Along for the ride
The last day or two has brought shock and awe, and mostly lament, at the no longer ignorable realization that our Supreme Court Justices are not supremely impartial in the name of fairness and the common good. They are personal, prejudiced and political to the core, determined to make this country in their own image.
I for one am not surprised. Wasn't it the Buddha's great realization 2500 years ago under that Bodhi tree--the reason he exclaimed: "Wonder of wonders!" and became enlightened, that everyone sees the world through their own prism and acts accordingly, as though what they imagine is reality? Wasn't it his realization that all of us chasing our fantasies live in a world of our own creation, distinctly different from everyone else's, and that creates Samsara in which we are all drowning in our own delusion and confusion? Isn't meditation learning that what we think is not what is really happening?
As it happens, I am also not surprised about these personality revelations because the week before the Supreme Court's conservatives put their stamp of approval on Christian prayer at government meetings, I had to ponder Buddha's insight as it erupted in my own life. I had just traveled across the country in a car with a friend who grasps with all her might at a particular perspective. For seven days, I was seat belt to seat belt and suitcase to suitcase with a dedicated fan of Fox News, a big city Ivy Leaguer who now disdains NPR and the New York Times and Jon Stewart as "too liberal." I had to go into major withdrawal. No listening to All Things Considered as we drove, watching the Daily Show on the hotel's cable and no letting on that I was secretly checking the news at the Times on my iPad whenever she was in the bathroom.
As it happens, I am also not surprised about these personality revelations because the week before the Supreme Court's conservatives put their stamp of approval on Christian prayer at government meetings, I had to ponder Buddha's insight as it erupted in my own life. I had just traveled across the country in a car with a friend who grasps with all her might at a particular perspective. For seven days, I was seat belt to seat belt and suitcase to suitcase with a dedicated fan of Fox News, a big city Ivy Leaguer who now disdains NPR and the New York Times and Jon Stewart as "too liberal." I had to go into major withdrawal. No listening to All Things Considered as we drove, watching the Daily Show on the hotel's cable and no letting on that I was secretly checking the news at the Times on my iPad whenever she was in the bathroom.
Anyway this woman wasn't interested in world news, only family matters, and her phone, which has the shrillest ring ever sold on Itunes (it sounds like a tomahawk), rang all day with them. This reminded me that while my friend has no use for news, she used to listen religiously to Dr. Laura and take her everything is black or white advice to heart --until Ms Tough Love went off the air. Now it's only Fox she friends with occasional black or white advice from Rush Limbaugh. (Although it did not come up on this trip, my friend consistently demonizes, as well as votes against, anyone who believes
abortion is a personal decision. I didn't understand this until she confessed she once chose to
have one. I could see in her demeanor that the memory makes her so uncomfortable, she wants all
abortion abolished--as though making the issue that starkly black or white will make her unhappy memory miraculously vanish.)
My friend often jokes that when her husband came to ask her father for her hand in marriage, her father said only: "Do whatever she wants and you'll get along just fine." It's one of the ways she introduces herself as someone who needs to be, how shall I say, on top of things, by which I mean in control driving the agenda at all times. Her father must have had a talent for understatement. She is dead serious about getting her way down to the exact table she wants in a restaurant. I've learned to quietly concede. Momentary circumstances really don't matter to me anyway; the sun will still rise in the morning and the Buddha's teaching will remain pure and perfect. And momentary circumstances are just that: impermanent.
My friend often jokes that when her husband came to ask her father for her hand in marriage, her father said only: "Do whatever she wants and you'll get along just fine." It's one of the ways she introduces herself as someone who needs to be, how shall I say, on top of things, by which I mean in control driving the agenda at all times. Her father must have had a talent for understatement. She is dead serious about getting her way down to the exact table she wants in a restaurant. I've learned to quietly concede. Momentary circumstances really don't matter to me anyway; the sun will still rise in the morning and the Buddha's teaching will remain pure and perfect. And momentary circumstances are just that: impermanent.
So here's how it went. The first day she thanked me for not criticizing her driving quirks. (I thank years of practice for giving that urge up.) The second day she couldn't stop complaining about mine to the point she started every morning with: "Do you want me to drive?" So she drove not only the agenda but the car. I passed a lot of road time doing mantras or trying to accommodate her wish to have a more
euphemistic synonym for her old nickname, bossy. Persuasive was her favorite while
assertive and persistent were mine.
To be fair, road trips are really not my friend's idea of travel. Flying business class to Paris or going to Art Basel in Miami is more her thing. Everything between New York and San Diego is a flyover zone. She's never ventured beyond western Europe and the Caribbean, never follows international happenings and speaks no language but English. She only stays in well known hotels or tediously researched rental apartments about which she needs to nail down and know every last detail before she commits. The unknown unnerves her. She doesn't ever go there.
To be fair, road trips are really not my friend's idea of travel. Flying business class to Paris or going to Art Basel in Miami is more her thing. Everything between New York and San Diego is a flyover zone. She's never ventured beyond western Europe and the Caribbean, never follows international happenings and speaks no language but English. She only stays in well known hotels or tediously researched rental apartments about which she needs to nail down and know every last detail before she commits. The unknown unnerves her. She doesn't ever go there.
This trip, she was exceedingly happy that I finally conceded and let her book us into a $350 a night hotel highly reviewed on Trip Advisor for its royal service and posh clientele. She was also implacably annoyed with me for impishly pointing out that the royal service did not include breakfast like a Best Western does or a bottle of water in the room, which Embassy Suites gives its not so posh clientele.
I had to be as cautious choosing just right restaurants as she was in picking satisfactory hotels because my friend does not like spicy food, vegetables or Asian cooking. She likes creamy pastas, roasts, grilled steak, crabmeat and chicken soups. She eats meat daily, yet it has never once occurred to her that all she remorselessly consumes comes from living creatures killed for her pleasure. What came to mind several times along the way was that grotesque Buddhist illustration of someone gleefully sucking the meat off the bones of a roasted animal a nearby yogi understands was the incarnation of the glutton's late mother. What came to mind was how far along the path of awareness I had traveled, how different from my old and her self I had become.
I had to be as cautious choosing just right restaurants as she was in picking satisfactory hotels because my friend does not like spicy food, vegetables or Asian cooking. She likes creamy pastas, roasts, grilled steak, crabmeat and chicken soups. She eats meat daily, yet it has never once occurred to her that all she remorselessly consumes comes from living creatures killed for her pleasure. What came to mind several times along the way was that grotesque Buddhist illustration of someone gleefully sucking the meat off the bones of a roasted animal a nearby yogi understands was the incarnation of the glutton's late mother. What came to mind was how far along the path of awareness I had traveled, how different from my old and her self I had become.
Also how beautiful Dharma is, all the gifts of insight it has given me.
My friend insists what she values is "beauty." She means beautiful things and beautiful people in elegantly dreamy surroundings. Young girls with parasols; a lavishly set dinner table with chargers, silver and lots of candles; always lipstick; the American Versailles--Asheville NC's Biltmore--she booked us to see. She loves Game of Thrones and absolutely hates Mad Men, my new favorite TV reality series. (So no talking about that either.) She is a collector of everything she finds beautiful, no matter how much else she has. She must own what she admires so she requires a lot of time for shopping. It became easy to see how hard my friend works to keep her life aimed straight and narrow at her idea of beauty whether objects, ideas, places or people. She culls so carefully to reinforce her sense of self, I realized, she has always only been surrounded by white people who have money and the beautiful things shopping can buy. As I said, the unknown unnerves her.
Did I say she invariably votes Republican? Because it seems to me these shining characteristics of hers, this conservatism or clinging your personal view of the world as a life raft, this refusal to embrace conflicting ideas or change, risk or adventure, or otherness, this inability to let go and let happen, add up to a lack of empathy or charity, or what the Buddha called compassion. Such lack of wisdom explains her and the Supreme Court majority's political persuasion, its need to create the world in their own image because they fear everybody else's. It's the unknown. The fact that I see that as ugly brings up that old saying: beauty is in the eyes of the beholder. The Buddha nailed that, didn't he?
I was born into my friend's world and she knows that. It's what made me acceptable in the first place. But I chose to move on, leave all that behind, and now I know how far away I got. My life has been its own cross country trip with its own idiosyncratic beauty not necessarily promoted by Vogue. Still I thought the difference wouldn't matter among old dear friends with a history of helping each other over humps. And because I had become so artful at conceding to her whims. My bad. The close proximity and long distance of the actual road trip kicked in. My friend hugged and thanked me when I left her off at her husband's side in Philadelphia, but after that she did not reply to my follow up text messages, a week of them. Finally the other day she sent this email: "I am in recovery from our grueling road trip and trying to process the journey."
I had already let it go. It was over; there were new challenges and demands. But that long stiff silence and coldly curt email signaled blunder of blunders. Apparently I had been tried in the court of her imagination for something not beautiful that marred her fantasy and found guilty as charged. So I tried to "process the journey" myself. Yes, I poked fun at the haute hotel she was delighted to stay at. No, I didn't gush all that effusively over the riches of the Biltmore. Yes, once I got annoyed that she read directions too slowly for me to turn on them (Her response was that I drive too fast). No, I wasn't enthusiastic about shopping but I always went along without comment even though there were sites I really wanted to see. Yes, I was happy to let her drive if that's what she wanted, even if this meant she did most of the work. It never occurred to me that letting her have her way would set up a grudge. What else was so unforgivable it smashed a 20-year friendship?
Perhaps my otherness finally intruded on the beauty, the certainty, the dreamy prism through which she views everything. Perhaps I am somehow no longer who or how she always imagined me to be, less shiningly beautiful in reality than in her fantasy. Perhaps why that's I was put out with the trash. Now everything in her experience will continue to match her expectations. No unknown knowns. The Buddha said we all see the world from our own private perspective, so persuaded it's the real deal we live totally unconnected lives, unable to identify with each other as one and the same. Still this experience that we all want the world created only in our own image came as a shock, and I lament.
Om mani peme hung. Om mani peme hung. Om mani peme hung.
~Sandy Garson "Wordsmithing to attest how the Dharma saved me from myself!"
http://www.sandygarson.com
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 friend insists what she values is "beauty." She means beautiful things and beautiful people in elegantly dreamy surroundings. Young girls with parasols; a lavishly set dinner table with chargers, silver and lots of candles; always lipstick; the American Versailles--Asheville NC's Biltmore--she booked us to see. She loves Game of Thrones and absolutely hates Mad Men, my new favorite TV reality series. (So no talking about that either.) She is a collector of everything she finds beautiful, no matter how much else she has. She must own what she admires so she requires a lot of time for shopping. It became easy to see how hard my friend works to keep her life aimed straight and narrow at her idea of beauty whether objects, ideas, places or people. She culls so carefully to reinforce her sense of self, I realized, she has always only been surrounded by white people who have money and the beautiful things shopping can buy. As I said, the unknown unnerves her.
Did I say she invariably votes Republican? Because it seems to me these shining characteristics of hers, this conservatism or clinging your personal view of the world as a life raft, this refusal to embrace conflicting ideas or change, risk or adventure, or otherness, this inability to let go and let happen, add up to a lack of empathy or charity, or what the Buddha called compassion. Such lack of wisdom explains her and the Supreme Court majority's political persuasion, its need to create the world in their own image because they fear everybody else's. It's the unknown. The fact that I see that as ugly brings up that old saying: beauty is in the eyes of the beholder. The Buddha nailed that, didn't he?
I was born into my friend's world and she knows that. It's what made me acceptable in the first place. But I chose to move on, leave all that behind, and now I know how far away I got. My life has been its own cross country trip with its own idiosyncratic beauty not necessarily promoted by Vogue. Still I thought the difference wouldn't matter among old dear friends with a history of helping each other over humps. And because I had become so artful at conceding to her whims. My bad. The close proximity and long distance of the actual road trip kicked in. My friend hugged and thanked me when I left her off at her husband's side in Philadelphia, but after that she did not reply to my follow up text messages, a week of them. Finally the other day she sent this email: "I am in recovery from our grueling road trip and trying to process the journey."
I had already let it go. It was over; there were new challenges and demands. But that long stiff silence and coldly curt email signaled blunder of blunders. Apparently I had been tried in the court of her imagination for something not beautiful that marred her fantasy and found guilty as charged. So I tried to "process the journey" myself. Yes, I poked fun at the haute hotel she was delighted to stay at. No, I didn't gush all that effusively over the riches of the Biltmore. Yes, once I got annoyed that she read directions too slowly for me to turn on them (Her response was that I drive too fast). No, I wasn't enthusiastic about shopping but I always went along without comment even though there were sites I really wanted to see. Yes, I was happy to let her drive if that's what she wanted, even if this meant she did most of the work. It never occurred to me that letting her have her way would set up a grudge. What else was so unforgivable it smashed a 20-year friendship?
Perhaps my otherness finally intruded on the beauty, the certainty, the dreamy prism through which she views everything. Perhaps I am somehow no longer who or how she always imagined me to be, less shiningly beautiful in reality than in her fantasy. Perhaps why that's I was put out with the trash. Now everything in her experience will continue to match her expectations. No unknown knowns. The Buddha said we all see the world from our own private perspective, so persuaded it's the real deal we live totally unconnected lives, unable to identify with each other as one and the same. Still this experience that we all want the world created only in our own image came as a shock, and I lament.
Om mani peme hung. Om mani peme hung. Om mani peme hung.
~Sandy Garson "Wordsmithing to attest how the Dharma saved me from myself!"
http://www.sandygarson.com
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 @ 7:41 PM
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