Yours in the Dharma:  Essays from a Buddhist perspective by Sandy Garson

This blog, Yours in the Dharma by Sandy Garson, is an effort to navigate life between the fast track and the breakdown lane, on the Buddhist path. It tries to use a heritage of precious, ancient teachings to steer clear of today's pain and confusion to clear the path to what's truly happening.

Wednesday, February 23, 2011

Currying favor

It’s impossible these days to walk down a street or supermarket aisle and not be accosted by someone selling something or signing up names for a petition. I don’t know why they believe it’s okay to aggressively interrupt people stressed more than enough as it is, people just trying to focus to get to their office or their doctor’s appointment or the diaper shelf so they can get home before the babysitter leaves. I’m certainly in favor of the Red Cross, gay rights and Greenpeace saving the whales—I love what they do. But when their agents disrespect what I have to do enough to step into my line of forward motion to cut me off as though I have no vital agenda of my own, I don't want to share the love.


The clipboard clippers who step out to stop me are unfortunately delivering a message Pema Chodron was trying to send when she told a group of us that after the shocking shoot up of students at Kent State, an Ohio National Guardsman met the press and said even though the hands at the end of their outstretched arms clenched only flowers, the sight of people marching toward him in deliberate confrontation was naked aggression. That's how these interceptors look to me. And why I am abrupt passing by with signs of dismissing them. I am trying to deliver the message that their tactics are not okay and probably aren’t saving any whales.



I am by now pretty set in this way, so I was taken aback the other day when I breezed by somebody parked behind a food table half blocking the entrance to the first aisle of a local supermarket, and was asked if I wanted to try Afghan food. A quick glance revealed stuffed flat bread and curried lentils I already happily consume. “No!” I said, speeding by. But memories of how good they taste made turn me around. “I’ve already tried it. I buy your stuff. You make great food.” I took off for the bread bar but heard a voice behind me shout: “Then come around and I’ll cook more for you.” That guy sharing the love stopped me right in my fast tracks. The Afghans shouldn’t be at war, I told myself. They should be at the dinner table. Stop petitions to stop the war. Let’s all just sit around eating bolani and curried lentils and savor Afghanistan.



~Sandy Garson"Wordsmithing to attest how the Dharma saved me from myself!"
http://www.sandygarson.com
http://yoursinthedharma.blogspot.com/

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Monday, February 21, 2011

The Balance Beam

I’ve just moved from one container into another, with furnishings, fashions and food flowing behind me like the tide. In this new phase of my life’s downhill slide, I went from the equivalent of an open bay, a three-bedroom flat, into a tiny cove, 650 sq ft of a one-bedroom apartment. Before the moving van appeared, I expended what felt like thunderous energy as I tried to get rid of half my furniture, half my clothes and a quarter of my books—I never part with kitchen stuff. Yet despite the frenetic trips to three used bookstores and two clothing consignment shops, five thrift store drop-offs and a truck full for Home Consignment, I can only echo the lament of the late E.B. White at his attempt to move: I am awed by the unwillingness of my things to leave me. I am shocked, shocked, that nobody wanted what I have been clinging to for years as just too great to part with. There's emptiness for you: I look at the blue sweater with a furry black cat stretched across it from the chest to the back and see fabulous vintage fashion from a legendary Madison Avenue store while a fashionista looks at it and sees an old oddity so baggy nobody would be caught dead in it.



Sadly, even though I did bravely give to the thrift shop the cozy sweater I wore during my 30-day meditation retreat in the snowy winter of 1991, and even though I am selling at auction a painting I adore, and even after making two emergency runs to Goodwill--one with an Italian handbag shaped like a dachshund, I am still drowning in my own detritus. I have to keep pulling large framed prints away from the front of the cabinet to get to my files and office supplies. I am tripping over shoes that don’t fit in the closet, and I can’t sit in the upholstered chair because it’s cradling an antique lamp an old friend gave me for my first house from what had been his Bucks County antique shop.



I have enough dust balls to prove I am not a clean freak. But I suffer from such a strong sense of balance, or maybe feng shui, that whatever is not in its naturally inevitable place screams at me. I am so badly afflicted by aesthetic sense that I always walk into other people's homes or offices and right away start mentally re-arranging everything. I devise meals to get coherent colors and have been known to move flowers around and around in a vase until their colors and shapes cohere into a pleasing design like one on an artist’s canvas. I am so allergic to non-alignment that anything out of place causes an itchy mental rash that hogs all my energy and attention. That's why I spend way too much time standing puzzled in front of my closet trying to figure out which pants look best texture-wise and color-wise and of course style-wise with the sweater I feel like wearing because it feels like that day’s sweater. I can't help myself. Thus, in a small space that exaggerates clutter and crowding, I’ve spent the last weeks madly chasing the aha! moment, involved in a weird cross between musical chairs and a jigsaw puzzle. The floor lamp here…no there…the other room… the bookcase is too busy…the pitcher too tall for that spot…the plant too wide…you’re out!



In feathering this new nest, I have been so obsessed moving knickknacks and lamps and furniture around and around to achieve harmony-- my version of harmony of course, that I haven’t been to movies or museums or my favorite walking grounds. I have been to lots of home improvement and hardware stores though, certain this time, the third time, the shower curtain will finally be the right one: thick enough to not blow into the narrow tub and plain enough so its design doesn’t make the tiny bathroom too busy and claustrophobic. I’ve been back to the lamp store four times for a lampshade that might make that antique lamp fit in its new surroundings. I bought a $20 hook at the Container Store. It’s astonishing how free spending all this re-arranging has suddenly made the tightly budgeted me. I am that hard core gone.


The joke of course is that after passing Thanksgiving weekend in retreat in a shabby cabin with castoff furniture and no bathroom or kitchen, I have been trying to hold the satisfaction I found there. I remind myself how there wasn’t much happiness in the 9- bedroom Queen Anne mansion into which I was born or any of the Park Avenue duplexes I was a guest in. There evidently wasn’t any satisfaction in the huge Hamptons’ mansion where the picture perfect Christmas party I went to was being photographed for a national magazine, for by the time that magazine was published the following Christmas, the young photogenic couple was divorced and fighting over the beautiful blond children. The mega rich couple whose decorator spent $25,000 on knickknacks the day I catered their Maine housewarming was also divorced within a year. There was only the sorrow of sickness and separation in the borrowed Belgravia flat between the one for the royal family of some Emirate or other and the one for the Maharaja of Jaipur. Yet I found bliss in that makeshift waterless cabin where everything was the cheapest available and nothing matched anything.



Part of me was starting to sing "Can't get no satisfaction" and part to chastise myself when my right knee suddenly went bad. Not being able to walk was an enormous distraction. It made me stop yelling at myself for being dissatisfied and “spendy” and just get into bed. Since it was late afternoon and I wasn't sleepy, I decided to get more detritus off the nightstand by reading the book my Tibetan goddaughter gave me for Christmas. It was Sogyal Rinpoche’s Glimpse After Glimpse: Daily Reflections on Living and Dying published back in 1995. And right up front as his entry for January 17, the actual day I moved, was this:


In Tibetan, the word for “body” is lü, which means “something you leave behind,” like baggage. Each time we say lü, it reminds us that we are only travelers, taking temporary refuge in this life and this body. In Tibet, people did not distract themselves by spending all their time trying to make their external circumstances more comfortable …. Going on, as we do, obsessively trying to improve our conditions, can become an end in itself and a pointless distraction. Would people in their right mind think of fastidiously redecorating their hotel room every time they checked into one?



~Sandy Garson"Wordsmithing to attest how the Dharma saved me from myself!"
http://www.sandygarson.com
http://yoursinthedharma.blogspot.com/

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Wednesday, February 02, 2011

Trouble on Oiled Waters

These midwinter eruptions in the Arab world look like last spring’s blowout in the Gulf of Mexico. Drilling too long and too deep, this time into bedrock psyche, has once again released enormous pent up pressure in nonstop gushes that nobody can contain. The government thugs who’ve entered Cairo’s Tahrir Square are like that crass blowout preventer BP used to squash the energy down. And we all know how marvelously that worked. So in the face of that disastrous strategy, BP had our government Coast Guard set fire to the oil to prevent its spread, a forerunner of the Tunisian despot sending his troops in to fire on the protest spreading through Tunis and the gunfire in Cairo.



When there was oil coated death everywhere there was flora and fauna near the Gulf of Mexico, mainstream news reports concentrated on the rising price of oil and thus the rising fortunes of BP. And now they talk mostly about how the protests are adversely affecting Suez shipping and pricing of oil. What to do? What to do? We care more about the gas in our cars than the gassing of people just trying to live decently because the cars are ours, here and now. We are that stunted.


The latest BP attempt, announced today amid flashes of news from Cairo, to have our government mislead us about the damage that it did by halving the estimate of oil flowing into the Gulf looks like an instant replay of Mubarak blacking out the internet and our blacking out Al Jazeera. Information is power so those who have no moral legs to stand on can only use a power outage to keep their standing.


What unnecessary suffering human beings cause each other being that selfish. Samsara is just instant replay, so sickeningly repetitive it leads to carpal tunnel inflammation of the soul. Om mani padme hung.




~Sandy Garson"Wordsmithing to attest how the Dharma saved me from myself!"
http://www.sandygarson.com
http://yoursinthedharma.blogspot.com/

Technorati Tags: , , , , , , Creative Commons LicenseThis work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 License.
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Yours In The Dharma 2001-2010, Sandy Garson Copyright 2001-2010 Sandy GarsonAll rights Reserved