living hells for the participants, for I observed many other relationships as well, in which love modulated into a lifetime of deep friendship. Not a bad life at all for those lucky couples. And yet now, comparing the geography of my life to the roads I could have taken, the quiet rich freedom of my days fills me. In subtle ways I chose this. I chose not to be bound by the lives and confusions and emotions of others close by. I had enough of my own. And now with retirement coming, there is the financial leisure at long long last, to start moving forward again. With writing, with meditation, with that journey I came to make.

For there is another role for a solitary woman, the nun. The spiritual seeker. The cloistered, vow-bound version of this, whether Buddhist or Christian, does not yet appeal, though I see many of my contemporaries in Buddhist circles moving toward that door, and many the better for it. But for now, for me, it is Annie Dillards version of “nun” that appeals most. A woman amidst a life simplified, looking out on the world with no clutter between. Seeing time and lives manifold and holding them all in the cup of her heart.

Thus does what we fear most turn out to be what we most wanted – so often.

Defining terms

2010-01-01T13:38:00.000-08:00

Time at last to write again. And more time coming, if my plans for semi-retirement, so promising at the moment, materialize next June.

There have been so many thoughts that crossed my mind over the years, declaimed themselves amidst the daily trivia as I drove on the freeway, or took a lunch break, and then retreated in the face of the common sense imperatives of the next class to plan or the next appointment or the next chore.

Now I am faced with a whole day of leisure and all the functioning technology one could wish for, (eat your heart out Dickens). Yet my mind retreats timidly. Nary a thought to find. What were they?

There is one that does come to me consistently, with every newscast in these years since 9-1-1.There is a muddle-headedness to term of “terrorist”, a lack of clarity to the concept that has had extraordinary consequences. That word has taken on such power in our current chapter of history. When the word is used - a hundred times a day it seems - it conjures rat-like humans who conspire in cramped apartments and plant bombs as some kind of past time, or twisted religious act. But truly, how can one wage a war against “terrorists” or “terrorism’? Is there any war that does not bring horrific levels of terror and pain to its participants and corollary victims?

Terrorism is defined as “the use of violence and threats to intimidate or coerce, esp. for political purposes.” I guess it is the “political purposes” that connects it so strongly in people’s minds as an act of war. And, given enough scale, it surely is – as in the Algerian uprising in the 50’s, or the Shiite militias in Iraq with their methodical mass tortures.

Yet it is one thing to say one’s enemies are “terrorists,” as we do with fundamentalist Muslims who bomb our soldiers and nearby civilians, and quite another to define “terrorists” are one’s enemies. This makes no sense because terrorism is a military or personal tactic of war, a way to fight or force one’s point of view when other ways are not easily available. It is an especially cruel and ugly way, given its terrible toll of civilians and children, yet it remains a military tactic, not a movement in and of itself, and not an inherent quality of any group.

Would we not have thought it strange if our leaders in WWII had declared war not on Germans but on heavy bombists? What about tankists? Whole cities were incinerated by their (and our) bombers. Villages were leveled as tank columns rolled through supported by infantry. Enough terror for a thousand 9-11’s. Yet it would never occur to give the specialist soldiers who perpetrated such acts their own unique titles as enemies. The enemies were the nations at war.

Turn the idea around. Would we cease calling Al Queda “enemy” if they started fighting with heavy bombers and tanks and infantry? Of course not. We would find relief only in having the acts of war out in the open. The enemy would remain the same.

There is also an astonishing level of myopia and denial about the tactics used by ourselves and our friends in relation to this term “terrorism”. Imagine for a moment the impact on American citizens if any nation, for ANY motive, sent a drone over our cities loaded with bombs, under the command of a foreign youth of 20, with little or no knowledge of our culture or motives, instructed to pull the trigger whenever he saw something he interpreted as suspicious. Imagine that several public gatherings – weddings, parades, festivals, beach fires for large families – became scenes of carnage with the bloody burnt bodies of adults and children cast about like a scene from hell and dozens more sent in agony to hospitals. To be followed a few days later by a tepid apology: “We regret the recent bombing. We received erroneous information that a terrorist leader might have been in the group.”

Imagine the nightly dreams of those under such a flight path.

Imagine a part of California or Texas walled off, as Palestinians in Gaza are walled off, allowed inadequate food and water and medical supplies, humiliated when they tried to come out for work. Imagine a group of men in the affected area deciding to take action by sending rockets over the barriers, harming some tens of people on the other side. Then imagine the other side bombing the enclosed area for days using jets and tanks and bombers, targeting hospitals, schools, and apartment buildings, destroying the whole functioning infrastructure of an economy already struggling to survive, inflicting casualties on the civilian population at ratio of 100 to 1 to the casualties they themselves suffered. How can politicians and pundits keep repeating their mantra of “this is the only way to defeat terrorists” in the face of such on the ground contradictions? What clarity can such words possibly bring in such a situation? And if they do actually mean something, why is it so forbidden to apply them according to their meaning, without partisanship? How can it not be obvious that both sides are trying to terrorize the other into submitting to their own interests?

But then what happens when the enemy is a small group bent on revenge or moved toward mayhem by some other motive that has come to seem more important to them than their own lives? Was the group that attached the Trade Center buildings really the opening front of a “war” in any sense that was not rhetorical? Perhaps many Taliban members of wahabi sects in Pakistan and Afghansitan and Saudi Arabia rejoiced to see Americans damaged. Does that mean they were suddenly soldiers in a united army against us? They were not members of Al Queda. They fought back in an organized way only when we invaded their countries with large armies.

The people who attacked the trade center were criminals, worthy of receiving whatever punishment for such a horrific terrorist act the law provides for. However, by instead defining our reaction as a “war on terror”, our government began an endless war against a nearly undefinable enemy. And it is a war that creates its own endless causes and can end only when we are too exhausted to fight further. This way of thinking – or not thinking – on the part of the Bush administratrion, this lack of clarity in defining its own vocabulary, started a cascade of misery and endless retributions that will affect the whole world for generations.

Remembering Georgia

2009-07-25T22:08:00.000-07:00

Remembering today. Not sure why, but the memory of a woman I met in my traveling days has settled in my mind today, a friend of a few days only, but a person with enough mystery and originality in her chosen way of life to occupy any writer for many pages indeed. Her name is lost to me – it has been 36 years – but I will name her Georgia, since the name would suit her. I don’t doubt she is gone from this world by now, or about to leave it. She was in her late fifties or early sixties when I met her, wrinkled from eyes to knees, with fine lines everywhere as if her body had shrunk and left her skin to do what it wished to make up the difference, draped over a well made structure of bird-like bones. Indeed that is one of the things that HAD happened to her that I know of. She showed me pictures of herself as she had been 10 years or so before I met her – in Texas, married to a businessman, dressed robustly in the wifely uniform of the middle class fifties, dotted blouse, long skirt fortified with petticoats, her hair in a teased blond buffont. And she was plump, even alarmingly so. Her blue eyes looked out from under a stiff thatch of mascara. Her lips were ruby bright, smiling falsely in the glare of the camera flash. She had just won a contest held by the Ladies Orchid Society of Houston or some such organization dedicated to virtue and flowers and middle class behavior control. She was surrounded by a coterie of similar women, sealed into a life different in every way imaginable from the one she lived now.

There was irony in her smile as she gazed down on the photo, self-bemusement that she clearly wanted to share. We sat in her small house some 12 feet off the ground in a tree, among a village of such casually constructed dwellings at the base the cliff that fronts the Arafura Sea in front of Darwin Australia. Lameroo village, it was called then, a hippie rest stop for traveling backpackers bound to Asia just to the north, or returning from it. One could live for almost nothing there in the early 1970’s – just get off the bus and settle into any recently vacated treehouse, or create one of your own. Join communal dinners at a nightly fire where a pot of rice and beans simmered and everyone was welcomed in to help chop vegetables and make music, to smoke hashish and linger in the slow Australian twilight, telling stories of where they had been or where they were going.

Georgia had one of the nicest houses in Lameroo, high enough to require a ladder. It had been cleverly constructed by a series of previous occupants, bright and sunny with an ocean view and with a real double bed mattress well shielded by tarps from the daily afternoon thunderstorms we all endured, replete with menacing black walls of rain and driving winds. A basin tied into the roots of her aerial kitchen held her plates and cups. A water container and foodstuffs were neatly stacked on shelves, and the pictures, of that other life in an utterly different place, were tacked to branches above us.

In the year she had been there, Georgia had shared this dwelling with a series of lovers, mostly merchant marine sailors who came and went as their vessels allowed them. Currently the man in question was a burly black haired Frenchman she favored with real affection, though I glimpsed him only once. When he was gone, she even sent him letters, dressing for the occasion of going up the cliff to the Darwin post office in a long hand embroidered dress of brilliant saffire blue and then carefully cinching it at the waist with a bright yellow and orange Nepalese sash she had been given. On days when she did not leave the village in the trees, she wore nothing at all, as we were all free to do (though I was shy enough to wear at least a sarong). Her greying yellow hair danced in curls about her always smiling face, and she moved as gracefully as a dancer. I met her one morning as we both went for water at a spigot on the side of a giant city cistern some half mile down the beach. When the long slow tide pulled out, the way was opened, though rocky, and we made our way carefully, laughing and telling our stories, water jugs carried on shoulder or head, feeling graceful and connected to the place. Natives out of time, warmed by sun and freedom, eager for the gifts of each novel day.

I was 26 that year, a natural time in life for adventures, for trying things out with all the daring one can muster. But Georgia? In years she was closing on elderly. In spirit, she seemed to have gone beyond all time. In my memory she lived at the edge of the world, wide open to joy, accepting the changes of each day, and never calling them loss.
Looking back now, less sanguine in my own early sixties, I wonder what extraordinary earthquake of the soul could have taken her so far. Was she mentally ill? She did not seem so. She bubbled, but she did not babble. It was a spiritual sea change that had moved her. And a fearlessness I had not ever seen before.

I remember her now perhaps because I have at last arrived at her time of life – in a far different place and state of mind. It seems to me sometimes that all my daring was spent in those years of traveling. Now I sit like a barnacle, locked into routine that has staled my mind almost into unconsciousness, too timid - so far - to let go of prudence even a little. In a year I face a decision, to retire with a meager monthly check and dare to try new things again - or stay on, cautious and fading, to a healthier income. The world calls to me again. Georgia laughs at me out of her bright eyed, wrinkled, ageless face. Love, she whispers. Live. Don’t be afraid.
I’m trying.

2009-06-27T20:58:00.000-07:00

Ah Jarvenpa, and you non-commital millions following my (nearly non-existent) blog, you are quite right that i need to bestir myself. What a lazy blogger i turned out to be. First overwhelmed by the events in Palestine. Then lost again in the vast, yet compelling trivia of daily life. Yet writing should be nearly as easy as thinking shouldn't it? And I surely do that. So here goes. I shall try a new mode. More often, but short. And perhaps someday aspire to the the essays and profound observations Jarvenpa herself regularly creates with such easy grace.

The white pit bull - Zeus is his name - now lives downstairs, his owner and I having had a falling out. But he has left behind his sidekick, Gigantor, a minute female cat, barely out of kittenhood, who was raised with this Chenghiz Khan of a dog and lies there lazily as a mouth bigger than her entire body looms over her and a tongue longer than her length swashes over her. Gigantor is befuddled. She had only just gotten used to living in my apartment and is quite astonished that all "her people" have now vacated to the apartment below. Or maybe its mostly that i serve up Fancy Feast to any one who might like some about 9am every morning. And she has discovered, after a short life of nibbling Zeus's kibble remnants, that she does indeed like Fancy Feast. And several quiet hidden sleeping spots not subject to the sound of video game machine guns.
in fact I am quite appreciative of all the new found silence of my apartment myself - though i do miss Zeus. It all started one night when his owner - my former housemate's boyfriend, who had come with her when she returned to live in my spare room as the solution to a temporary housing crisis, returned from outside and encountered a skunk on my deck. The cornered skunk let loose, as cornered skunks do, and the boyfriend, after roaring by me to the shower with reeking dog in tow, was so put out that he couldn't stop roaring for hours - and would accept no apologies or explanations at all for the kibble i had left out that had drawn the skunks.
Sigh.
It was not violent in the end. But it was a glimpse of violence - of living with a man who is capable of such out of control emotion and it taught me a lot - mostly profound sympathy for the SO many who are trapped in such situations. We made up eventually. Mutual apologies passed by letter, and then grudging courtesies. But i asked him to leave and he gladly went. Fortunately the room below me opened up and made it easy for him to take girlfriend and dog and simply move out of my sight with no great hardship (he is unemployed and making him - and Zeus and Gigantor - homeless - was not a burden of conscience i wanted). The rent below is even less - since they are renting out the living room as well. The world's belt tightening all around me - but that is a topic for another blog.
Til soon, or sooner at least, i promise,
Ocean Lady

2009-04-29T13:55:00.000-07:00

Its spring and I'm trying out a new blog post with my class.

2009-01-06T13:17:00.000-08:00

More then 500 Gazans killed now. 111 children. Ambulances targeted. Families taking refuge in UN school wiped out. The Israelis' indignantly accuse Hamas of taking refuge among civilians and say they must attack these buildings in order to root them out. Where else are they supposed to go in this tiny state? And who are they "rooting out" - sons and fathers and brothers of the families inside? Whoever could imagine that bombing a whole apartment building to punish a single man is a justifiable, reasonable moral idea? And where is it even remotely safe for anyone in Gaza right now? Two images stay with me, a 10 year old girl, her beautiful dark eyes wide with utter terror, looking from side to side at the horrors surrounding her in a hospital waiting room, her lips shaking so much she cannot speak. And another, the face of a very young unconscious boy, tender as a flower, the curve of a tiny ear, the long lashes resting on his cheek. A neighbor had brought him into hospital when his family was blown up, left him there without a friend, or even a name to wake to, or any memory but fire and pain when those soft brown eyes, too soon, open again.

"We had to give an answer," Israeli's say. "We had to stop the shelling." And surely they have given an answer. And surely the result will be more of what they have experienced in the past decades of hellish interactions: a bitter, despairing, wounded, captive people living among them. "We are doing everything we can to avoid civilian casualties." one Israeli official says stonefaced. "Israel knows nothing about any civilian casualties." says another. "I would like to kill them all," a man in the street is quoted as saying. "Well, actually, most Israelis don't think much about the welfare of Palestinians," an experienced observer remarks. "Its deeply regrettable, but we simply have to do it," say many more. And their plan? To take out all the rocket launchers and the "militants" firing them and, one gathers, and then leave behind the smoking bloody ruins of Gaza with again little or no thought at all for the welfare of those who remain. Let the UN fix it.

And Hamas? What level of insanity lead them to believe that firing hundreds of rockets would lead to the end of Israel's blockade? What rage-induced blindness leads them to continue firing in the face of the invasion?

A sign of insanity, if I paraphrase correctly, is continuining to expect a different result from something that has repeatedly not worked in the past. Surely both Hamas and Israelis are suffering from the same grinding painful obsession - that by hurting the other so much, the other will stop hurting them.

Imagine, just imagine, an hour when everyone that quivering country stopped hating or fearing. When leaders on both side opened themselves to concern for the well-being not just of their own population, but of the others, their close neighbors and distant cousins, who live so near, who truly, share so much. When plans were made to enhance the lives of both. When Palestinians were given something to live for, and encountered Israelis as friends and co-workers on government sponsored projects together. When those who continued to fire rockets, or make insulting statements, or harrass others were treated simply as criminals and arrested by the combined efforts of both governments. Hard to get there from here no doubt. But surely a direction worth trying with as much energy as the insanity now unfolding?

One Road Only

2008-12-27T12:08:00.000-08:00

Over 200 dead in Gaza my newspaper reports today. A military strike on "Hamas compounds". Violent reactions and demonstrations beginning all over the Middle East. Yet what moves me most is the account of a father weeping in the street for a son he had just sent out for cigarettes, beating his head with his hands in surrender to complete despair. It is hard for me to imagine the weight of suffering that is being borne now in so many places and most especially in Gaza.

I live in easy California, yet I found myself in a grinding circle of dark thoughts yesterday simply because a small feral cat that i feed was missing, and new, somewhat combative neighbors had spoken of having two raccoons i also feed trapped and removed. Had she been caught in their trap? Was she even now terrorized in a facility somewhere, scheduled to die. I have fed this cat for 15 years, worried over her well-being, tried vainly to bring her in from the cold, and been rewarded only by her willingness now, not to run as i stand 5 feet from her, sweet-talking away. The thought of her suffering brought grief that i could not shake. And even worse the thought of others causing her grief brought unaccustomed anger. A whole drama of surging possiblities and dark emotions over the welfare of this little cat took me over. Lying in bed at night my thoughts raced uncontrollably, a tortuous energy that no amount of self talk turned off. For the first time in my life i took a sleeping pill. The cat reappeared the next day. The neighbors had done nothing.

What oh what then do those whose children or parents or beloved husbands or wives are destroyed in front of them feel? What can life be like for those whose houses and whole neighborhoods are destroyed as a "lesson" in revenge. What black racing thoughts wrack their dreams? What repeating loops of internal agony haunt their days - their years?

I think sometimes that much of mankind is now suffering from a kind of mental illness - a plague of anger so intense it blocks all light and reason for months at a time. Surely many in the middle east must now live in this maelstrom of unease. And those who take action, take revenge, always see only the imperative of their own need to get even, never the similarity of their own actions to what was done to them. Worse, too many don't seem to mind at all that the main damage of their revenge falls more often than not on those who have done them no wrong.

I'm not sure why so many, myself included, generally expect the Israelis not to fall into this cycle of back and forth revenge so easily. And yet they do, and have, repeatedly, and did again yesterday. Hamas sent 60 rockets over several days into Israel border communities, mostly missing, but in the end killing several people and reawakening self righteous fury in the whole nation. The old justification - if we don't respond in kind they will never stop, "they will drive us into the sea" was again the mantra. And so, again, they brought the full weight of a military assault against residential neighborhoods in Gaza, a tiny captive nation they have cut off from food and medicine and energy for months already, a nation with no army, a people so damaged and scarred from conflict and hopelessness i am continually amazed they function at all. Hundreds of tons of bombs fell and "over 200" is the acknowledged casualty list. Clearly the number of savaged lives is far more. Many of them are HAMAS, men and youths dedicated to "getting even"for past assaults. Many many more surely were just men women and children trying to live in that desperate place, now wounded or dead or grieving. This way of responding to terrorism IS terrorism just as clearly as the rockets that went in the other direction. It is a blind assault on a group you want to get even with, never mind who pays the price. The price must be paid. Because.... that will make Israel feel better??

I guess what astonishes me most is the sheer inability of most Israelis and Palestinians to see, after decades of repeated demonstration, what comes next after such expressions of blind hatred. Everything gets worse, much worse, for many months. Hundreds more will likely die, with a ratio, if this back and forth of getting even follows previous patterns, of about 1:8 Israeli to Palestinian casualities. And the mental anguish they all live within will worsen. And nothing at all will be solved until once again total horror at the level of violence may bring outside mediators and force a cease fire. Its like watching Siamese twins fight. And in one of these mini-wars, in all the mutual madness, someone may at last set off an atom bomb and then..?

I do not judge either side for this. I know it is human. I know if i lived within it, on either side, that my own mind would be constantly anquished and whipped by angry thoughts. Nevertheless, it is a fruitless war, fought immorally on both sides, and above all futile, futile, futile. There is one road that leads out of this hell realm and ONE ROAD ONLY - to learn how to see life from the group's point of view. And little by little to find a way love those others - and consider their needs as important as one's own. The final negotiation of a permanent ceasefire must allow both groups a full and free and hopeful way of life - EVEN IF more blows fall in the interim - as they surely will. Terrorist acts will continue - with so many made mentally ill by anger over so many decades - but they must be treated appropriately as police matters, NOT part of a war against a whole population.

First thoughts

2008-12-20T19:05:00.000-08:00

Strange, now that i am faced with writing my thoughts so publicly for the first time, I find myself almost too shy to say anything. Commentators surge all around, these days, dissecting every development, on radio, flipping news and their opinions of it like linguistic flapjacks, energized with their wit and all the music breaks on public radio. Entertaining almost to hear the details of the end of civilization as i have known it laid out and dissected in such high spirited detail. An oboe plays in the background when the stock market descends. Dixieland plays when it rises. Millions are losing housing and jobs, politicians look out into TV camera lenses with a stunned expression, clearly having no idea how to stop the slide. Terrified of what is coming and more terrified to articulate it openly, for fear of bringing it to pass all that more quickly. The world is so vastly interconnected now, so immense, so complex. It is all happening so rapidly, with startling new developments no one had thought of coming by the hour. I think no one understands it all anymore, if any ever did. The enormity of all of us is now far beyond the imagination of any of us. And so we focus on the minutiae, the bond salesman who lost $50 billion of his investors money. The three big car companies in free fall. Fanny Mae and Freddy Mac and their cities of lost dreams. It all seemed far away at first. Though i knew the consequences must be coming. Like distant undersea earthquakes that one knows must generate tsunamis.

And so they have, shuddering through businesses all across the country and now beginning to touch the lives of those all around me. My landlord, a real estate developer, lost his job and my rent was raised $250 a month. Two leeks i bought at the store today, thinking to make my own soup, cost $1.99. Still working 30 hours weekly as a teacher, i am finding groceries ever harder to pay for - what of those who have already lost their jobs? The two California schools i work for now face huge deficits, with a state government in disarray in the face of a budget that will run out, apparently, months before more taxes come in. School administrators whisper to secretaries of terrible damaging changes that may be coming. Secretaries confide in teachers. Whole sections of education may be eliminated, perhaps hundreds of jobs to be lost locally. Impossible situations developing everywhere. Local projects are grinding to a halt. A local pool and many museums may close. Two favorite bookstores may close. Neighbors all around speak in hushed conversations when they meet, of spending less, holding on to what they have, of this person or that person who is being evicted. Where will they go all these evictees?