Even Nowgirls Get the Blues

An unexpected envelope in the mailbox this past weekend hit me like the cratering meteor that rattled and riddled part of Siberia. Its impact blew the lid off nuclear-strength memories buried deep so they couldn't cause paralyzing damage again. Families can be that toxic, leaving crater size holes, and as a friend just wrote: "You've got the absolutely most monstrous hands down."

Because I didn't know where or how to escape the literal fallout, I went to my altar. It looked comfortingly clean and shiny from its Losar renewal. I sat in front of it and began to notice what kept passing through my mind like the headlines that scroll across Times Square: the title of an old bestselling book: When Bad Things Happen to Good People, and Paul Simon's eloquent lyric: "Some people's lives roll easy, Some people's lives never roll at all." What also passed was the primary preoccupation of the early Puritan writers with how the sins of the fathers are visited upon the children.  Their crime, your punishment.

People with silky family ties are not as driven to the Dharma as those of us with ties that strangled, those of us left for dead to wander about seeking a fire-lit inn where there may be room. But as the lamentably late Traleg Rinpoche thinks it necessary to repeat over and again with increasing testiness in Mind At Ease, the Dharma was never intended to be a substitute for psychological therapy or pharmaceutical psychiatry. That is the terrible misuse we in the West want to make of it. And Dzongsar Khyentse Rinpoche in his inimitable way has written a laser sharp book to say: if you're looking to feel warm and fuzzy and good all over, forget meditation and go get a massage. That way you won't be disappointed.

I second. The Dharma is cold comfort. With an admittedly limited view, I could not see where it provides sympathy for the suffering of those punished by the misdeeds of others. When bad things happen to good people, it offers only the invisible logic of karma. Your bad; tough luck. It offers only the theory that somewhere back in time, along the power line of your energy source, there must have been major emissions of anger, jealousy, willful stupidity, greed or the let 'em eat cake hauteur of pride. Somewhere along your incarnation line, you zapped someone or many. That's why this life dances to the tune of that old lyric: "Who's sorry now, You had your way and now you must pay."

As my teacher likes to say: What if you ignored this law of karma and it was really true? So, maybe you can't prove or disprove karma, but obviously you're going to be better off in the long run if you hedge your bets by believing it and making this life a virtuous remedy. Well, when you take up the challenge of that what if, expiation turns into nonstop minding your manners: never doing greed, animosity, jealousy, so what or so there ever again. 

Dharma offers ways to help with this. Unfortunately, the paramitas and lojong and the tortuous logic of madhyamika are not for sissies or suckers with crib notes. The Dharma gives your tough luck the tough love of a DIY deal. Maybe that's why the word "warrior" emerges so many times, and there is so much insistence on courage, lots and even more courage than you swear you'd ever have. Frankly, giving your all to making sure the bad luck stops here, bravely standing by so no one you come upon will have to live with the crippling pain buried deep within you, watching your every step, then still getting smacked to the ground nevertheless can cancel any courage you've actually dug up. You just want to cry "Uncle!" and quit. But suicide would give you even worse karma the next time around.

There is of course an emergency contact, and I did dial Chenrezig (Avalokiteshvara), the pure white deity whose many heads see all suffering and whose many hands reach out to assuage it. I mumbled his mantra, Om Mani Peme Hung, "May All beings be free of suffering", and I prayed beseechingly to him as the great lord of love,  Solwa debso Jamgon Chenrezig. In the past, as I noted two years ago this month, he has miraculously responded, that time with a wind at my back that blew away the obstacles and debris in front of me.  But this great protector seemed strangely absent now as though he had more pressing things to do.

Since there was no balm inside, I took myself out for a walk, the way you would take out a dog who needs to relieve a streaming pressure or eliminate a pile of, um... shit. I walked into the park because sometimes there is great solace in the bigger picture that is Nature. Sometimes her vast beauty and startling triumphs can give you the solace of perspective, like Humphrey Bogart in Casablanca consoling Ingrid Bergman that given all the machinations of the world at large, the affairs of two small human beings don't amount to a hill of beans.

When you sit on a park bench, Nature will tell you a kind story. The grass may be cut down over and over, again and again, but the whacking only makes it defiantly grow back thicker and more green. The trees may be robbed of their leaves and fruits and left bereft of their great warmth and beauty, but they rev their energy to thrust forth new buds and shoots to start again. Anybody who has ever tried to cut one down to be rid of it knows a tree will just keep on sprouting limbs to defy death. 

And whether the trees are fully dressed in their fulsome green fashion or standing there stark naked in the cold, the birds visit and chirp like friends who love you despite what they can't figure out, and can only say they're so sorry.

In the arboretum, everything is labeled: this tree, that bush, their Latin and nick names and birthplace. Nothing escapes notice. Traleg Rinpoche says that if you always know the state of your mind, never NOT know what's going on with/in it, you are at the fine point of liberation and enlightenment. Since pain helps you notice, label and locate the point of origin, maybe it's a blue plate special served as a shortcut to enlightenment and liberation.

In the clearing around the pond or the fountain in a park, you can really see the sky. Sunday's was a gloriously cloud free rich blue, a pure and primordial vastness not stained by anything. It is a Mahamudra practice to look up and mix your breath, then your mind with the pristine infinity of such a richly blue sky. This helps you understand you and your mind are essentially that very same unstained and unimpeded infinity where lives roll easy because there are no blots or clouds to create distinctions. There are no fathers, no children, no good or bad or anything really happening. No hill and no beans. Just endless clear and vivid space that can never be obstructed.

It is a Tibetan yoga practice to spread your legs slightly wider than your hips and throw your arms out slightly past your shoulders with your fingers spread the way gospel singers do when they shout phrases like "glory be." With the fierce force of spit, you exhale whatever seems to be stuck inside you. Like your breath, it will exit and explode into the infinity of space, dissolving into nothing. You exhale once, twice and once again to shoot out all the poison. You stand there with your spread legs pointing to the Earth from which your body come, your arms a V pointing to the sky which reflects your mind, and realize you are Xing everything out, with those outspread and wiggling fingers signaling: "glory be."




~Sandy Garson "Wordsmithing to attest how the Dharma saved me from myself!"
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