GO FLY A KITE
Last November when my spirit felt as though it were getting dark as the days, I bought a kite. The old-fashioned, elegant simplicity of making a colorful little cutout float high on a breeze seemed ideal self-medication for getting myself uplifted, and the timelessly plain, child sized diamond with two fluttering ribbons cost something like $12.00 which was mighty cheap for a non-Canadian prescription.
As I suspected, it is impossible to look down or feel down when flying a kite; the tug is totally upward. My spirit lifted as I ran across San Francisco’s big bayside lawn, working the wind with that bobbing and diving diamond. Somebody else had a vividly colored clipper ship sailing across the sky and somebody had a huge red box bouncing on four long white strings, its blue ribbons in beguiling flutter as it swooped and rose, swooped and rose, now on this side, now on that side of the enchanting clipper. And under them both flapped my little diamond with two ribbons. I came away exhilarated, so happy I went out and bought a seagull kite with a four-foot wingspan.
This joy had to be shared for instructions warned one person must loft the kite while another person unfurls the string to guide it. I invited friends to join me barefoot on the beach. First they were surprised by what seemed an outlandish idea, then they were surprised by how addicting keeping a kite in the air flow can be—even when that gull tanked, which it did way too often. Over and over with the stubborn repetitiveness of Ground Hog Day, we launched big bird, furiously furled out string, ran this way and that, cooing and shooing and being entranced by its buoyant leaps into the stratosphere. Trying to fly high was heady fun, such innocent forgotten buoyant cheer, nothing seemed to matter but keeping up the kite and the good time. When we quit, we were effervescent.
It's not easy to feel glad to be alive in a world where Odes to Joy are limited to Beethoven’s Ninth. We pass our days in a culture of complaint: synonyms for “discontent” take up one full page of Roget’s Original Thesaurus, 1962, as do those for “suffering”, but they do not flow freely for “joy.” After pleasure, delight and rapture, they slip into honeymoon, indulgence and beatitude. This is a shortcoming that reminds me how much my high school posse used to scheme to get our friend Andi out of the house without encountering her uptight mother, for if any of us chirped that rhetorical “How are you?” we were stuck listening to a ten to twenty minute litany of all the slights, ills and resentments of her past 48 hours. She was incapable of saying: “Fine” or “Great!” or even smiling.
When thirty years ago the eminent mythologist Joseph Campbell decoded ancient wisdom and told young people to “follow your bliss”, the entire corporate-political-button down ivory league establishment came whipcracking down with fiery misguided attacks on his seeming invocation to drug up and tune/space out. They shot him down so viciously nobody examined what he meant by much owed to joy. Nobody ever again mentioned bliss as a goal, let alone a need.
As it happens, two weeks ago I followed my bliss back to Maine. I needed to be there on a summer day when the seals swim in the high tide, the great blue heron stalks in the low and I splash in that warm channel of the great salt sea at my door. For ten days happiness was the major nutrient of my life. I made strawberry jam, planted flowers, paddled my kayak, basked on flat ledges in the warm sun and sipped gin and tonic at sunset sitting barefoot by the bay with old friends. I heard the screen door slam and the fridge open onto the precious bounty of the land. I saw the people I want to see because they were willing to give time to see me. I fell asleep –the smell of the sea still in my hair--reading an enchanting story while the full moon blushed red as it slid over pitch dark pines, its jovial reflection echoing in the ripples of the bay below.
The effect was utterly magical. Nothing momentous happened, even the July 4th fireworks were the usual fizzy failures, but being where you want to be and who you are piles happiness on happiness into peak experience that unleashes an avalanche of joy burying doubt and fear. Contentment is a still point in the churning sales pitch world: I had no inclination to purchase anything, to change anything, to go anywhere, to stir anyone up, to feel sorrow or jealousy or unconfident or self-conscious. I was so satisfied with myself I didn’t even bother to put on lipstick when in public. Blocked by neither boredom nor discontent days flowed free. With no obstacle to go around, I felt no resistance. Gliding like a sailboat or a kite running with the wind, I learned that bliss is simply the absence of struggle. No dissatisfaction guaranteed.
Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche is said to have chided his American students that while the universe is continually raining blessings down they keep holding their umbrella up. Blessings turn out to be those small joys that materialize—getting to Maine when you want to, getting a parking space or a plane seat in the exit row or an unanticipated call from an old love suddenly thinking of you. Blessings include the freedom to go to the movies and get an aisle seat without a seven foot man suddenly plopping down in front of you or finding the jammed freeway lane momentarily free of traffic as you zoom in from the on-ramp or not getting the condo whose market value fell two months after the closing. They are shiny street pennies that once you train yourself to spot can become, as happened to me, the cosmic gift of a curbside $5 bill everyone else passes by.If you look you can detect pattern. And if you get thankful, you will see yourself protected, showered everywhere with gifts and good luck and doors opening, reasons to be joyful that add up to the sheer bliss of being you alive.
This can actually keep you alive. I spent my Saturday morning in paradise sitting on my dock in the bay with my friend Mei, a powerful Chinese physician who has spent the last 15 years so miraculously helping cancer patients to survive she’s been invited to participate in research at Harvard Medical School. I told her the Dalai Lama’s twenty years of dialogue with Western scientists on the mind/body connection has revealed physical proof that the mind definitely impacts the immune system. Brain changes can be charted. “Yes!” she cried, her hands shooting up to frame her head, “yes! I have been saying this for years: cancer is 70% up here. That is most of what I treat.”
Three weeks earlier a sick friend had envied my steady health, saying I am lucky because I have good genes. But I’ve had physical difficulties that I now see were simultaneous with emotional ones, so my bet is on having good joy. My mother exited her unhappy life by dying of cancer when she was 50. My friend Andi tormented by that malcontent mother was eaten away by cancer at the age of 35. The day after I got back from Maine I went to get my hair cut and found the usually voluble Tina bummed by news that she needed to be re-tested for possible cancer. She had just started suffering from edema—today she was trying support hose—and she just hates it when stuff like this happens. When we got down to the stuff happening —Miss Type A desperately holding on to a cheating ex-husband and the house they lived in so they could join in another real estate deal, I could see that with all her resistance dedicated to fighting reality (she didn’t want to let go of husband and move to Plan B), she had none left for her immune system. Was it any wonder her body was holding on too, to water and toxins?
I am writing all this because I left that beauty salon and came face to face with my own inexorable sorrow. My Maine idyll had included a most unexpected call from the man it is my sad fate to love to the depth of my being, a man who evidently loves me profoundly too for after more than a year of no contact, he was calling to say he needed the sight of me again. Perhaps happiness is mysteriously magnetic. Maybe the phone call was a blessing like the full red moon. Maybe it was a blessing to sip tea that afternoon sitting across from my personal piece de resistance learning yet again that mine is a thwarted, aborted love because he is tragically afflicted by narcissism, which prevents him from relating normally to others. When he left, both of us stuck as usual on start with nowhere to go, I watched myself tank like that airborne seagull. Unable to rejoice that I loved someone who actually loved me back, I swallowed my dismay, resisting the wisdom of letting go. I didn't care if I was blessed by being spared suffering that might come from getting closer to this damaged and damaging being. I felt heavy, lethargic, dazed from coming so close yet being so far from what ought to have been the jackpot of joy. My body shrank from the weight of pain. A friend said I sounded weak and bleary when I answered the telephone. I told her why. “O come on now,” she responded crisply. “String him up, string him along. What I am trying to say is: go fly a kite!”
Technorati Tags: Yours In The Dharma. Sandy Garson, Dharma, Buddhist
As I suspected, it is impossible to look down or feel down when flying a kite; the tug is totally upward. My spirit lifted as I ran across San Francisco’s big bayside lawn, working the wind with that bobbing and diving diamond. Somebody else had a vividly colored clipper ship sailing across the sky and somebody had a huge red box bouncing on four long white strings, its blue ribbons in beguiling flutter as it swooped and rose, swooped and rose, now on this side, now on that side of the enchanting clipper. And under them both flapped my little diamond with two ribbons. I came away exhilarated, so happy I went out and bought a seagull kite with a four-foot wingspan.
This joy had to be shared for instructions warned one person must loft the kite while another person unfurls the string to guide it. I invited friends to join me barefoot on the beach. First they were surprised by what seemed an outlandish idea, then they were surprised by how addicting keeping a kite in the air flow can be—even when that gull tanked, which it did way too often. Over and over with the stubborn repetitiveness of Ground Hog Day, we launched big bird, furiously furled out string, ran this way and that, cooing and shooing and being entranced by its buoyant leaps into the stratosphere. Trying to fly high was heady fun, such innocent forgotten buoyant cheer, nothing seemed to matter but keeping up the kite and the good time. When we quit, we were effervescent.
It's not easy to feel glad to be alive in a world where Odes to Joy are limited to Beethoven’s Ninth. We pass our days in a culture of complaint: synonyms for “discontent” take up one full page of Roget’s Original Thesaurus, 1962, as do those for “suffering”, but they do not flow freely for “joy.” After pleasure, delight and rapture, they slip into honeymoon, indulgence and beatitude. This is a shortcoming that reminds me how much my high school posse used to scheme to get our friend Andi out of the house without encountering her uptight mother, for if any of us chirped that rhetorical “How are you?” we were stuck listening to a ten to twenty minute litany of all the slights, ills and resentments of her past 48 hours. She was incapable of saying: “Fine” or “Great!” or even smiling.
When thirty years ago the eminent mythologist Joseph Campbell decoded ancient wisdom and told young people to “follow your bliss”, the entire corporate-political-button down ivory league establishment came whipcracking down with fiery misguided attacks on his seeming invocation to drug up and tune/space out. They shot him down so viciously nobody examined what he meant by much owed to joy. Nobody ever again mentioned bliss as a goal, let alone a need.
As it happens, two weeks ago I followed my bliss back to Maine. I needed to be there on a summer day when the seals swim in the high tide, the great blue heron stalks in the low and I splash in that warm channel of the great salt sea at my door. For ten days happiness was the major nutrient of my life. I made strawberry jam, planted flowers, paddled my kayak, basked on flat ledges in the warm sun and sipped gin and tonic at sunset sitting barefoot by the bay with old friends. I heard the screen door slam and the fridge open onto the precious bounty of the land. I saw the people I want to see because they were willing to give time to see me. I fell asleep –the smell of the sea still in my hair--reading an enchanting story while the full moon blushed red as it slid over pitch dark pines, its jovial reflection echoing in the ripples of the bay below.
The effect was utterly magical. Nothing momentous happened, even the July 4th fireworks were the usual fizzy failures, but being where you want to be and who you are piles happiness on happiness into peak experience that unleashes an avalanche of joy burying doubt and fear. Contentment is a still point in the churning sales pitch world: I had no inclination to purchase anything, to change anything, to go anywhere, to stir anyone up, to feel sorrow or jealousy or unconfident or self-conscious. I was so satisfied with myself I didn’t even bother to put on lipstick when in public. Blocked by neither boredom nor discontent days flowed free. With no obstacle to go around, I felt no resistance. Gliding like a sailboat or a kite running with the wind, I learned that bliss is simply the absence of struggle. No dissatisfaction guaranteed.
Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche is said to have chided his American students that while the universe is continually raining blessings down they keep holding their umbrella up. Blessings turn out to be those small joys that materialize—getting to Maine when you want to, getting a parking space or a plane seat in the exit row or an unanticipated call from an old love suddenly thinking of you. Blessings include the freedom to go to the movies and get an aisle seat without a seven foot man suddenly plopping down in front of you or finding the jammed freeway lane momentarily free of traffic as you zoom in from the on-ramp or not getting the condo whose market value fell two months after the closing. They are shiny street pennies that once you train yourself to spot can become, as happened to me, the cosmic gift of a curbside $5 bill everyone else passes by.If you look you can detect pattern. And if you get thankful, you will see yourself protected, showered everywhere with gifts and good luck and doors opening, reasons to be joyful that add up to the sheer bliss of being you alive.
This can actually keep you alive. I spent my Saturday morning in paradise sitting on my dock in the bay with my friend Mei, a powerful Chinese physician who has spent the last 15 years so miraculously helping cancer patients to survive she’s been invited to participate in research at Harvard Medical School. I told her the Dalai Lama’s twenty years of dialogue with Western scientists on the mind/body connection has revealed physical proof that the mind definitely impacts the immune system. Brain changes can be charted. “Yes!” she cried, her hands shooting up to frame her head, “yes! I have been saying this for years: cancer is 70% up here. That is most of what I treat.”
Three weeks earlier a sick friend had envied my steady health, saying I am lucky because I have good genes. But I’ve had physical difficulties that I now see were simultaneous with emotional ones, so my bet is on having good joy. My mother exited her unhappy life by dying of cancer when she was 50. My friend Andi tormented by that malcontent mother was eaten away by cancer at the age of 35. The day after I got back from Maine I went to get my hair cut and found the usually voluble Tina bummed by news that she needed to be re-tested for possible cancer. She had just started suffering from edema—today she was trying support hose—and she just hates it when stuff like this happens. When we got down to the stuff happening —Miss Type A desperately holding on to a cheating ex-husband and the house they lived in so they could join in another real estate deal, I could see that with all her resistance dedicated to fighting reality (she didn’t want to let go of husband and move to Plan B), she had none left for her immune system. Was it any wonder her body was holding on too, to water and toxins?
I am writing all this because I left that beauty salon and came face to face with my own inexorable sorrow. My Maine idyll had included a most unexpected call from the man it is my sad fate to love to the depth of my being, a man who evidently loves me profoundly too for after more than a year of no contact, he was calling to say he needed the sight of me again. Perhaps happiness is mysteriously magnetic. Maybe the phone call was a blessing like the full red moon. Maybe it was a blessing to sip tea that afternoon sitting across from my personal piece de resistance learning yet again that mine is a thwarted, aborted love because he is tragically afflicted by narcissism, which prevents him from relating normally to others. When he left, both of us stuck as usual on start with nowhere to go, I watched myself tank like that airborne seagull. Unable to rejoice that I loved someone who actually loved me back, I swallowed my dismay, resisting the wisdom of letting go. I didn't care if I was blessed by being spared suffering that might come from getting closer to this damaged and damaging being. I felt heavy, lethargic, dazed from coming so close yet being so far from what ought to have been the jackpot of joy. My body shrank from the weight of pain. A friend said I sounded weak and bleary when I answered the telephone. I told her why. “O come on now,” she responded crisply. “String him up, string him along. What I am trying to say is: go fly a kite!”
Technorati Tags: Yours In The Dharma. Sandy Garson, Dharma, Buddhist
posted by Sandy Garson @ 12:48 AM
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