An Oy Story
The couple upstairs came home last night around 6 glowing like Christmas lights as they carefully carried in their holiday gift, life. New baby James looked sweetly flawless. What didn't show was how perfectly polite he was. He had waited to come out and play until after his mother enjoyed Thanksgiving dinner with her parents. She did not want to be in a hospital or in labor on turkey day, getting second class attention, and, James must've known she is used to getting what she wants. That's probably why he was also chivalrous enough to tarry a few extra days so he would be a Sagittarius instead of a Scorpio. Everybody upstairs is happy, except perhaps the 3-year-old whose limelight has just been stolen.
My phone was ringing. It was a dear younger friend of mine who now lives in LA. Once gay marriage was legalized in California, he got a new toupee and staged an extravaganza wedding to the blond blue--eyed foreigner who'd been following him around for almost two years. That's what he wanted more than anything in the universe--not a blue-eyed blond, just someone special all for him. The glow from the achievement was megawatt, but it was quickly eroded by the rise of a glower. No matter how hard my friend tried, his partner's sudden unhappiness ripped like shears up the middle of the relationship and severed it. He moved out. Alone again, my friend poured out thousands upon thousands of dollars for couples therapy. What he discovered was how trapped the foreigner felt: he repeatedly complained he'd given up a good supervisory job, a condo and a country, as well as his family, to be married and stuck in El Lay. He was living my friend's life, not his own, and he resented this enough to quit and go live at the site of a personal assistant job he got. Except, finding servitude even worse, he had begun inching back, running away, inching back.
I had to hang up in the midst of advising my friend that it was probably best to bravely confront this yo-yoing with a simple frank question: Is it better for you if I totally get out so you can have your life all to yourself? I wanted to tell him that if the guy said bye that would eventually turn out to be okay because the universe loves us so much, sometimes not getting what we want turns into the best happily ever after. But I had to go. My young friend from Spain was texting her imminent arrival to crash on my air mattress. She was back from El Lay where she'd schlepped her life to merge it with the man she thinks she loves, back to escape the lonely struggle of having sacrificed her hard-earned San Francisco familiarity-- friends, work, neighborhood-- to blend into this man's situation. Like the blond foreigner, this dark eyed, dark haired beauty was not happy. Building a relationship, a safe suspension bridge between two mountains of emotions and ideas, was aching, tact-breaking labor. She did love this fellow and was trying very hard, but would this sense of struggle end? Tomorrow morning she was going to a life coaching retreat.
Before she was even gone, before I could ask her if she'd ever considered how much trouble her mother had suffered to build what looks like an ideal marriage with her father, before the sun was up, the ring of my mobile woke me. The call was from Europe, the special lama, now defrocked and working in a sushi joint because he fell in love and has a child. I'd been kind enough to sponsor his retreat a decade ago, so perhaps I could help now. Sponsor again. His younger brother had been in our guru's school, doing well in the 8th grade, when their father abruptly forced him back to the high Himalayan valley village they come from. "My father felt like he was going to die in the next year or two and he wanted to be certain the farm and the cows safely passed to one of his sons. My brother was 16 then. Now he is 18 with a wife and two children and no money up there for anything. Please, can you help him." (I did not end with ? because it was not a question.)
O dear Buddha. The people in Nepal have less than nothing so they all think their exiles must have hit it rich in the West and they stick like ticks. The exiles, having not even enough funds to support themselves and no way to evade their families, turn in desperation to native Westerners sure our cultural flash is the sign we're all loaded like Brinks. I wanted to slide deep under the duvet to hide from this. But I'd just told my young, put-upon friend in LA to speak truth like a knife though butter, so I reckoned I should as well. I told my friend, this lama, I was having enough trouble these days sponsoring myself and paying my own bills. I told him years ago I'd somehow been tagged by one of his cohorts to become the official caretaker of a fatherless boy from the next valley when he became 16, and this kid came with an add-on, an inseparable friend from the same village who was already addressing emails to me as "mom." I had no idea how I could ever manage this. Was I not already committed to continually finding enough money to feed Rinpoche's growing army of monks, nuns and schoolchildren--nearly 2,000 mouths now?
I was starting to tell him about my vow to one of his close Dharma brothers to look after his niece who is now at college in Canada when I remembered the email that hit my screen just before baby James arrived. It came from a Sherpa student graduate of Rinpoche's school and a high school in middle America. Two months ago, her younger sister had sent a desperation email asking me to help find this young woman a cheap or free place to live so she could take the medical assistant program she'd been accepted for. "You are always so kind," she wrote, "i thought you could help." That made me feel very obliged to try and the dakinis kicked in good luck. I found a friend who had a friend who had an extra room once used by an estranged daughter. She offered it for free. So the Sherpa flew in from MIssouri, settled her stuff there, and thanked me for making her education possible. Yesterday's followup email said the woman's daughter re-appeared so the woman told her to take her stuff and go. But not to worry: she had a friend and that friend had a tiny apartment so she'd bought an air mattress to stay there. (All these tiny apartments and air mattresses color this oy story.) She'd be all right, she wrote. Her friend is a refugee from Rwanda. The Sherpa is passing time reading her book by a young Somali woman, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, whose courage is inspiring her. How's that for an old fashioned life coach?
Thinking about a Sherpa put me in mind to suggest to my lama friend perhaps his brother could participate in the trekking boom. Sadly, the Nepali government--one of the most inept and corrupt on this planet--just opened a money stream (i.e.permit prices) by opening this formerly secret and sacred area to trekkers. Why shouldn't a local or two profit from the coming corrosion? The lama seemed happily relieved when he hung up with a final "Tashi delek!" But I was a mess. Here I was about to abet profiteering when just yesterday I was doing my damnedest to stop it. For months I'd been urged to help prevent Chinese bulldozers from destroying the ancient sacred high hidden valley of Tsum as they plowed a highway from Lhasa to Kathmandu. It was now or never but just yesterday I'd finally gotten to sending an email to somebody who might significantly manage that. So saving the sacred authenticity of these secret valleys was on what's left of my mind.
I didn't want to think about it. It was way to early in the day and I didn't want to soil my bed with shit like this. Since I had the phone in hand, I checked my email for distraction. One new letter...from my dear German friend with two granddaughters: one living in Spain with her mother, the other living a block away with her father and spending afterschool hours with her granny. My friend sounded sad. Everything was okay really, on the surface anyway, she said, but in truth her husband's physical condition was "not getting any better as people always assume. Actually it is getting worse and we are trying our best to be brave and go on." More than 70 years ago, he'd been new life like baby James, and almost 50 years ago, my friend had worked at building a bridge to him in marriage, like my young friend's Spanish parents. Their son had tried too, like my friend in LA, but his bridge collapsed, its shear splitting children.
My Spanish friend slipped out the door to catch her ride to life coaching. I lay in bed sad but also weirdly happy. All the troubles streaming through were not about me. They were for me binoculars that revealed up close and personal that suffering of change the Buddha, 2,600 years ago, warned us about. I had been given the gift of zooming in on the same old same old cycling around and around to keep carving the canyon called Samsara. A new baby, an old man, a broken marriage, an impending one, mired in family duty and migrated toward a better life. I didn't have to drive anywhere for life coaching.
And if you don't think those calls, texts and emails really came, feel free to check with the NSA.
~Sandy Garson "Wordsmithing to attest how the Dharma saved me from myself!"
http://www.sandygarson.com Also www.veggiyana.org.
http://yoursinthedharma.blogspot.com/
Technorati Tags: Yours In The Dharma, Sandy Garson, Dharma, Buddhist, Buddhism, Spirituality, Religion
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 License.
Click here to request Sandy Garson for reprint permission.
Yours In The Dharma 2001-2010, Sandy Garson Copyright 2001-2010 Sandy Garson
My phone was ringing. It was a dear younger friend of mine who now lives in LA. Once gay marriage was legalized in California, he got a new toupee and staged an extravaganza wedding to the blond blue--eyed foreigner who'd been following him around for almost two years. That's what he wanted more than anything in the universe--not a blue-eyed blond, just someone special all for him. The glow from the achievement was megawatt, but it was quickly eroded by the rise of a glower. No matter how hard my friend tried, his partner's sudden unhappiness ripped like shears up the middle of the relationship and severed it. He moved out. Alone again, my friend poured out thousands upon thousands of dollars for couples therapy. What he discovered was how trapped the foreigner felt: he repeatedly complained he'd given up a good supervisory job, a condo and a country, as well as his family, to be married and stuck in El Lay. He was living my friend's life, not his own, and he resented this enough to quit and go live at the site of a personal assistant job he got. Except, finding servitude even worse, he had begun inching back, running away, inching back.
I had to hang up in the midst of advising my friend that it was probably best to bravely confront this yo-yoing with a simple frank question: Is it better for you if I totally get out so you can have your life all to yourself? I wanted to tell him that if the guy said bye that would eventually turn out to be okay because the universe loves us so much, sometimes not getting what we want turns into the best happily ever after. But I had to go. My young friend from Spain was texting her imminent arrival to crash on my air mattress. She was back from El Lay where she'd schlepped her life to merge it with the man she thinks she loves, back to escape the lonely struggle of having sacrificed her hard-earned San Francisco familiarity-- friends, work, neighborhood-- to blend into this man's situation. Like the blond foreigner, this dark eyed, dark haired beauty was not happy. Building a relationship, a safe suspension bridge between two mountains of emotions and ideas, was aching, tact-breaking labor. She did love this fellow and was trying very hard, but would this sense of struggle end? Tomorrow morning she was going to a life coaching retreat.
Before she was even gone, before I could ask her if she'd ever considered how much trouble her mother had suffered to build what looks like an ideal marriage with her father, before the sun was up, the ring of my mobile woke me. The call was from Europe, the special lama, now defrocked and working in a sushi joint because he fell in love and has a child. I'd been kind enough to sponsor his retreat a decade ago, so perhaps I could help now. Sponsor again. His younger brother had been in our guru's school, doing well in the 8th grade, when their father abruptly forced him back to the high Himalayan valley village they come from. "My father felt like he was going to die in the next year or two and he wanted to be certain the farm and the cows safely passed to one of his sons. My brother was 16 then. Now he is 18 with a wife and two children and no money up there for anything. Please, can you help him." (I did not end with ? because it was not a question.)
O dear Buddha. The people in Nepal have less than nothing so they all think their exiles must have hit it rich in the West and they stick like ticks. The exiles, having not even enough funds to support themselves and no way to evade their families, turn in desperation to native Westerners sure our cultural flash is the sign we're all loaded like Brinks. I wanted to slide deep under the duvet to hide from this. But I'd just told my young, put-upon friend in LA to speak truth like a knife though butter, so I reckoned I should as well. I told my friend, this lama, I was having enough trouble these days sponsoring myself and paying my own bills. I told him years ago I'd somehow been tagged by one of his cohorts to become the official caretaker of a fatherless boy from the next valley when he became 16, and this kid came with an add-on, an inseparable friend from the same village who was already addressing emails to me as "mom." I had no idea how I could ever manage this. Was I not already committed to continually finding enough money to feed Rinpoche's growing army of monks, nuns and schoolchildren--nearly 2,000 mouths now?
I was starting to tell him about my vow to one of his close Dharma brothers to look after his niece who is now at college in Canada when I remembered the email that hit my screen just before baby James arrived. It came from a Sherpa student graduate of Rinpoche's school and a high school in middle America. Two months ago, her younger sister had sent a desperation email asking me to help find this young woman a cheap or free place to live so she could take the medical assistant program she'd been accepted for. "You are always so kind," she wrote, "i thought you could help." That made me feel very obliged to try and the dakinis kicked in good luck. I found a friend who had a friend who had an extra room once used by an estranged daughter. She offered it for free. So the Sherpa flew in from MIssouri, settled her stuff there, and thanked me for making her education possible. Yesterday's followup email said the woman's daughter re-appeared so the woman told her to take her stuff and go. But not to worry: she had a friend and that friend had a tiny apartment so she'd bought an air mattress to stay there. (All these tiny apartments and air mattresses color this oy story.) She'd be all right, she wrote. Her friend is a refugee from Rwanda. The Sherpa is passing time reading her book by a young Somali woman, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, whose courage is inspiring her. How's that for an old fashioned life coach?
Thinking about a Sherpa put me in mind to suggest to my lama friend perhaps his brother could participate in the trekking boom. Sadly, the Nepali government--one of the most inept and corrupt on this planet--just opened a money stream (i.e.permit prices) by opening this formerly secret and sacred area to trekkers. Why shouldn't a local or two profit from the coming corrosion? The lama seemed happily relieved when he hung up with a final "Tashi delek!" But I was a mess. Here I was about to abet profiteering when just yesterday I was doing my damnedest to stop it. For months I'd been urged to help prevent Chinese bulldozers from destroying the ancient sacred high hidden valley of Tsum as they plowed a highway from Lhasa to Kathmandu. It was now or never but just yesterday I'd finally gotten to sending an email to somebody who might significantly manage that. So saving the sacred authenticity of these secret valleys was on what's left of my mind.
I didn't want to think about it. It was way to early in the day and I didn't want to soil my bed with shit like this. Since I had the phone in hand, I checked my email for distraction. One new letter...from my dear German friend with two granddaughters: one living in Spain with her mother, the other living a block away with her father and spending afterschool hours with her granny. My friend sounded sad. Everything was okay really, on the surface anyway, she said, but in truth her husband's physical condition was "not getting any better as people always assume. Actually it is getting worse and we are trying our best to be brave and go on." More than 70 years ago, he'd been new life like baby James, and almost 50 years ago, my friend had worked at building a bridge to him in marriage, like my young friend's Spanish parents. Their son had tried too, like my friend in LA, but his bridge collapsed, its shear splitting children.
My Spanish friend slipped out the door to catch her ride to life coaching. I lay in bed sad but also weirdly happy. All the troubles streaming through were not about me. They were for me binoculars that revealed up close and personal that suffering of change the Buddha, 2,600 years ago, warned us about. I had been given the gift of zooming in on the same old same old cycling around and around to keep carving the canyon called Samsara. A new baby, an old man, a broken marriage, an impending one, mired in family duty and migrated toward a better life. I didn't have to drive anywhere for life coaching.
And if you don't think those calls, texts and emails really came, feel free to check with the NSA.
~Sandy Garson "Wordsmithing to attest how the Dharma saved me from myself!"
http://www.sandygarson.com Also www.veggiyana.org.
http://yoursinthedharma.blogspot.com/
Technorati Tags: Yours In The Dharma, Sandy Garson, Dharma, Buddhist, Buddhism, Spirituality, Religion
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 License.Click here to request Sandy Garson for reprint permission.
posted by Sandy Garson @ 12:27 PM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home