sorry for the silence:sickness is a dharma challenge
I wanted to share from Mongolia with those who may be reading this blog the stories of the 73 year old Grandma who lived alone in her remote ger and of the remarkable, brave and extremely beautiful young woman named Narmandakh. Exhaustion, a bad internet connection and the problems from some mysterious ailment kept me from it.
Sadly I brought the exhaustion and mysterious symptoms with me, and for a while they did me in. Not being in control of your body is serious dharma practice. The frustrating and scary symptoms and the failure of anyone to diagnose what they add up to has definitely challenged my patience, dented my sense of impermanence (they are not going away), and taxed my belief that everything is pure and perfect as it is (sorry but I can't figure out how to make severe qualify.) I sat around obsessing about what was wrong with me and spent too much time looking up ridiculous things on the internet, desperate for an answer.
But last week, I caught myself bringing myself down, holding myself down in distress, wasting my time in pointess research. Slowly I began to realize that getting upset and depressed wasn't helping me feel better and get on, it was just making life worse. "Suppose this is all fatal and you die tomorrow?" I asked myself. "What you're gonna most regret is that you didn't do things you wanted. So what the hell? Go swimming. Enjoy yourself. Go to the movies with friends and laugh while you can." So I have been. I try to go about the day as if nothing is wrong, at least when I'm not going for tests. And if I do pop off tomorrow, at least I will have had some fun in the runup.
Auspiciously, the day I decided to do a U turn with my behavior, I received a very cheering email from Mongolia in which the six woman working at the cafe where I taught cooking hoped my back was better and announced that the cash register was really ringing daily now because of all the new food they were cooking. They were especially proud to report that the two youngest, who had been dishwashers and general aids when I got there, were now fulltime bakers. The demand was great for our soucream apple pie with the butter cookie crust, our cream cheese frosted carrot cake and oatmeal cookies, plus of course the cheesecake.
This was wondrous news all around. The cafe needed to make money to support all the return to Buddhism activities going on in Mongolia--or at least the free ones in its building. I'd been asked to come because the food was so unappealing the cafe wasn't raising enough money to pay its own bills. Now its receipts were double the old days and climbing.
The joy of the women and their kind messages to me was the most cheering. Frankly, it was unnerving to have to walk into a restaurant kitchen and tell the staff who'd been working 10 hours shifts there that what they cooked was disgusting, that in essence they were inadequate. After all that is the reason I had been summoned. But it turned out they were anxiously awaiting a teacher, someone who would show them how other countries cook. They couldn't get enough. And when something sold out, they were so gleeful, they jumped up and down, screamed and hugged each other. They couldnt believe they'd done it. In the end they were so grateful they pooled their very limited resources to take me out for dinner and give me a present.
That made the 14 hour work days, seven days a week, and the exhaustion worth it. Their email lifted my spirits out of their gloom, for it reminded me I had actually achieved something--something that seems to be of benefit--and achievement often carries a price. No Mongolia, no mysterious symptoms. No good deed goes unpunished.
Next the story of Grandma and Narmandakh and more....
Meanwhile let us all pray for the swift return of Kyabgon Traleg Rinpoche, so astonishingly clever at teaching Dharma to us Westerners and in flawless English. He died suddenly two weeks ago. The loss is enormous.
~Sandy Garson"Wordsmithing to attest how the Dharma saved me from myself!"
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Labels: Mongolia
posted by Sandy Garson @ 12:52 PM
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