Closer to Normal Today

Feeling closer to normal today. I woke up at 6:30 am, with a great line on my tongue that I should have written down. Instead I went back to sleep and forgot it.

I'm not supposed to do any physical work. So I sit in a chair and ask Linda to do this or that. I kidded her last night that she doesn't have a 24/7 smile. I guess she's human!

Will, no fever today. Looks like a couple of people who were praying for me were successful. Or, more successful than those praying for the pneumonia.

Get to go to Torah study now... and then the hardware store for six screws. I have recently organized all my screws and nuts so I wouldn't have to keep going to the hardware store. Yet, I always come up not having the ones I need. Is there a lesson there? Preparation doesn't work?

And I continually mess up by not reading instructions. It seems I'm wired to think that is cheating. Maybe after I'm 70, soon, I'll start reading instructions. But I'd rather make mistakes.

There are actually a couple of ideas I wanted to write about.

One is from Torah class today, where Moses is told by God to take off his shoes because the ground is holy. One thing I've learned in the last year is that saying x is y (this ground is holy) says nothing about z being y or not. But, the odds are a little greater, if x is y, then z is y. Just a little greater. You reach into a bag and grab a M&M. Generally, if you hear objects clanking around in the bag, they will be M&Ms too.

If Jews are chosen by God, and given “the promised land” that sways the chances that others are chosen as well, and given their “promised land.”

The second is from when I used the phrase with Michael today that one has to step outside of their shell. As I said it, I could see a shell of a body opening up, and the inside becoming the outside. It made me think of Flint's blog post (http://flintsparks.org/2015/12/the-space-between/),

“Many of you have heard me say, over and over, that awakening does not happen “in” a person. It happens “between.” If our lives are woven as a single fabric and linked as one inconceivable network of relationship, then to “attain individual enlightenment” has no meaning. However, the realization of liberating intimacy through profound meeting is the great gift of all contemplative practice and spiritual inquiry. But opening the space between us requires courage — the courage to see and to be seen. This capacity is grounded in the practice of loving presence which is the embodiment of wisdom and compassion.”

Perhaps when Socrates said that the "unexamined life is not worth living" he meant “life” not to mean my individual trials and tribulations, but rather “life” meaning interactions and intersections with others. In Torah study we read from a book called the Aura of the Torah (http://www.amazon.com/dp/0827609485/?tag=googhydr-20&hvadid=43209081026&hvpos=1t1&hvexid=&hvnetw=g&hvrand=10674722123649549816&hvpone=&hvptwo=&hvqmt=b&hvdev=c&ref=pd_sl_7ueyorf35u_b). Aura is something we often miss as we get caught up with the trials and tribulations of our lives. As Wordsworth wrote, ”...Little we see in Nature that is ours;....”

Happy New Year—Resolutions and Worrying

There seems to be some disagreements about whether New Years’ resolutions work. Like most things, they probably sometimes do and sometimes don't.

I'm making one today. To write something on my blog everyday. But not like before. Maybe. I'm going to focus on being honest rather than being wise. Somehow I realized this year that I am pretty stupid. Not so much in a demeaning way. More about realizing that we can know so little.

And I fight pneumonia... looking like I'll be the winner for now, mostly. Funny to think of the pneumonia as "not me" and "me" as the warrior. I tell others to embrace their enemy. Maybe I should take my advice?

Barbara writes about worrying. My mom and grandma were the worriers that I knew.

I commented on her fine blog:

Bertrand Russell wrote in his autobiography that as a youth he was fraught with worry, but then realized that anything that might happen in the grand scheme would be of such little consequence that it wouldn't matter. He claimed that he stopped worrying then. I once talked with someone in the early days of AIDS. He said waiting for the test results was excruciating, but finally learning about his death sentence was exhilarating. He had been liberated, in a sense.

Response to the poem “Mayfly” by Ellery Akers. Her poem starts: A mayfly struggles in the muddy water. I tell myself not to interfere, but ....

++++++++++

The angel helped the mayfly whose lifespan was only one day. It was not one of those acts that will appear on the front page of the New York Times.

I was struck by the reflection of the angel: how she felt better helping the mayfly escape the muddy water. Was “to feel good” the angel’s stimulus, or simply something she noticed after the fact.

The other day I helped a little bug find its way from our dining room to our garden. Why did I do that? If my motivation was simply for my own pleasure I would consider myself pretty selfish. Or if it was to avoid feeling bad for the demise of the bug in a foreign environment, I would think of myself as equally selfish.

So why do we help our struggling siblings? Are we separate from them? Are there really lines in the sand where I end and you begin? My mom used to say that when we mourn, we mourn our own death. Do we feel nothing for the other?

Why does the angel first tell herself not to interfere. Is it because the bug’s life is so short? My mother-in-law is at the end of her life. Yet she probably has many mayfly life spans ahead of her. And many angels. Yesterday she was dressed in her street clothes even though she couldn’t make it to the streets. It made her angel daughter very happy to see her ready for another day in the big world. Last night she fell out of her bed and survived without an injury (talking about a cat having nine lives).

In any case… Do angels give us life by taking care of us? Is life given and taken? We see daily incidents where life is taken prematurely, either accidentally or on purpose. We are saddened when this happens. It is as if a person was meant to live much longer than they actually do. But imagine they were only suppose to live as long as they lived. And imagine the mayfly was suppose to have a longer fluttering in the muddy water. Suppose suppose. Endless thinking takes me away from making someone’s day a little easier or happier.

Kerbey Lane, Austin, TX

The waiter asked if I had any questions. Not about the menu, I said. Well, he said, what's the question? "Who were you before you were born?" I answered. Then I added, "You don't need to give me an answer now." When we were through eating, he said that he had a question for me. "What?" I asked. "What is free on earth?" he asked. "I think I've heard that one, but I don't remember the answer," I answered. "Your breakfast," he answered. Then he handed us a check with a $0 total!
When I got home, I told my wife. "Pay forward time, " she said.

“I still believe, in spite of everything that people are good at heart.” —Anne Frank

My first thought, when I came across this quote yesterday, was that I wondered if the quote was still true. Is this a worse time than it was 70 years ago? When I read her diary in high school I don't remember questioning whether people were really “good at heart.” I asked my neighbor what he thought this morning, and he said that it was true if the person hadn't been indoctrinated. I wanted to ask him whether Christ would agree, but I didn't, assuming that he'd say that he didn't know.

Why would someone whose life had been turned upside down say that people were good at heart? Is it because the frontal lobe of her brain hadn't developed and that's what led Anne to such a ridiculous realization?

What was amazingly similar for Anne Frank and perhaps the rest of us who are under the mortality death sentence is that we tend to live pretty normal lives even though the death gremlin could knock at our door at any moment. i think the book is read in high school not because it is about the holocaust but rather because it is about a normal adolescent girl. Her unusual circumstances don't shift her life. She has the same thoughts, crushes, and insecurities that most of us did at her age (and still do).

So I've been evading the issue about whether I agree with her statement... And why? And how? On the one hand we have bands of people who not only hate others but proceed to kill them mercilessly. If all people were good at heart, then we have to include those people who were indoctrinated.

There I go again, avoiding the question about what I believe. I started thinking about my student who killed his teacher (not me). My mother, trained as a social worker, asked me if he was violent. "No," I said, "just confused."

Anne's statement struck a chord for me. Do I believe it, or just want to believe it? Would I believe it if I was in hiding? I don't know.

I still believe, in spite of everything, that people are good at heart.

Sand in the Eye

Comment on Jiaoan’s Sand in the Eye

I too had the thought that not expressing emotions was something you were suppose to do in Zen. Then I heard that it was more about letting them come to their natural end.

I have been in two concurrent political discussions lately. I stood on one side of the fence and my friends on the other. We all feel that we are not being heard. When I hear the expression "sand in the eye,” I am reminded of my recent conversations. We have something, deep down, that attaches us to our positions. We are like the scientist who works for a drug company. We want to show how effective is a medicine. We are not trying to find the truth, but rather trying to win the debate. The sand in our eyes—what we believe—is keeping us from exploring the issue.

“Beyond the sand there is the eye.” That could be called the letter "I" or me. It is the sand in me that no one is going to change.

In the koan, Jiaoan said “erasing views to become free.” Then we won't have sand in our eyes. We'll be able to see clearly. We will realize that we don't know the consequence of anything we do or propose because all is interdependent and impermanent. What worked yesterday may not work today or tomorrow.

Take What is Given

 "Just to be is a blessing

 Just to live is holy.”

—Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel

The second precept that we take in Soto Zen is “do not take what is not given.” At the San Francisco Zen Center they added a line to each of the precepts to give them a positive spin. “2. A disciple of Buddha does not take what is not given but rather cultivates and encourages generosity.”

Perhaps it should be, “we should take what is given.” Someone suggested that I should add an only to that: "we should take only what is given."

In any case, I thought it would be an interesting generosity practice to focus on taking rather than giving. Rabbi Heschel's statement suggests that being on earth is a blessing. Appreciating that seems transformational. I feel, “Thank you, universe, for letting me be. Thank you for the innumerable gifts that you shower on me every moment.” (This may introduce a dilemma: as a generous and loving person, do we thank the coyote/universe who enjoys our neighbor’s yelping dog for supper?)

I imagined myself starting to focus on these blessings. How lucky I am to be surrounded in my life by so many jewels! How lucky to live in an environment so conducive to my interests!

The second line of the Heschel quote, is “just to live is holy.” In Buddhism we talk about the rarity of being born human. It is the rarity of the possibility that one tortoise would rise to the surface of the ocean and its head would go through one floating oxen yoke. That's how lucky it is to be born in human realm.

In the Torah, God says that you shall be holy for I'm holy. Here, too, it is a recognition of what it is that which makes us special. It doesn't matter what you call that which created us. It also says that we should revere our mother and father. We revere holy things, and  that makes us holy, for we came from holy parents. And our mother and father, metaphorically, are everything that comes together to give us this life.

What a great tattoo this would be, with each line of Heschel’s quote on a different arm! Then the words could be easily shared when we reach with both hands to accept what is given to us.

And we can smile and say thanks.

—Kim Mosley