tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-178737252024-03-07T00:47:16.307-08:00Yours in the DharmaThis 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.Sandy Garsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09824736880802751211noreply@blogger.comBlogger333125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17873725.post-67236218752578039722017-02-04T18:18:00.000-08:002017-02-07T09:08:11.627-08:00Force Options<span family="verdana" size:85=""></span><br />
<span family="verdana" size:85="">The other night I found myself watching people one by one fire guns at other people, the real <i>bang bang you're dead</i> thing. Six men and women were experiencing a police academy training program called Force Options, and I was reporting on their civilian response to simulations of situations the police get into. </span><br />
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<span family="verdana" size:85="">The Captain of the district--for whom I was working-- decided to respond to ongoing uproar about perception of police brutality by putting the public in a cop's shoes when an SOS comes to the station or patrol car. Finding themselves suddenly face to face with a robber in an alley, an agitated linebacker of a man in a hospital emergency room, a guy who pulls a knife in a traffic stop, what would they do? The program was called Force Options. The civilians facing the simulation screen were armed with all legally available choices: handcuffs, pepper spray, baton, gun and their own voice. The room went dark, the floor to ceiling screen lit up and suddenly a bruised woman was whispering that her husband was in the basement thinking to kill himself with a gun, "don't hurt him." The room went dark, the floor to ceiling screen lit up and a recently returned Iraq war veteran babbling out of his mind on his front porch jumped down, ran forward and pulled a gun. </span><br />
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<span family="verdana" size:85="">Bang bang! Just about every scenario, every civilian grabbed the gun and shot. Our primal flight or fight response is that powerful. So overwhelming that when the lights came on and the simulation was rerun,</span><span family="verdana" size:85=""> the six men and women discovered</span><span family="verdana" size:85=""> their optics had narrowed to just the danger point, meaning they had missed all the scene's cues and clues. They'd heard absolutely nothing the suspects said because hearing is the first sense panic shuts down. Cold sweat kept them from calmly weighing possibilities: they just shot, bang bang. Everyone of those peaceniks came away shocked and shaken.</span><br />
<br />
<span family="verdana" size:85="">The next afternoon I found myself in a Dharma group where people wanted to talk about responding to difficult circumstances, about how as Buddhist</span><span family="verdana" size:85="">s we might</span><span family="verdana" size:85=""> learn to transcend them. I found myself thinking about Force Options and the way those unprepared people had deployed them the night before. In a split second epiphany, it seemed to me all of us go around, go through our daily lives invisibly armed with force options. Calls come, like they do to a patrol car, when we find ourselves trapped in circumstances set by other people. We walk in and how fast we pull the gun, bang bang. "Deal with it" is very hard.</span><br />
<br />
<span family="verdana" size:85="">Frequently our most powerful reach-for weapon is money: it's supposed to talk but turns out to be the greatest silencer. Sometimes we pull out denial, but more often anger--simmering as the pepper spray of sarcasm or outright explosive, aggression being the Dharma synonym. Our teachers are always telling us red hot anger is not really a useful restraint weapon. It's a hot coal we have in our hand ready to throw, but meanwhile our hand is the one getting burned and the person we want to throw it at can easily dodge, coming away unscathed. Trying to defend ourselves, we throw our anger at anyone who comes near us, which escalates collateral damage. Turns out to be the same problem firing a police gun: no guarantee you will hit the target because one or both of you is probably moving. No guarantee the bullet will even stop the other person; they can now shoot back at you. Worse, any bullet could hit an innocent person on the scene: collateral damage. </span><br />
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<span family="verdana" size:85="">The Police Captain insisted the whole point of Force Options is de-escalation. To the police, that means using time to create distance between them and the immediate danger. The shorthand is: de-escalation =time+ distance. Talking someone down, talking directly to them in a way that encourages them to talk, to engage in a conversation that reveals their intent and motive so you can skillfully head toward a resolution deflates the energy of danger. Literally defuses. It is pluperfect de-escalation. The district's policewoman trained to verbally defuse is lovingly called by her cohorts "the crime whisperer." </span><br />
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<span family="verdana" size:85="">Those of us trying to practice Dharma, trying as the Buddha said, to tame our minds are trying to get trained to that too. Using all the force options our Rinpoches give us, </span><span family="verdana" size:85="">we try to de-escalate our inner conflicts</span><span family="verdana" size:85="">. We are learning not to have our focus get so narrow we only see danger. Like police cadets, we are training in skillful means to stay awake, alert, to pick up all the clues of all the circumstances. We learn to stop talking to ourselves so we can actually hear what others are saying. That's the only way to do something positive about it. If we make peace with ourselves, we have the skill to make it with others--mainly because they're no longer a danger to us. If we realize we have no self to defend, we don't need to shoot. We have restraint, the time and distance to use a smile and a kind word as force options. That's actually what the Dalai Lama and my beloved Rinpoche rely on and nobody gets hurt. </span><br />
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<br />
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<span family="verdana" size:85="">~Sandy Garson
<i>"Wordsmithing to attest how the Dharma saved me from myself!"</i><br />
http://www.sandygarson.com<br />
http://yoursinthedharma.blogspot.com/</span><br />
<span family="verdana" size:85="">
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<center>Powered by <a href="http://dir.webring.com/rw" target=_top>WebRing</a>.</center></div>Sandy Garsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09824736880802751211noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17873725.post-36411120877286349902017-01-08T21:07:00.000-08:002017-01-08T21:07:29.946-08:00New Year Hope<span family="verdana" size:85=""></span><br />
<span family="verdana" size:85=""> As a surprise birthday present, a Dharma brother gave me Dzongsar Khyentse's newest book: <i>The Guru Drinks Bourbon? </i>I don't know how he knew Dzongsar is my favorite in your face guru. Since my birthday was a washout--the universe's present was the Pacific coast storm of the decade, I immediately started to read it. And I found this inscription from the late great guru Jigme Lingpa that I want to offer as a New Year's present to everyone:</span><br />
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<span family="verdana" size:85="">"Even if you may not always practice, if you have a constant wish to practice and a constant concern about not being able to practice, you are far wealthier than the most materially successful person. If you put emphasis on generating the motivation to be kind and to enlighten all sentient beings, there is no comparison. You have surpassed what any other religion or spiritual system can do."</span><br />
<span family="verdana" size:85=""><i> </i></span><br />
<span family="verdana" size:85=""><i> </i></span><br />
<br />
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<span family="verdana" size:85="">~Sandy Garson
<i>"Wordsmithing to attest how the Dharma saved me from myself!"</i><br />
http://www.sandygarson.com<br />
http://yoursinthedharma.blogspot.com/</span><br />
<span family="verdana" size:85="">
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<center>Powered by <a href="http://dir.webring.com/rw" target=_top>WebRing</a>.</center></div>Sandy Garsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09824736880802751211noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17873725.post-45911664757195129722016-12-22T08:41:00.000-08:002016-12-27T10:36:21.267-08:00It's about time<span family="verdana" size:85=""></span><br />
<span family="verdana" size:85="">All of us who have survived this breathtaking year racing to its close have been let in on an astonishing secret: l</span><span family="verdana" size:85="">ife still works exactly the way </span><span family="verdana" size:85="">Chinese astrologers </span><span family="verdana" size:85=""> predicted millennia ago.</span><span family="verdana" size:85=""> Their </span><span family="verdana" size:85="">circa BC 2600</span> <span family="verdana" size:85=""><i>right the first time </i>Reality Version 1 </span><span family="verdana" size:85="">nailed 2016 as a frenzy of devastating upheaval, scorched earth and nonstop chaos. They said 2016 would be the time of shenanigans and surprises, a year of the fire monkey.</span><br />
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<span family="verdana" size:85="">It feels impossible to imagine how so long ago those non electronic people could so accurately foresee this year of cataclysmic earthquakes in Italy and Indonesia, devastating hurricanes, catastrophic fires in Oakland and Alaska and Tennessee, fatal floods in Louisiana, Fiji and North Carolina, Brexit, the end of the staid in the Noble Prize for Literature, two teams in the basement for decades suddenly rising to fight for supremacy in the World Series, the economic meltdown in Greece and abolition of money in India, dangerous escalation of military macho in the South China Sea, unspeakable atrocities in Yemen and South Sudan and Syria, the impeachment of governments in Brazil and Korea, Zika, humungously debilitating cyberattacks and hacks, a worldwide contagion of hate and fascism, the rise of a zombie Russia and the dissolution of a united Europe, the death of so many creative and compassionate minds, a tsunami of hapless refugees, complete rejection of Ataturk in Turkey and total demolition of democracy in America. </span><br />
<br />
<span family="verdana" size:85="">Every day headlines were <i>yuge</i> and that was just the upending in public. The private lives of everybody I know became a roller coaster best described in an old Paul Simon lyric: </span><br />
<span family="verdana" size:85="">"I don't have a soul that's not been battered,</span><br />
<span family="verdana" size:85="">I don't have a friend who feels at ease,</span><br />
<span family="verdana" size:85="">I don't know a dream that's not been shattered</span><br />
<span family="verdana" size:85="">and driven to its knees.</span><br />
<br />
<span family="verdana" size:85="">There
was an excess of inexplicable firsts and lasts in my friends' lives:
sudden deaths, women widowed and alone for the first time, people
unemployed for the first time, people messed up by real estate deals for
the first time, people whose routines were upended by family or medical
surprises. </span><span family="verdana" size:85="">There were all of us who finally broke through the cocoon of lethargy or apathy to come alive for Bernie only to be thrown off the bus by people whose arrogance drove it into a ditch. There were all of those burned by Samsung or brightened by Hamilton, the hottest show in decades. There were how many millions whose meals were suddenly affected by Cuisinart, and how many thousands ready to roll to Cuba. LGBT came to be or not to be. All of our major Dharma teachers told us now was the time to put down the texts and spread bodhicitta as fast and steadily as possible.</span><br />
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<span family="verdana" size:85="">I had my own upheavals. I had my car stolen, my eyesight diminish and my younger nephew push his way into my life after a 20-year absence. I had the local police captain offer me a precinct position and had to go through lots of fingerprinting and eyeball vetting. After almost 40 years I suddenly had a letter from the great love of my life. I had the busiest summer and skimpiest bank account I can remember. I was thrust into an enormous Dharma project as its lead creator. I had to speed up the sale of my apartment to be three months earlier than planned and on short notice had to find a temporary home. I am not the person who started the year, and in equally obvious ways neither is anybody else.</span><br />
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<span family="verdana" size:85="">All the high speed chaos and crushing of 2016 cannot easily be categorized as coincidence. The last time we went through a year of the fire monkey was 1956, and we can see in retrospect it was startlingly revolutionary in every way. Elvis Presley burst into our lives via <i>Heartbreak Hotel </i>and Norma Jean Mortenson became Marilyn Monroe. Morocco declared independence from France, Indonesia became independent of the Netherlands, Tunisia became a free country, Pakistan became a country (an Islamic republic), India remade its state borders creating three new ones down south, Hungary and Georgia both revolted against the Soviet Union trying to get free. Castro came to Cuba and the Nicaraguan dictator Somoza was assassinated. The last foreign troops left Egypt making it independent and Nasser seized the Suez Canal. Eisenhower started the US highway system and <i>In God We Trust </i>became the official US motto.</span><br />
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<span family="verdana" size:85="">There was more: The luxury liner Andrea Doria sank like the second Titanic, the first commercial nuclear power plant opened, the Ringling Brothers staged their very last circus actually under a tent. A massive earthquake upended the Cyclades and the largest mining disaster in history Belgium. Asian flu epidemics began. Don Larsen threw the only perfect game in World Series history and the Methodists ordained the first woman pastor. The Supreme Court ended segregation with busing. <i>My Fair Lady</i> came to Broadway, <i>As the World Turns </i>started on TV and Grace Kelly married the prince. The drama of the year was<i> Look Back in Anger</i>, the book <i>The Man Who Knew Too Much</i> and the song sung by Doris Day <i>Que Sera Sera</i>.</span><br />
<span family="verdana" size:85=""><br /></span><span family="verdana" size:85="">It's all still alive and kicking, that stuff of 1956. And now we get the earth-shattering add-ons of 2016 seemingly aimed at blowing up everything that happened in between. Look back in anger. A hard rain's gonna fall.</span><br />
<br />
<span family="verdana" size:85="">The ancient Chinese also predicted a fire monkey year would inevitably be followed by the time of a fire rooster: crowing (flamboyance included), scratching (meanness meant) and a lot of fiery but witless behavior. Q<i>ue sera sera</i> starts on January 28, just a week after the American President's inauguration. </span>
<span family="verdana" size:85="">Damn if i know how the ancient Chinese figured that out. </span><span family="verdana" size:85=""><br /></span>
<span family="verdana" size:85=""><br /></span>
<br />
<span family="verdana" size:85="">~Sandy Garson
<i>"Wordsmithing to attest how the Dharma saved me from myself!"</i><br />
http://www.sandygarson.com<br />
http://yoursinthedharma.blogspot.com/</span><br />
<span family="verdana" size:85="">
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<center>Powered by <a href="http://dir.webring.com/rw" target=_top>WebRing</a>.</center></div>Sandy Garsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09824736880802751211noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17873725.post-30014301185165986802016-11-11T17:26:00.003-08:002016-11-13T10:09:40.023-08:00Culinary Compassion<span family="verdana" size:85="">Two weeks ago, the celebrated chefs of London, England participated in a one-day campaign they called "Cook for Syria." Carryout shops and fine restaurants sold traditional Syrian dishes and sent the income to support that long suffering country's children. The idea was schoolbooks, footballs, food and clothing. </span><br />
<br />
<span family="verdana" size:85="">The bigger idea was to publicize, prepare and promulgate Syrian food, so those out of that country's line of fire could be reminded of its people and their unspeakable suffering. The idea was to somehow say: "You have not been forgotten." This well-timed antithesis of exit, disengagement and isolation was a way to flaunt human commonality. The exit from that is extinction. </span><br />
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<span family="verdana" size:85="">Shortly after I read about this culinary goodwill, I made Syria's beloved comfort food <i>Harak Osbao</i>. The translation is <i>Burnt Finger</i>, for in older times people couldn't wait to eat this tasty combination </span><span family="verdana" size:85="">of lentils, macaroni and fried onions</span><span family="verdana" size:85=""> and supposedly stuck their hands into the hot pot I went big. I made enough to share with my Saturday Dharma group that always ends with a potluck lunch. Before I served it, I explained why we were eating this at this moment: #CookforSyria. Nobody had ever heard of anything like it before. But everybody was familiar with lentils, macaroni and fried onions. Nothing scary here. They dug right in.</span><br />
<br />
<span family="verdana" size:85="">I figured that would happen. Although people who don't think much about their food think I'm nuts, I have long believed that cooking and/or eating somebody else's food is an honest way of communing with them. I got started when I came back from Europe in 1962 and tried to recreate the food I had there so my trip wouldn't really end. Much later I became the Western expert on Himalayan food because I deliberately learned to cook it in order to better understand my Rinpoche, his monks and their surround. #CookforSyria was me doing what comes naturally. I was already sprinkling Aleppo pepper on any dish I could, not just because its subtle heat makes the food more enticing. Every time I held the bottle with that word Aleppo on its label, I remembered the people who created and brought the spice to me, innocents afflicted by unimaginable suffering, including deliberate famine. I wished them well.</span><br />
<br />
I am not totally crazed by magical thinking. I just realize there is absolutely nothing I can do to stop the sociopathic smashing of human life in Syria. I am also old enough to realize marching down some office lined boulevard chanting "Save Syria! while dodging people throwing rocks for looting isn't going to accomplish anything. What I can do is my best equivalent to JFK saying: <i>Ich ben ein Berliner</i>. I can<br />
joyfully keep the nation's cultural identity alive by using Aleppo pepper and preparing <i>Harak Osbao, </i>spreading them around.<br />
<br />
<span family="verdana" size:85="">Hopelessness never has to be the default option.</span><span family="verdana" size:85=""> </span><span family="verdana" size:85="">When students lament something terrible happened--a chronic illness, a sudden death, a rent relationship, a political nightmare, a lost cause--and there's nothing they can do, Rinpoches and lamas always say there is indeed something: <i>tonglen</i>. </span><span family="verdana" size:85="">This is the Dharma practice more commonly referred to as <i>sending and taking</i> because you harness your natural breathing cycle to send out all the love and positive energy you can muster and breath in all the black pain and suffering of whoever is your concern to take it them from them. This is how you cleanse your world: send white light and love on your out-breath; remove darkness and distress with your in-breath.</span><br />
<span family="verdana" size:85=""><br /></span>
<span family="verdana" size:85="">People are often terrified to do this. Exhaling love and light </span><span family="verdana" size:85="">feels </span><span family="verdana" size:85="">tentatively manageable, but the business of taking in and thus taking on somebody else's disease, death or distress is horrifying. Why would anyone dare? Who wants to get cancer or bombs? Our poor teachers must work intensely to point out this exercise is simply you breathing naturally in and out. Absolutely nothing else is happening. You are in no danger of getting infected by HIV or Ebola or hit by bombs. </span><span family="verdana" size:85="">You're going to get out alive.</span><span family="verdana" size:85=""> You are simply sitting still breathing the invisible air around you in and out while focusing your mind and energy on your desire to help someone. It takes getting used to.</span><br />
<br />
<span family="verdana" size:85="">Our teachers will also admit, when questioned, that <i>tonglen</i> offers no direct tangible result, no real remedy for the problem. Doing it is definitely not going to cure cancer, delay the divorce or destroy enemy lines. In truth, you are not <i>sending and taking</i> to improve the other who is your object of concern. You are doing it to benefit yourself. Tonglen is the exercise that develops your empathy muscle, reduces swelling of the ego and sharpens mental perceptions. It teaches you to acknowledge suffering and be unafraid to face it. E</span><span family="verdana" size:85="">ssentially t</span><span family="verdana" size:85=""><i>onglen</i> is compassion fitness training. </span><br />
<span family="verdana" size:85=""><br /></span>
<span family="verdana" size:85="">So in a way is cooking. It has always seemed to me that taking in the food of someone other is sending them gratitude, respect, even love. It represents appreciation and neuroscience is now telling us what all human beings have in common is the intense need to be acknowledged and appreciated. Eating what others eat makes you one with them in a bright and joyful way. Afterward, you usually end up breathing out thanks for that delicious dish they brought to your table, for the blessing of their existence. #cookforSyria.</span><br />
<span family="verdana" size:85=""><br /></span>
<span family="verdana" size:85="">Here is my <i>Harak Osbao</i>:</span><br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgTWya6mIu8vVQq5847PrNVzGd0j9yFWw3i0iVJgc1s5xWtU3XKdeZQaEwYL8P16o_LeKL1hJ74lpBKO-sgvrnzpMFTQkp14O7vLtvrtvhZORcvMcMCOZDzV0Xap97dwOkCDciKOg/s1600/syria+2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgTWya6mIu8vVQq5847PrNVzGd0j9yFWw3i0iVJgc1s5xWtU3XKdeZQaEwYL8P16o_LeKL1hJ74lpBKO-sgvrnzpMFTQkp14O7vLtvrtvhZORcvMcMCOZDzV0Xap97dwOkCDciKOg/s200/syria+2.jpg" width="150" /></a></div>
<span family="verdana" size:85=""><br /></span>
You can look up recipes. Essentially you cook up about 1 1/2 c brown lentils in vegetable broth until almost soft, then throw in a cup of small macaroni and 2 tbsp pomegranate molasses, 1 tbsp salt and 1 tsp Aleppo pepper. If you have tomato paste around add 2 tsp. Cook til the macaroni is soft. Hopefully the liquid dries up. If not drain it out.<br />
Meanwhile cut two red onions into thin rings and saute them in olive oil until they're caramelized, about 12 minutes, without burning. Put them on a plate and put 4 cloves minced garlic with more olive oil in the pan and brown the garlic. remove from heat and add 2 tsp sumac and handful of chopped cilantro.<br />
Pour the lentil/macaroni mixture into a large shallow serving dish. Top with the onions, then the garlic mix. Top all that with freshly chopped flat leaf parsley, some pomegranate arils and lemon juice or lemon wedges. Enjoy! <br />
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<span family="verdana" size:85="">~Sandy Garson
<i>"Wordsmithing to attest how the Dharma saved me from myself!"</i><br />
http://www.sandygarson.com<br />
http://yoursinthedharma.blogspot.com/</span><br />
<span family="verdana" size:85="">
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<center>Powered by <a href="http://dir.webring.com/rw" target=_top>WebRing</a>.</center></div>Sandy Garsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09824736880802751211noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17873725.post-48827284732894696222016-11-02T11:46:00.000-07:002016-11-02T11:46:05.002-07:00The Day after the Day of the Dead is a Day of Living<span family="verdana" size:85=""></span><br />
<span family="verdana" size:85=""> This is the Dharma and <i>Bodhicitta</i></span><a href="javascript:;" kind="click"> </a><span family="verdana" size:85=""> and all the treasure we can ever hope to find:</span><br />
<span family="verdana" size:85=""><br /></span>
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<span style="color: #16191f; font-family: "System Font Regular"; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "System Font Regular";">'I wish I could show
you, When you are lonely or in darkness, The Astonishing Light Of your own
Being"</span></div>
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<span style="color: #16191f; font-family: "System Font Regular"; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "System Font Regular";">Hafiz</span></div>
<br />
<span family="verdana" size:85="">It really is there if you put down your not so smart phone and take the time to look for it.</span><br />
<span family="verdana" size:85=""><br /></span>
<span family="verdana" size:85=""><br /></span>
<span family="verdana" size:85=""><br /></span>
<span family="verdana" size:85="">~Sandy Garson
<i>"Wordsmithing to attest how the Dharma saved me from myself!"</i><br />
http://www.sandygarson.com<br />
http://yoursinthedharma.blogspot.com/</span><br />
<span family="verdana" size:85="">
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<center>Powered by <a href="http://dir.webring.com/rw" target=_top>WebRing</a>.</center></div>Sandy Garsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09824736880802751211noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17873725.post-60453273651204437612016-10-24T21:20:00.004-07:002016-10-25T07:48:18.663-07:00Nasty women are Dharma in action<span family="verdana" size:85="">Last week I went to Vancouver, BC, to see my glorious teacher and met there a seasoned Dharma student from the SF Bay area, a woman who home-schooled her three now grown sons, doesn't color her long gray hair and is steadfastly vegetarian. As we talked about our personal encounters with the Dharma, she said in passing: "I really do wish it had more for a feminist, but that's okay, I guess." </span><br />
<span family="verdana" size:85=""><br /></span>
<span family="verdana" size:85="">My ears perked right up because I have heard this complaint so many times and don't get why all these women don't get why this is necessarily so. Dharma has of course adapted the traditional trappings of the cultures it conquered to make itself at home, and most of them were highly patriarchal. It's easy to see the everyday misogynistic result, particularly in the rigid Tibetan hierarchy with its blatant discrimination against nuns and yoginis. It's definitely harder not to take this cultural baggage as carry-on down the path. A bit of work to not be blinded by it and see Dharma nakedly.</span><br />
<br />
<span family="verdana" size:85="">When I can, I see why Buddhism didn't explicitly reach out to women. I see the reason in the traditional Chinese pictorial symbol for "<i>hen hao</i>", which means "very good": a woman intertwined with her child. This goodness does not look different from what Catholics see in that sacred image of Mary intertwined with her child, Jesus: "<i>Pieta</i>," a word derived from <i>pity </i>and <i>godliness </i>to convey the infinite goodness and beauty of unquestioning love. </span><br />
<br />
<span family="verdana" size:85="">I see the Buddha as perhaps the world's first public feminist. Shakyamuni Buddha welcomed women to his inner circle and did not have the problem some of his less enlightened companions did. Often, it seems, females were his best students--and teachers, particularly the exquisitely beautiful courtesan who flaunted her aging as a way to make his legions deal with impermanence. </span><br />
<br />
<span family="verdana" size:85="">The Buddha</span><span family="verdana" size:85=""> recognized the debt he owed his mother and reminded everyone of us of our same debt. He did not denigrate the vital role of his own wife, especially in caring for their son. More to the point, while he wandered India searching for truth and harmony, he time and again came upon women peacefully nurturing babies, helping the elderly and sharing with each other. Bravely he recognized women as the inherently loving, selfless beings he was trying to learn how to be. He recognized they did not need him to teach them the selflessness of compassion.</span><br />
<br />
<span family="verdana" size:85="">Men however were clueless. And therein was the suffering. The Iron Age was upon them, putting all sorts of new weapons of crass destruction in their hands. The future of humanity--and all beings, lay in urgently countering these new arms by inculcating the concepts of no harm and kindness in males. Survival depended on teaching men to cherish others like women automatically do. Making them nonjudgmental would make them less competitive, less hierarchical, less demanding and harsh. Thus<i> Bodhicitta</i>, the awakened, intertwined </span><span family="verdana" size:85="">heart</span><span family="verdana" size:85=""> is the core essence of all his teachings. </span><span family="verdana" size:85="">So is the endless emphasis on others. It seems to me <i>Bodhicitta</i> is supposed to make men behave like women. </span><br />
<br />
<span family="verdana" size:85="">Unfortunately, we live on the flip side, in a world whose primary question for the last century has been Henry Higgins': "Why can't a woman be more like a man?" Feminists went for it. They bailed from the practices of lovingkindness-- feeding, nurturing, tending, uniting-- and rushed to put on pant suits, carry briefcases and hire household help. More money. No more drudgery. No more hearth and home. It's wrong to totally blame them: what women represented, what they bring to the world was denied and denigrated. Men were replacing them with machines. </span><br />
<span family="verdana" size:85=""><br /></span>
<span family="verdana" size:85="">The late Isak Dinesen warned against a world that did not honor the innate attributes of women and did not recognize the critical counterbalancing of male and female. She pointed out that men do but women are, alluding to the way people always described their fathers as "a doctor or a lawyer or a seaman" while they inevitably described their mothers as "lovely or caring and warm." </span><br />
<br />
<span family="verdana" size:85="">We all live now in the cold, cruel, competitive and literally careless world that is the dystopian result of lopsidedness--or monopoly power. Call it Neoliberalism if you want, this me-first, winner-take-all, king of the jungle masculine ethos that's engulfed and depressed us. Since everyone wants to be a king of the jungle man, people have tilted to looking for love in all the wrong places: on Tinder and Facebook, in kennels and animal shelters, out of pills and smokes and snorts. So many videos of cat cuteness going viral. So many opportunities for Big Pharma as this cancer metastasizes. Everyone is openly hurting one way or another. Newspapers carry headlines about endemic loneliness, killer opioid epidemics, gun consumption and suicide spikes. Last week alone I had three clerks express relief and gratitude when I thanked them for trying to be helpful and sort my problems out because we live in cruel times destroying everyone and everything. </span><br />
<span family="verdana" size:85=""><br /></span>
<span family="verdana" size:85="">In Vancouver, when I asked my elderly guru what he wants us to do now in this dreadful world, what legacy for him can we create, he said without hesitation: "Bodhicitta!" Show it, spread it, share it. He was saying what the Buddha said almost 2600 years back: Show everyone love and respect, protect and cherish them like a mother does a child. Bring people together; touch their heart; bring them joy. Introduce them to goodness. Who doesn't want that?</span><br />
<span family="verdana" size:85=""><br /></span>
<span family="verdana" size:85="">Rinpoche was asking me to be full on female, doing what comes naturally. Wisdom in every language known to man is always feminine. For the Buddha it all starts with <i>Prajnaparamita</i>, the great mother, the great wisdom. The legions of monks and lamas and gurus who've come after are powerless without her just as they are all powerless until the female wisdom goddesses, the dakinis, bless them. </span><span family="verdana" size:85="">Every morning, the monks in Rinpoche's monastery open the
shrine hall with an hour of prayers to the great Arya Tara, asking the
swift, fierce, all-knowing goddess for protection, guidance, confidence
and love. How much more "feminist" can you get? </span><br />
<br />
<span family="verdana" size:85="">I told some of this to that woman in Vancouver. She smiled brightly and kept smiling as we parted. I felt better myself. Dharma is indeed a warm and welcoming refuge in these greed stricken, cruel-hearted masculine times. Something like a mother's hug. </span><br />
<br />
<span family="verdana" size:85="">~Sandy Garson
<i>"Wordsmithing to attest how the Dharma saved me from myself!"</i><br />
http://www.sandygarson.com<br />
http://yoursinthedharma.blogspot.com/</span><br />
<span family="verdana" size:85="">
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<center>Powered by <a href="http://dir.webring.com/rw" target=_top>WebRing</a>.</center></div>Sandy Garsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09824736880802751211noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17873725.post-2249792914471851682016-10-17T15:33:00.001-07:002016-10-17T15:33:53.506-07:00News for the blues<span family="verdana" size:85=""></span><br />
<span family="verdana" size:85=""> I am posting this because my own experience tells me it's true, astonishing but absolutely true. I was going to write a lot more but found it wasn't necessary. That Tinkerbell magic really exists: if you just believe, believe hard enough and pray, light appears and goodness comes through.</span><br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh5DtyeXsjPh0kBHwYyCxmxSQtPYhVO_gWmU9jOORwf13rJIpXVgO3VU2adaOZxdGvVxEfWol7JipZYJjYspwyYsGGhA2RFj517HmlPO_9vuBa66klFSmSZpE3efWqY21rF_8GdJQ/s1600/13091887_928646400585384_5553272309321773741_n.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh5DtyeXsjPh0kBHwYyCxmxSQtPYhVO_gWmU9jOORwf13rJIpXVgO3VU2adaOZxdGvVxEfWol7JipZYJjYspwyYsGGhA2RFj517HmlPO_9vuBa66klFSmSZpE3efWqY21rF_8GdJQ/s320/13091887_928646400585384_5553272309321773741_n.jpg" width="228" /></a></div>
<span family="verdana" size:85=""> Oh, and one more thing, as Steve Jobs liked to say:</span><br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgutn_fnF7CTgcw8UiiBXMb2eW1BEPXQsPlXbXWgcrSBEOgdHycOfgBJSWXOSPlIkFLivrsQ-mewa0F7zEdRGthzNnlTuBofZIJqefPZfT6bLw4QLCUz84NS0CPKHUXqdTxOJ18sw/s1600/be+the+reason.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgutn_fnF7CTgcw8UiiBXMb2eW1BEPXQsPlXbXWgcrSBEOgdHycOfgBJSWXOSPlIkFLivrsQ-mewa0F7zEdRGthzNnlTuBofZIJqefPZfT6bLw4QLCUz84NS0CPKHUXqdTxOJ18sw/s320/be+the+reason.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
<span family="verdana" size:85="">Both of these can make life worth living.</span><br />
<br />
<span family="verdana" size:85="">~Sandy Garson
<i>"Wordsmithing to attest how the Dharma saved me from myself!"</i><br />
http://www.sandygarson.com<br />
http://yoursinthedharma.blogspot.com/</span><br />
<span family="verdana" size:85="">
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<center>Powered by <a href="http://dir.webring.com/rw" target=_top>WebRing</a>.</center></div>Sandy Garsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09824736880802751211noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17873725.post-48313201947268860722016-09-22T14:33:00.000-07:002016-09-22T14:33:42.682-07:00The Poise in the Boat<span family="verdana" size:85=""></span><br />
<span family="verdana" size:85="">Rain or shine, every day for the past few weeks, as soon as the sun rises and again not long before it sets, local college rowers glide</span><span family="verdana" size:85=""> by my house in sleek white shells of one, two, four and eight. The simultaneous dip of so many oars into fast moving water creates a rhythmic thump loud enough to wake me at dawn and divert my attention in the twilight. I just love that sight.</span><span family="verdana" size:85=""> </span><br />
<span family="verdana" size:85=""></span><br />
<span family="verdana" size:85=""><br /></span>
<span family="verdana" size:85="">Most times there are enough sculls going by to be an armada. That's because women have equal opportunity now, scull for scull, and some days it's hard to tell who's who out there. I can only distinguish their boats from the males' on those not freezing days when guys tend to row bare-chested and all torsos in others boats are covered by tanks or tees or sweats. Because women in my time weren't allowed to row and I love the sport, I have been known to spontaneously shout: "Go Girls!"</span><br />
<br />
<span family="verdana" size:85="">That's about it for segregation at sea here, a sensible matter of muscle might. Since everyone's legs are bare, this year I see some are dark and others caramel. An encouraging addition to a very Brahman blueblood sport--like women. But then, sex
and skin color don't matter half as much as the guts to get up in
the chilly dark of 5 am to be out uncovered on the water by 6, especially when it's raining
or so cold I'm inside wrapped in fleece, snuggled in sleep.</span><span family="verdana" size:85=""><span family="verdana" size:85=""> It amazes me they get out there. The crews have already gone a mile when they pass by me and
will glide another mile before they turn back stroke and feathering without letup: four miles with and
against a stubborn, powerful tide. stroke feather stroke feather. </span></span><br />
<br />
<span family="verdana" size:85=""><span family="verdana" size:85="">Sex and skin color have nothing to do with the energy, stamina and sheer will to go the distance.
It's all mind. Mind over matter. Mind is the matter. Rowing is the most grueling sport because there's no pause, no time out, no chance to step aside on the field. Just continual stroke feather stroke feather with everybody dependent on you keeping up keeping on the stroke feather. A mantra. </span></span><br />
<br />
<span family="verdana" size:85=""><span family="verdana" size:85="">Even when crew is done, it's not done. The rowers have to lift their shell out of the water and carry it away. There's no locker room to retreat to and relax in. Just a van ride back to campus. And there are no cheerleaders or friends/parents in viewing stands. It's lonely that way. Not an ego trip.</span></span><br />
<br />
<span family="verdana" size:85="">I think I am perpetually mesmerized by the sight of those shells sliding by because sex and skin color, slaps on the back, standpoint and sensibility are all so irrelevant. Rowing is every body literally pulling together. It is the awesome phenomenon of persistence, the miracle of exertion and the dazzling display of diligence--qualities I recognize I don't have enough of every time those boats glide by. </span><br />
<br />
<span family="verdana" size:85="">That magnificence was of course the point of that thrilling book, <i>The Boys in The Boat</i>. Those ragtag eight Washington state boys went for the gold and by their merit beat both bad weather and cheating Nazis to it in 1936 because, man to man, they could not bear to disappoint each other. If ever there was a team sport, crew is it.</span><br />
<br />
The single scullers must look over their shoulder all the time to see where they are going. They look lonely out there in the crowd, and uninteresting to me. They get no coxswain to help, no one to to set the pace. Performance is strictly up to each of them with no way to know if it's good enough or not. Going it alone has obstacles and handicaps that go away when the number of rowers in a boat goes up. I think I am mesmerized by the sight of all those sculls sliding by two times a day because they are a memorably picturesque
message not only about how much more persistent exertion I need, but more crucially perhaps, how much faster, smoother and friction free we humans can
go when we are in the same boat diligently pulling together.<br />
<span family="verdana" size:85=""><br /></span>
<br />
<br />
<br />
<span family="verdana" size:85="">~Sandy Garson
<i>"Wordsmithing to attest how the Dharma saved me from myself!"</i><br />
http://www.sandygarson.com<br />
http://yoursinthedharma.blogspot.com/</span><br />
<span family="verdana" size:85="">
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<center>Powered by <a href="http://dir.webring.com/rw" target=_top>WebRing</a>.</center></div>Sandy Garsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09824736880802751211noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17873725.post-29214413371033271902016-09-13T14:25:00.001-07:002016-09-14T07:12:42.821-07:00Eulogy for a stranger<span family="verdana" size:85=""></span><br />
<span family="verdana" size:85="">In mid July, instead of being at the Bob Dylan concert I had a ticket for, I was in Vancouver, Canada at Rinpoche's monastery for a special weekend teaching. That's where I came upon a tall, middle aged blonde I'd met there the year before. Back then she joined a friend and I for lunch, essentially because we had a rental car and she had no wheels at all. My friend had evidently made this woman's vague acquaintance years earlier at a retreat in the lonesome highlands of SE Colorado when they both found themselves washing dishes together in the kitchen. </span><br />
<span family="verdana" size:85=""><br /></span>
<span family="verdana" size:85="">I newly made Arlette's acquaintance at that pub lunch. She was from Hawaii, Maui to be specific. </span><span family="verdana" size:85="">She wore bright red lipstick. </span><span family="verdana" size:85="">She was single, at that moment. She was a therapist. When the waitress came to take our order, she was an inquisitor. "I really want the chicken," she said, eyes on the menu, "but is it organic?" It was. "Is it free range?" It was. "How much of a range?" The waitress didn't know. "Was it well treated?" The waitress didn't answer. I thought I was in an SNL skit. I couldn't believe this woman was that ditzy, that a person long past 40 could be that much of an easily parodied type. I felt like shouting: "Order the baked potato!" but we were on a break from a Buddhist prayer gathering, so with considerable effort, I zipped my lip and pulled out my patience. In other words, I didn't say a word. </span><br />
<span family="verdana" size:85=""><br /></span>
<span family="verdana" size:85="">When I spotted Arlette in the shrine room in Vancouver this year</span><span family="verdana" size:85="">, that chicken shtick was all I could think about. I could not get over her total lack of self-consciousness, more to the point self-awareness. She had not been making a Portlandia joke. I had been making a judgment. She was a type.</span><br />
<span family="verdana" size:85=""><br /></span>
<span family="verdana" size:85="">This July, Arlette was, as she had been, full of zest and zeal. She still wore bright red lipstick.She had flowered shirts. She cadged rides with my dharma brother, who found her charming. She waved at me. We chatted briefly, and I got reminded she was from Hawaii, Maui to be specific. I got reminded she smiled all the time. I got reminded how temporary a judgment can be. For what purpose was I carrying that chicken shtick memory around? To keep labeling her as a type.</span><br />
<span family="verdana" size:85=""><br /></span>
<span family="verdana" size:85="">Little more than a month later, an unusual and unusually mysterious post showed up in my Facebook feed. The author introduced herself as Arlette's dear friend and went on to say while she was very uncomfortable speaking out on this medium, she needed to convey a message. To those who knew Arlette, all was not well. She had cancer. She had gone to Germany for an "alternative" treatment. </span><br />
<span family="verdana" size:85=""><br /></span>
<span family="verdana" size:85="">Prayers for Arlette began to appear in my Facebook feed, followed the next day by news her body had reacted to either the cancer or the treatment with a stroke. She remained unconscious. More prayers surfaced on Facebook before a post that evening announcing she'd left her body, as Buddhists say. Just five weeks after I saw her red smiling lips, Arlette had gone free range. </span><span family="verdana" size:85="">Thirty years of the teachings and talk about impermanence boiled down to Arlette gleaming in July, gone in August. </span><br />
<span family="verdana" size:85=""><br /></span>
<span family="verdana" size:85="">Her friends posted like mad. They were going to miss her high spirits, her sparkling energy, her resolve to handle anything thrown at her. People said she never shirked. She always smiled. She had great strength and character. Someone posted a video of Arlette in her Maui apartment spontaneously dancing to the live voice and guitar of a gray haired, long bearded old friend. It was like watching Zorba the Greek exposing the joy of being human. Infinite love and admiration kept pouring through my Facebook feed for someone I hardly knew, someone I remembered as an SNL skit, someone very alive who died in a flash, just like that! </span><br />
<span family="verdana" size:85=""><br /></span>
<span family="verdana" size:85="">I wondered if behind all those red-lipped smiles and bright energy in Vancouver, Arlette knew she had cancer and was doing a spectacular acting job. Or was it a surprise waiting when she got back home? A shocking hit, like a landmine. that blew her away to Germany where she died alone, in a hospital.</span><br />
<span family="verdana" size:85=""><br /></span>
<span family="verdana" size:85="">Most of the world didn't know Arlette and I didn't either. But the unsolicited outpouring of pain and praise says she was a rare type: a human being worth knowing, worth the space she took up and the organic food she consumed. She didn't have a lot of money or a fancy house or a world mastery agenda. She just had a lot of heart and persistence that apparently made other people's lives happier. What more could anybody want out of life than to be a blessing to others? Who can do better than die alone yet be instantly mourned as a tremendous loss, someone remembered with unanimous love. </span><br />
<span family="verdana" size:85=""><br /></span>
<span family="verdana" size:85="">"Now she is with Rinpoche," my dharma brother wrote in his post, "sharing his blessings." Her spirit, as Bob Dylan would say, is blowing in the wind. "Viva Arlette!" I spontaneously commented. "Viva Arlette!" </span><br />
<br />
<br />
<span family="verdana" size:85="">~Sandy Garson
<i>"Wordsmithing to attest how the Dharma saved me from myself!"</i><br />
http://www.sandygarson.com<br />
http://yoursinthedharma.blogspot.com/</span><br />
<span family="verdana" size:85="">
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<center>Powered by <a href="http://dir.webring.com/rw" target=_top>WebRing</a>.</center></div>Sandy Garsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09824736880802751211noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17873725.post-1936966322418069672016-09-04T08:19:00.001-07:002016-09-11T06:20:55.327-07:00Jam Session: Bodhicitta in a jar<span family="verdana" size:85=""></span><br />
<span family="verdana" size:85=""> </span>
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Everyone can breathe easier today. The world is a happier
place. This morning</div>
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I was up earlier than the sun could burn off cold fog, so I
fired up the range and made a small batch of late crop strawberry jam. Now
there should be enough-- although truthfully when it comes to sharing the love
of homemade jam from farmer’s market fruits there is never enough.</div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhxk0IXi-KVEvwUhkrBrvgXZpjy9qt-vO3ciExt6Znfa-_B4kHVSlz_I_aWz3eD_EJSxNzHRNTDzTRr81O6i43UwhwpM6hqVLr5mHTBnlyC4piXX9LWUx72J7OQM-TzZ2CVF60hrg/s1600/IMG_3558.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhxk0IXi-KVEvwUhkrBrvgXZpjy9qt-vO3ciExt6Znfa-_B4kHVSlz_I_aWz3eD_EJSxNzHRNTDzTRr81O6i43UwhwpM6hqVLr5mHTBnlyC4piXX9LWUx72J7OQM-TzZ2CVF60hrg/s200/IMG_3558.JPG" width="200" /></a></div>
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The jars of seasonal strawberry I made late in June were
disappearing rapidly, chosen over peach and apricot, even blueberry, so I was
fretting. For 48 years, I have been making pure ingredient strawberry jam (just
the berries with lime juice, rose water, spices and tiny bit of raw sugar), and
there have definitely been years I wanted to quit, this being one of them. But
people wait for it. They look so forward to getting a jar or two, I feel like
that Titanic love: I must go on. </div>
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<br /></div>
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There’s definitely a jar for me, if I even want it because I
don’t eat that much jam. But others, they’re crazy for it, and my jam making is
always for others. Frankly, no matter how much stuff and money
people have, they go gaga over a jar of simple homemade jam. It’s still the
best handout money can’t buy. I love how happy it makes everyone, how simple it is to make
people happy in this monstrously troubled world.</div>
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<br /></div>
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So, when to my surprise yesterday, I saw a few piled-high
pints of late crop strawberries at my local farmers’ market, I figured “<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">what the hell’</i> and the pig in me grabbed
two. I could’ve sliced and enjoyed them, but I was, as I said, worried about
others. So I am happy to report the four jars of jam those berries just made reduced
my anxiety. More people are going feel the love. Homemade jam is such an easy
way to share it, I am in fact on my way back to the kitchen to turn the four
peaches a local farmer gave me and the handful of blackberries I picked by the
side of the road into a few more jars to give away. On this very happy morning,
I feel like the world is going to be a more perfect place.</div>
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<br />
<span family="verdana" size:85="">~Sandy Garson
<i>"Wordsmithing to attest how the Dharma saved me from myself!"</i><br />
http://www.sandygarson.com<br />
http://yoursinthedharma.blogspot.com/</span><br />
<span family="verdana" size:85="">
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<center>Powered by <a href="http://dir.webring.com/rw" target=_top>WebRing</a>.</center></div>Sandy Garsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09824736880802751211noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17873725.post-69150494934927748752016-08-29T12:30:00.005-07:002016-09-11T06:29:40.497-07:00Trying to Share the Love<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><span family="verdana" size:85="">I just helped someone put together brochure copy for a morning meditation program a major organization in New York City has agreed to sponsor. The operative word had to be <i>mindfulness </i>so this secular institution could avoid the religious implications of "meditation." My friend came up with "contemplation." </span></span></span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><span family="verdana" size:85=""><br /></span></span></span></span>
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><span family="verdana" size:85="">I really wanted her program to succeed. I wanted lots of frayed New Yorkers to pile in and start their day with a pile of good news. </span><span family="verdana" size:85="">I wanted to make the marketing pitch meaningful as well as dead on honest. So I contemplated why I find Buddhism to be so precious, sacred actually, and how it changed my life. </span></span></span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></span></span>
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><span family="verdana" size:85="">This brought me to the innovative way a Dharma brother of mine in San Francisco has, with our Rinpoche's blessings, started to present Buddhism: as the pure, unfettered love called <i>Bodhicitta</i>. No texts for study, no big untranslatable words to parse, no tormas to fashion or mantras to memorize. Just guided meditation on the endless streams of light and love pouring into us from the Buddha and his retinue of deities, and from all the great masters who came before us and spent their lives perfecting the idea we can all transcend our anguish. </span></span></span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><span family="verdana" size:85=""> <span family="verdana" size:85=""> </span></span></span></span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><span family="verdana" size:85=""><span family="verdana" size:85="">Rinpoche's insight is that we are now living in heavy rains<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"> that have</span> br<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">ought us all </span>a tsunami of trouble. </span></span><span family="verdana" size:85=""><span family="verdana" size:85="">
Everyone is struggling in some way. Matters keep getting worse.</span></span><span family="verdana" size:85=""><span family="verdana" size:85=""> Everyone has been wounded one way or another with no way to heal. No place to turn... except... .Rinpoche sees the Buddha and his retinue along with the long lineage of those who brought us his message as a sheltering umbrella we can all get under.</span></span></span></span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></span></span>
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><span family="verdana" size:85=""><span family="verdana" size:85="">So instead of meeting for 90 minutes to struggle over the meaning of ancient texts and treatises, he
wants his students to just sit there and feel the love. When you do, you walk away on clouds</span>, nourished and buoyant. You wonder why no one ever told you this before. You want to share the love. Compassion arises. It's all bodhicitta, sometimes translated as "awakened heart."</span></span></span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><span family="verdana" size:85=""><br /></span></span></span>
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><span family="verdana" size:85="">It starts with the Buddha's vital, simple message. Contrary to monotheistic doctrines that insist you are a mess who needs God's help, the Buddha assures you are perfect just as you are. There is absolutely nothing wrong with you, nothing to hide.You don't need to rush out shopping for stuff to make yourself better. That kind of self-improvement improves nothing but some corporation's bottom line. Put the credit card away. You already have everything you need, You just need to discover that. </span></span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><span family="verdana" size:85="">The Buddha managed by contemplating how his life had worked out. Ever since he's been inviting us to a come-as-you-are party so we too can do that and come to see all the blessings we have. Chief among them is all that shit we're so busy hiding, all that scary stuff like failures and fractures and freakiness. They are actually the pile of manure that's going to make perfection grow, the dirt scrapers that can reveal the gold within you. If you dig in.<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"> After all, the symbol<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"> of Buddh<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">ist dharma is the lotus<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">.</span> <span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">This</span> most beautiful flower on Earth can only grow in mud. </span></span></span></span></span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">That's what contemplation practice actually is. Buddhist meditation is the insistent belief we are all worthy beings with access to unending blessings. The trick is how to sit still for a few minutes to find that out for ourselves. To help us, Buddhists back in the day created four images that are now widely available and wildly popular.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br />First there is the Buddha himself. Artists have very strict rules for how a Buddha is portrayed. He will often have a third eye or dot representing it at the top of his nose. This represents inner seeing, the result of contemplation. Often Buddha will be shown with his right hand reaching down to touch the ground. This “touching the Earth” mudra represents the Buddha’s assertion that he and all beings have the right to be here on Earth and receive all its blessings. He is saying: we all belong here and we all benefit.” Sometimes Buddha is shown in full meditation posture and sometimes with his right hand turned outward in front of his chest. You know what that gesture means, don't you? It's the STOP sigh. <span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Here, it<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">'s the Buddha saying, stop being <span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">scared. I'm here. <span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">The hand gesture represents the Buddha dispelling</span></span></span></span> our de<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">epest f</span>ears. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br />Next, Tara, or Drolma in Tibetan. She comes in many colors and many poses because she has so many ways of protecting us. Tara is the great mother who wants for each of us what any loving mother wants for her child: good health, long life, freedom from fear, and wisdom. She is always shown with her right hand extended in the gesture of generosity to indicate she grants all our requests. Of the 21 Taras, the two most widely popular are Green Tara and White Tara. Green Tara has her leg extended, some say, so she can rise up quickly to come to our aid. Both Taras have a lotus in their left hand, rising from their heart. This is a way of showing us their great compassion and wisdom. Tara is the great mother and protector of all Himalayan peoples. She is known as Kwan Yin in China and Japan.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br />Then Manjushri represents wisdom and he is always portrayed as a youth to tell us that wisdom is always fresh: it never ages, rots or gets stale. Manjushri is always portrayed with a sword because wisdom easily cuts through our ignorance and pain and slays it. He wants us to be that kind of warrior. Cutting through our delusions and illusions will give us clarity that we can wield like his sword to cut off suffering. Manjushri is a reminder that we are all born perfect with everything we need to be happy beyond suffering. We just need <span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">to borrow his sword of wisdom to cut through</span> our despairs <span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">t<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">o</span></span> r<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">each<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"> </span></span></span>this truth, the way a machete hacks a<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">way the weeds until the land is clear.</span> <span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">C</span>ontemplation is the best way to do that.<br /><br />And finally Sipaykhorlo: The Wheel of Life illustrates the overarching truth we learn from contemplating ourselves: how we make our own suffering happen. In the center are the three poisons that destroy our clarity and skill: passion or wanting, aggression or hating and ignorance or not caring. These are shown with animal images. Around them are the six realms of suffering actions propel beings into: the hell realm (red hot anger), the hungry ghost realm (constant thirst from never having enough), the animal realm (ignorance of karma and dharma or, in other words, cause and effect), human realm (destroyed by desires), the jealous gods realm (endless warfare and envy), the god realm (downfall due to pride and arrogance). And around these are the 12 interdependent links of activity that lead us into so much suffering. This is the uh-oh image, painstakingly crafted to show us the chain that enchains us in interminable suffering for the purpose of showing us how to break that chain and set ourselves free. <br /><br /> The Buddha wants us to be happy all the time. For 2600 years men and women have devoted their lives to contemplating and come away telling us we are okay, we are lovable, we are absolutely perfect. Now is a good time to tune in and hear them. Happiness is, as they say, an inside job.</span><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><span family="verdana" size:85="">~Sandy Garson
<i>"Wordsmithing to attest how the Dharma saved me from myself!"</i><br />
http://www.sandygarson.com<br />
http://yoursinthedharma.blogspot.com/</span></span><br />
<span family="verdana" size:85=""><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">
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<center>Powered by <a href="http://dir.webring.com/rw" target=_top>WebRing</a>.</center></div>Sandy Garsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09824736880802751211noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17873725.post-31345002300823512862016-08-25T17:21:00.001-07:002016-08-26T06:22:20.519-07:00In Praise of PutteringLast week I tried to show a 9-year-old the huge bald eagle camouflaged in a dead tree across the inlet. I myself get ridiculously excited whenever I spot "big bird", but this child who had never seen America's national symbol before could have cared less. She looked up from her mobile phone game and quickly back with a barely disclosed <i>ho hum, so what</i>, <i>why are you bothering me?</i> I am still in shock.<br />
<br />
I probably shouldn't be because her parents and only grandparents are all career-driven urban/ suburbanites who don't have pets, gardens, spiritual inclinations or the slightest curiosity about the natural world. They don't care where their food, electricity and water come from as long as they steadily get plenty. They don't care if they drive gas guzzlers; they can afford the gallons. They're in the driven multitude that commutes to the straight and narrow virtual reality of consumer culture and corporate career, stuck in that bubble of conformity, delegating the urgencies of life to strangers.<br />
<br />
Not surprisingly, these are folks who lack hobbies, passions, spiritual strength, and most of all the urge to putter around. I am quick to notice what sociologists of the 50s called <i>outer directed people--those force fed food for thought by outside interests, </i>or to put it another way, those always under the influence<i>--</i> because I am so happy to tune out their noisy <i>must-do</i> world and quietly putter around listening to myself. Instead of the mad scribble of endless appointments and must-dos that is
their and everybody else's calendar, mine is a symphony of blank spaces. This ode
to joy means time doing what today's hyperactive, pay to play
Tiger Mom culture absolutely loathes: live hands on. I mess around in the garden, the kitchen, the landscape, with boats and property, other people's needs and of course my
mind--which seems to include all the decor shifting I do trying to get my place to feel more "right." I also sit around watching seabirds, searching the stars, checking world news, admiring the sunset or full moon and sometimes just listening to my breath. Puttering is me dealing with the real world.<br />
<br />
You could say my career has been being alive as a human. I adopted this "lifestyle" after I spent my 20s burying a half-dozen family and friends who played strictly by conventional consume and career rules yet got rudely torn away before they did what they truly wanted. All that subtraction added up to a huge epiphany: "question authority." Instead of tearing between life and death like it's a 200 meter Olympic swim and getting helplessly blown away, maybe it was better to float and surf life's waves. <br />
<br />
I suppose without knowing it, I was an earlier adopter of the Buddhist belief in giving up all hope for fruition, giving up all expectation of glory, focusing on the present moment. Those with whom I shared my reckoning thought I'd lost my mind, probably from the weight of too much tragedy. Or, as time went on, perhaps it was guts because I stepped out of the conventional straight line life and began floating from one experience to another, a nomad among the settled. My oldest friend, grandmother of that uninterested child, took to calling me "the wandering Bu..." <br />
<br />
<span family="verdana" size:85="">Frankly, there have been moments I worried about myself, especially after the financial road turned into a dead-end pile of rocks. H</span>aving my "space", as the counterculture used to say, made me a generalist in an era that increasingly prizes and encourages laser-focused specialization.<span family="verdana" size:85=""> Our culture has become a ferocious Tiger Mom hellbent on raising competent career professionals who never get time to learn how to be a human being, to find out what it feels like to be alive. </span><br />
<br />
<span family="verdana" size:85="">Well, as life would have it, I'm now finding </span><span family="verdana" size:85="">the oddest part of being the odd one out is being the only one among affluent and acculturated friends who has entered end times (old age) busily
challenged, full of energy, packed with curiosity, and reasonably happy. </span><span family="verdana" size:85="">The one who feels the most alive, the one in the best of health. (Dear Buddha, may I not be jinxed for saying this.) </span><br />
<br />
<span family="verdana" size:85="">Yesterday maybe for the fourth time, my college friend who's been a "wealth manager" for 30 years very defensively </span><span family="verdana" size:85="">re-iterated</span><span family="verdana" size:85=""> that even though she's 73 and has enough money, she can't quit because her life would have no structure. "I like it," she said, "that I know where to be at what hour. Otherwise I wouldn't know how to fill my day when I get out of bed." I heard here the echo of an old boyfriend telling me even though he was over 70 and had had a heart attack, he couldn't quit being a hedgefunder because he was good at making money and that's all he knew how to do. </span><br />
<span family="verdana" size:85=""><br /></span>
<span family="verdana" size:85="">Two years ago, my friend who became an attorney after her second child entered kindergarten was forced by age rules to retire from her government job. Giving up that long held position meant giving up a title that, as she put it, told her who she was: a lawyer. I pointed out in my best Buddhist way she was still a wife, mother, friend and grandmother, but that didn't assuage her in the slightest. Those positions were ordinary. They didn't grant elite status. "I need a way for people to define me, for me to really know who<i> I </i>am," is how she put it. For two years, she's been flailing as she tries to find out. She started taking guitar lessons but her young teacher didn't want to work with a "Florence Jenkins" and told her to go elsewhere. She signed on at an employment agency that forwards volunteers to non-profit institutions but can't find one that resonates with her because "I don't want to be around sick, deranged, or foreign people." Her interests are so limited, there's hardly a museum where she could be a docent. Monthly botox shots, a personal trainer every other day, and quarterly spa visits don't fill her time or define her enough. She's so unhappy.</span><br />
<span family="verdana" size:85=""><br /></span>
<span family="verdana" size:85="">My oldest friend was fired because of age. She lives in a huge, overly furnished house with two monogrammed cars, but she kept hunting down jobs and collecting unemployment. She got one for a year but lost it six months ago, so she's back on unemployment and interviews. "Can't you just quit?" I asked. "You're old enough and age is the issue." "I need something to do," she said. "I need a focus...and I like the extra money." Meanwhile all her focus nowadays is overwhelmingly on her grandchildren whose lives she seems to be leading.</span><br />
<br />
<span family="verdana" size:85="">Even more weird is how all that time everybody thought I wasted has somehow made me the person everybody now wants to consult. Oddly, I am the one guiding the wealth manager through personal real estate ventures. I am advising the former lawyer on gluten free options for her celiac grandson and non profit NGOs she doesn't know about that could use her help. Last year I was guiding her through the intricacies of dealing with condo management for redress and repairs. My oldest friend admired my herb plantings so I've helped her start her own. Her granddaughter wanted to come see me because when she was four, I taught her how to make jam and she just loved that. She loved it so much she walked out asking me what kind we'd make next year when she came back. We have been cooking up a storm one day a year and this year was no exception, except that the demand to make a lot of things we weren't going to eat struck me as more about resume building than the joy of cooking. </span><br />
<br />
<span family="verdana" size:85="">I have been on the phone and text messaging system with a bright young friend in San Francisco who has no clue how to handle vital property repair issues. I've recently helped a young friend in LA with the decor of houses he remodels to flip. I've had several rounds of coffee with a Fox News watching friend who needs to talk about a serious, secret family problem. I have been emailing a very successful college friend who lost her husband/business partner of 48 years because she keeps thanking me for the " unique good advice." </span><br />
<br />
<span family="verdana" size:85="">Twice in the last two weeks, I sat face to face with two other women whose lives were coming apart. To the one whose cancer had returned and was facing major disfiguring surgery--a psychiatrist, I explained how to focus the mind for protection and healing through the basics of Medicine Buddha practice. For the grandmother who kept tearing up when she talked about what an awful mess she'd become--she can't keep up with her grandchildren since her hips are so bad she requires a walker and she knows her physical impairment comes from her terrible mental state because all her friends are dead and she feels so lonely--I sat at the restaurant table and taught her basic meditation breathing and the idea of fresh start. I recommended books. Now someone is suggesting I help establish a Buddhist center for spiritual healing through Bodhicitta, Medicine Buddha and mind training skills. And I may do it because I see how many souls struggle and suffer when their humanity surfaces.</span><br />
<br />
<span family="verdana" size:85="">I have never considered puttering as sputtering, wasting time and "doing nothing." Cleaning my room and my clothes, moving plants around my garden, creating something edible from disparate ingredients in my fridge or discovering a dozen ways to deploy a can of chickpeas, doing crossword puzzles, watching the seabirds stalking the shore or dark clouds commandeering the sky have all been fitness training, cathartic ways of sharpening my perceptions, clearing my mind and honing my humanity. Last week someone shared on Facebook the idea that although we are living in an age of infinite information, we get no wisdom. I think that's because we're too focused on getting ahead instead of getting a head. People need to stop being afraid of life and just putter around in it.</span><br />
<br />
<br />
<span family="verdana" size:85="">~Sandy Garson
<i>"Wordsmithing to attest how the Dharma saved me from myself!"</i><br />
http://www.sandygarson.com<br />
http://yoursinthedharma.blogspot.com/</span><br />
<span family="verdana" size:85="">
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<span family="verdana" size:85="">My beloved Rinpoche seems to spend most of his teaching time harping on the same simple point: now is the time to take up the Dharma as fiercely as you can. Don't wait; don't get distracted; don't make excuses. Just pass Go ASAP. Suffering will get you if you don't watch out. </span><br />
<br />
I flew to Vancouver for 48 hours to hear him teach a newly found pith instruction he boiled down to the same message. I reasoned, as I always do when he does this, Rinpoche couldn't get to the meat of the matter because he was speaking to a vast assemblage of ordinary people who dropped in for the weekend, not long term yogis privy to the secret esoteric practice instructions passed down through generations. What could an old man facing what could be his final public words say, but: <i>Please please practice.</i><br />
<br />
Of course Miss Piggy wanted the heady stuff. I'm not a long term yogi, but I've been studying for 30 years and I flew a long way to learn something new. Disappointment made me fidget in my seat and tune out<i>. I know. I know, </i>my mind railed. <i>I've heard it 100 times: meditate, be kind, avoid negative thoughts and activity. You have this precious human life so hard to obtain: use it or lose it. I'm sick of hearing about how amazing it is to be in a human body--especially when mine is falling apart.</i><br />
<br />
Yes, you get old and start losing your parts: the eyesight, the hearing, the knees and hips, the eyebrows (never the hair on your legs of course) and tiny waist. You end up wondering why all the fuss about this human body that's got expiration dates all over it. This is the age of sustainable. It's so not. In fact, I've started to think of the diminishing form as the Buddha's dirty trick to finally make me realize the only thing that doesn't disintegrate or even grow old is the mind (notice how you always feel the same young in your thoughts?), so get on it now.<br />
<br />
Still, gurus always remind us our mind is housed in our body, temporarily. Like a rental car we eventually return, it's a vehicle for getting around. The body is also sort of a gym in which the mind can strengthen through fitness training. Or warp. In other words, a mind needs a body. Some body.<br />
<br />
A precious human body being nearly impossible for the mind to obtain is the first of four thoughts supposed to turn the mind to practicing Dharma. A student hears it early and often. It's sort of a scare tactic. The BOO! subtext is how the odds of being born, the mind's being reborn, in a human body --and one that's got all its faculties working to boot--are the same as those of a turtle popping its head up in the Pacific Ocean into a floating brass ring. The Universe's A list of somebodies is that short. <br />
<br />
Humans make the list as the only beings with minds sharp enough to cut through the daze/days to the causes and understanding of how to eradicate suffering. We are the only creatures motivated by abstract ideas. Each of us is the agent of change we can believe in because we can believe in change. Since only humans realize it exists, only humans can effect it. We alone can free ourselves from the endless woes of the world. So hurry while you're in a human body.<br />
<br />
I thought myself pretty inured to this same old, same old motivation coach line and left Vancouver grumpy about not learning anything super new. So I feel obliged to confess it's been a surprise--or maybe Rinpoche's deliberate trick-- how activities since have ratcheted my usual precious human life <i>ho hum</i> up to Holy Cow!<br />
<br />
A long hot summer has revealed beyond question the pathetic minority we human beings are. For one thing, I've been dealing with huge colonies of harmless black ants crawling everywhere, huger colonies of red ants digging up the sand under my brick walkway, spraying telltale flyers from swarming colonies of carpenter ants that would like to eat my house for lunch. And those damned fruit flies that mysteriously show up on the kitchen cabinets, those unswattable little buggers.<br />
<br />
More annoying, I'm scratching the skin off my arms and torso where the toxic hairs of the hundreds of brown tail moth caterpillars crawling around the oak trees caused itchy rashes. These are not the four dozen tent caterpillars that built a huge cocoon in my sand cherry tree, causing me to saw off its largest limb. Then there are the earthworms I inadvertently disturb and damage trying to help a plant. And Buddha only knows how many white aphids are now munching on my drought stricken perennials, how many new almost invisible spider webs are being spun to catch them.<br />
<br />
I joke that the way Tibetans give corpses to wild animals and birds to eat as a way of compensating for the animals they ate, I've given my live body to tiny creatures. I've gone through two tubes of 1% cortisone cream to stop the itching not just of brown tail moth caterpillars but mosquito bites, bigger black fly bites and the endless nips of "<i>no see'ums</i>", aka gnats, at night. The final insult was when I attempted to break up a huge seaweed clog on the ropes securing my dock and emerged from the salt water literally covered by hundreds of tiny tan wiggling worms that stung. <br />
<br />
I don't want to know about the microscopic dust mites that live in the dust I pay dearly every two weeks to eradicate because they've eaten flesh off my face and triggered asthma. I don't count the bees buzzing around the purple lavender bushes and flamboyant red flower stalks of a Persian plant. I've lost count of the disgustingly voracious army of Japanese beetles trying to devour it, the dune roses and the sand cherry tree. My garden is under siege, and me as an army of one is fighting a battle against hundreds of these little shiny savages. At least six dozen lie dead in the four day old trap, another two dozen in the jar of soapy water left out as a warning, yet every afternoon they keep coming like waves of a tsunami.<br />
<br />
One groundhog who's eaten a quarter of my perennials, half my annuals and all my black raspberries. Two chipmunks hungry for my blueberries. A family of dreaded red squirrels, a fat gray squirrel always scurrying. A woodpecker whose sound echoes, a bald eagle mom and its baby learning how to circle, 18 Canada geese all in a row swimming by, a pair of ducks with three ducklings paddling behind, three great blue herons hanging around the shore at low tide alternating with a half dozen snowy egrets so regal on spindly black legs, a flock of terns diving for the huge schools of small silvery "bait" fish carried by the fast moving tide, the continual splash of bass breaking the water. I hear the haunting cry of an owl from time to time, just heard the raucous squawks a crow mob and watched five seagulls fighting over a clam dug up by one. Clams and blood worms under the salt water mud, snails and mussels in the seaweed, crabs and lobsters crawling along the bottom, green flies skimming the surface...<br />
<br />
Amid all this body options, I ended up an A lister with access, the elite with an In. And you did too. In this world of infinite critters and pests and living bacteria, we got the precious, hard-won human body. And look at me wasting it to death, sitting around sipping coffee, checking email, soaking up the sun, running off to hot spots and worrying about its hair, even though I've been warned at least 100 times I could lose this opportunity next time around. Look how many disgusting creatures I could turn out to be. <br />
<br />
The swarms of summer radicalized me. So I am sharing the news. Somehow somewhere in the past I --and you--did enough things good and right to not be a Japanese beetle (hedge fund managers only), sand worm, mosquito (insurance executives exclusive), aphid, carpenter ant or gnat. Whatever made us win the karma lottery, I--and you--better be doing it from now on so next time around we win again and get another human body--maybe even in a more elite situation. A body with all its working parts, that's "precious" because it's the only vehicle driving to immortality with no suffering. Now really is the time to think ahead and be kind, avoid negative thoughts and harmful actions. Now may be the only time left to focus on the Dharma and liberate ourselves forever from pain, distress, decrepitude and death. Life in the body we've got may not be the greatest, but it's going to be a helluva lot more horrid to be a cockroach, termite, leech or vole. <br />
<br />
<span family="verdana" size:85=""><br /></span>
<br />
<span family="verdana" size:85="">~Sandy Garson
<i>"Wordsmithing to attest how the Dharma saved me from myself!"</i><br />
http://www.sandygarson.com<br />
http://yoursinthedharma.blogspot.com/</span><br />
<span family="verdana" size:85="">
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<center>Powered by <a href="http://dir.webring.com/rw" target=_top>WebRing</a>.</center></div>Sandy Garsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09824736880802751211noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17873725.post-30326113867749658342016-07-06T15:09:00.002-07:002016-07-08T06:50:37.741-07:00Summertime...and the living isn't easy<span family="verdana" size:85=""></span><br />
<span family="verdana" size:85="">Just before Independence Day, I saw headlines about medical scientists close enough to curing cancer, people were no longer going to die. Also gididier headlines that other scientists, blessed with Botox and ice, are close to extending human life spans to 150 years. By the end of this 21st Century, people will get closer to being eternal. A century later we should all be death-proof.</span><br />
<br />
<span family="verdana" size:85="">Like most grandiose schemes of grandeur, kissing mortality goodby does not seem to have been thought through. I have yet to read how some mad scientist is working on the critical shelf life issue, changing the expiration date of ears, eyes, knees, hips and heart valves. I know the young disrupters and innovators and starter uppers don't want to hear from the worldly wise and experienced, but I feel it necessary to point this out because here I am less than half of that 150, and already two of those five have worn out. Contemporaries have plastic hips and knees. Organ by organ we are trading hardware for soft ware, turning into plastic. I no longer need the Buddha to tell me impermanence is a bitch. It is a weapon of mass destruction, but we are not going to win a war that abolishes it.</span><span family="verdana" size:85=""> </span><br />
<br />
<span family="verdana" size:85="">And why should we? Let's suppose folks two hundred years ago found a way to surpass death
and make themselves permanent. Makes themselves the chosen. We would not be here now. Nobody would've
made way for the new, the fresh, the flexible. Nothing but stagnation
and paralysis.</span><br />
<br />
<span family="verdana" size:85="">That's why these efforts feel as reckless as Brexit. Resentful of their lot in life--in this case a four score and ten year expiration date shared with others, people want out. They're angry at limitation, angry at loss of control over their own lives. So badly do they want what they want that as with Brexit, they haven't bothered to consider the hard realities and consequences.This quest reeks of animosity toward the forward pressing hordes of younger, stronger folks with all their hipbones, taut skin and not-fading smarts. As i said, impermanence is a howler.</span><br />
<br />
<span family="verdana" size:85=""> A few weeks ago, or so I read, the octogenarian actress Vanessa Redgrave told an interviewer she was not afraid to die. In fact, she was looking forward to it. "Living is very hard," she said. "It will be easy to give up." </span><br />
<span family="verdana" size:85=""><br /></span>
<span family="verdana" size:85="">A non-Buddhist has nailed it. Living is actually so hard, we should be glad to give it up. Let somebody else deal with it. Not even a life of vast privilege and vaster talent that brought more of it liberated Vanessa Redgrave from human suffering. Her adult daughter died abruptly in a skiing accident; her younger sister died of cancer; she went through divorce and probably sorrows and sicknesses her publicist did not let us know about. She's a reminder nobody escapes the inevitable suffering the Buddha pointed out 2600 years ago: being born into this erratic world, bodily sickness, the painful deteriorations of old age and death with its paralyzing fears. That's just for starters.</span><br />
<span family="verdana" size:85=""><br /></span>
<span family="verdana" size:85="">Over the long July 4th holiday weekend, </span><span family="verdana" size:85="">I thought a lot about what Redgrave said because the weather was so heartbreakingly exquisite. The sky was spotless blue, breezes fluttered, flowers bloomed, and the sea was warm enough to swim in. Perfection was right here with fireworks. And right beside it in full bloom with its own fireworks was Samsara, a tidal wave of sadness flowing from phone calls, emails, kaffeeklatch and texts. </span><br />
<br />
<span family="verdana" size:85="">On July 2 for no apparent reason any medical examiner can find, a 16-month-old two houses from mine abruptly died. The young parents are inconsolable and the 5-year-old does not know what to do. On July 1, an 85-year-old woman who lives alone and has no close family was told to report at 6 AM to the hospital for invasive testing that could provoke immediate heart surgery. The woman is terrified.</span><br />
<br />
<span family="verdana" size:85="">A normally doting grandmother confided the daughter-in-law divorced from her son had been cited by Child Protective Services for beating up the 14-year-old daughter my friend so loves because this mother is incapable of managing anger. What to do? Another upper middle class grandmother who is the pillar of privilege is trying to reach the much younger children her morbidly angry and weird son beat up. Finally the mother walked, taking the kids with her. Another grandmother hinted how physically painful it has become to keep and keep up with her overactive six-year-old grandson for a month while his single mother tries to sort her life out. </span><br />
<br />
<span family="verdana" size:85="">Cancer has returned to the body of the woman next door and the doctor says this time it's terminal. Meanwhile the chemo is killing her; some days she can't breathe. On July 1, I worked with three 7-year-olds. When i asked the sweet boy if he'd go to the office to ask for a photocopy, he stepped back, looked pained and whispered: "I can't. I'm shy." When I caught the more brazenly assertive and plumper of the two girls secretly stuffing herself with sugar, butter and whipped cream, her look defied me the way it did when she threw a plastic knife past my head toward the sink.</span><br />
<br />
On July 4, I finally reached an old friend mourning for her 50-year life partner who passed in late May after a short, bloody battle with an exotic cancer. They had no children, just each other 24/7 all those years and suddenly she's all alone. I checked in with another friend who lost her 48-year life and business partner--same story, no children, together 24/7--two months ago and was struggling to establish her own life. Still no new job for a childhood friend who at 72 can't quit because she has no inner life and needs something to do, something to fill her time between grandchildren visits. I had a long phone conversation with another childhood friend in Manhattan who since she was forced to retire from her lawyer job has been a mess trying to figure out who she is and what she should do without a title and office. She has money, privilege, a husband, regular Botox injections in her face and a nice perch in midtown but she's bored, sad and scared.<br />
<br />
Before the weekend, I had lunch with a young Sherpa woman graduated from community college in the US and totally on her own here, very unhappy that in the name of "efficiency" she doesn't get regular hours or a set number of hours per week at her paying job that pays erratically. After the weekend I had a long phone call from a friend in southern California, frustrated that he'd just lost 1/4 of his annual income because a competitor underhandedly underbid him on a big job, deliberately taking a loss to knife my friend. "Foul play," he grouched.<br />
<br />
My French sister wrote that she couldn't go up to Paris for a weekend to enjoy the free concert tickets I offered her because she had to take care of senile parents and grumpy husband. A young friend working as a journalist in Europe was in tears after visiting a Syrian refugee camp, seeing how inhumane everything was. <br />
<br />
A Dharma brother forwarded an email about the Chinese invading Sera Monastery inside Tibet and removing the nuns and monks trying to practice there. An elderly Buddhist nun of Swiss origin wrote from her retreat in Nepal that the monsoon and the monastery were hell on her body. Also her visa was about to expire so she was forced to leave the country without a clear place to go. And I got a call from my six-year-old "granddaughter" saying she missed me so much and when was I coming back. I tried to invite her mother to bring her across the country for a week--a week the mother was searching for something to occupy the child--but the mother already had her own life too programmed. What to say? "I miss you too."<br />
<br />
Not even on a physically perfect Independence Day could I be liberated from human suffering. And these people want us to live to be 150?!? <br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<span family="verdana" size:85=""><br /></span>
<span family="verdana" size:85=""><br /></span>
<br />
<br />
<span family="verdana" size:85="">~Sandy Garson
<i>"Wordsmithing to attest how the Dharma saved me from myself!"</i><br />
http://www.sandygarson.com<br />
http://yoursinthedharma.blogspot.com/</span><br />
<span family="verdana" size:85="">
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<center>Powered by <a href="http://dir.webring.com/rw" target=_top>WebRing</a>.</center></div>Sandy Garsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09824736880802751211noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17873725.post-72930553489385382962016-06-15T15:42:00.003-07:002016-06-16T06:16:23.410-07:00That Blast from the Past<span family="verdana" size:85=""></span><br />
<span family="verdana" size:85="">It's June again. </span><span family="verdana" size:85=""><span family="verdana" size:85="">I have been sitting through the tightly scripted exercise
called graduation, watching </span>a drama that plays throughout America during this long light time of year. Act 1: Pomp and Circumstance. Act 2: Robed celebrities in tasseled mortarboard hats spout sanctimonious words of sweet promise about</span><span family="verdana" size:85=""><span family="verdana" size:85=""> the future, that unknown void the graduates seated in front of them are about to be shoved.into. </span><i>The future is all yours. Grab'n'Go. Have it your way. </i>Act 3: Graduates get diplomas, toss tassels and are tossed into the world... oops, I mean the future. <i> </i></span><br />
<br />
<span family="verdana" size:85="">This year I sat reflecting on my own post graduation life and how I've learned to live with it. Of course I remember absolutely nothing about the mortarboard moments, least of all what any speakers had to tell me. But since tradition dies hard, I'm willing to bet they droned on about how shiny and bright the future is and how tightly I should embrace it. <i>Yeh, right</i>, I thought as I looked back. <i>Good luck with that</i>! </span><br />
<br />
<span family="verdana" size:85="">The canned blah blah blah made me wonder why we still think the future is so imperative, influential and inviting we need to lavish praise on it at delicate moments like these.</span><span family="verdana" size:85=""> A quote from a different kind of midsummer night came to mind: "What fools these mortals be!" </span><span family="verdana" size:85=""> Rinpoches regularly warn us never to think about the future because t</span><span family="verdana" size:85="">here is no there there. </span><span family="verdana" size:85=""> it hasn't happened yet.</span><span family="verdana" size:85=""> Who can speak with certainty about it? (Certainly not pollsters or pundits.) Whatever anybody says, they are just another fortune teller making it up. They are just braiding strands of imagination into a tale. </span><br />
<br />
<span family="verdana" size:85="">We need to give graduates news they can actually use. How much more beneficial it would be if celebs with microphone and mortarboard talked about the past. You know what George Santayana said. I say: see in the endless headlines reiterating what a holy mess we're making of this planet, see how it's mainly thanks to all those people who just can't get passed the past. You have to learn how to do that.</span><br />
<br />
<span family="verdana" size:85="">I'm not talking only about </span>all the fossil fuel profiteers denying climate change and denying all of us a future on this planet. That same old same old yet to be disrupted. I'm referring to all those angry people in the Middle East hellbent on recreating some imagined past far more powerful and glorious than their reality right now. ISIL wants the
8th C Caliphate, Orthodox Jews want BC Jerusalem, Saudi Arabians want
18th C fundamentalist Muslim extremism. The Taliban wants the 19th C before electronics
and women's liberation, the Serbs want the 13C before the Ottomans invaded and converted some of their neighbors to Islam. These folks are so obsessed looking
backwards over their shoulder, they can't see where they are going. They
constantly crash into each another, provoking road rage and fist fights
writ large as war. <br />
<br />
On this side of the pond we have the cohort of Antonin Scalia fond of sitting in modern clothes interpreting the Constitution
solely in terms of the powdered wigs and cod pieces of 1790. We have Quebecois with license plates that proclaim: "<i>Je me souviens</i>!" although after 46 years of seeing them, beats me what they're so dead set on remembering? How they killed the native tribes? The few months the French controlled all of Eastern Canada? What is there to remember?<br />
<br />
We have
fundamentalist Christians determined to use modern technology to impose sharia style ancient Bible law on America, starting with the declaration that homosexuality is an abomination. We have
all those Trumpeteers desperately dragging this country back to 1860 when
white Christian men could lord themselves over every other being on the continent because a future without their hegemony is way too scary. That's what got Nazis going in defeated postwar Germany: resentment of changing reality, particularly diminished masculinity. It's the same thing when gray haired old guys try a makeover with young trophy wives. Everybody is crying over spilled milk. They want to go back to that particular past when they were in charge, in control instead of out of it. You don't have to wonder why the Buddha listed impermanence as the number one cause of suffering.<br />
<span family="verdana" size:85=""> </span><br />
<span family="verdana" size:85=""><br /></span>
<span family="verdana" size:85="">Fixation on the past turns out to be bonanza for our vocabulary. Look at all the words-- how unflattering they are yet how familiar: vindictive, vengeful, antagonistic, retribution, retaliation, animus, vendetta, </span>revenge, enmity, vengeance, avenger, feud, grudge, resentment. Graduates: do you want these words attached to you? They describe eternal<span family="verdana" size:85=""> ping pong between past and present, a</span> back and forth that is nothing more than continual jockeying to get even. An eye for an eye. But as Rinpoche likes to warn, there can never be <i>even</i> because the last party assailed will inevitably become the next assailant and
strike back. It goes on and on without end until everybody has no eyes, or ayes. The odds for ever getting even are totally against you, so fuhgetaboutit. <br />
<br />
<span family="verdana" size:85="">And here's where we find a few sunny words for our fixation with the past: <i>pardon, redress </i>and<i> </i><i>forgiveness</i>, with its sibling synonyms<i> compassion, mercy</i> and <i>reprieve</i>. Also its reminder, see the word in its center, to <i>give. </i>By the inviolable law of Karma, what you get as a future totally 100% depends on how much give you give the past. That's what there is to learn.</span><br />
<br />
<span family="verdana" size:85="">Graduates, you need to embrace the past. You need right now to be like Milarepa in his cave. First he tries to shoo away the demons that haunted it, but naturally they bounce right back. So he tries to viciously scare them away but they scare him by returning undaunted. So in desperation, he embraces them. They dance and melt away. </span><br />
<br />
<span family="verdana" size:85="">Take it from Lily Tomlin: "Forgiveness is giving up all hope of having a better past." If you can do this, I guarantee you will have a really good shot at that bright future all those speakers promise you. </span><br />
<br />
<br />
<span family="verdana" size:85="">~Sandy Garson
<i>"Wordsmithing to attest how the Dharma saved me from myself!"</i><br />
http://www.sandygarson.com<br />
http://yoursinthedharma.blogspot.com/</span><br />
<span family="verdana" size:85="">
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<center>Powered by <a href="http://dir.webring.com/rw" target=_top>WebRing</a>.</center></div>Sandy Garsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09824736880802751211noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17873725.post-63585543189130589652016-05-29T10:12:00.000-07:002016-05-30T18:44:52.292-07:00Moving On<span family="verdana" size:85=""></span><br />
<span family="verdana" size:85="">Every time I've heard or said: "This too shall pass", I was not thinking it would one day refer to my</span><span family="verdana" size:85=""> waist, my memory, my energy and my appetite. But here I am, pushed an inch shorter by gravity, with legs that have enough </span><span family="verdana" size:85="">veins showing and liver spots to look like road maps.</span><span family="verdana" size:85=""> </span><span family="verdana" size:85="">Now comes </span><span family="verdana" size:85="">hearing aids and cataract removal. This is impermanence up close and personal--literally in your face. </span><span family="verdana" size:85=""> Without even trying, I've become the poster girl for primate change. </span><br />
<br />
<span family="verdana" size:85="">I guess you could say I am now running life's marathon in the breakdown lane. Bravery, mega doses of bravery are required daily. </span><span family="verdana" size:85="">It's galling to realize I have a shelf life, tough to accept the use-by and expiration date, scary to live through the daunting inconvenience of them often being very different. Last year waist, this year ears... I feel like I am taking a final for that Dharma practice where you ask yourself: <i>am I my eyes? If i lose my left little finger, I am still I? Is my hair me? Am I not me without hair? </i>Thank Buddha I know that practice. Using it has been like putting aloe on a burn. </span><br />
<span family="verdana" size:85=""><br /></span>
<span family="verdana" size:85="">Lots of people, all way younger, would say I've also lost touch. They consider my considerable experience worthless in their bright, new shiny new world so do not hire me. I</span><span family="verdana" size:85="">'m losing it. Right? </span><span family="verdana" size:85="">Age has become my handicap. </span><br />
<br />
<span family="verdana" size:85="">Sometimes I tell myself I'm being shunned because the kids don't want to be reminded there is other knowledge, another way, another age to become.</span><span family="verdana" size:85=""> They're short term and I've gone long.</span><span family="verdana" size:85=""> I might have something to add-- say, perspective -- but they can't bear to think they don't know everything already. </span><span family="verdana" size:85="">They're strictly DIY. </span><span family="verdana" size:85="">The famous disrupters are evidently not allowed to be disrupted.</span><span family="verdana" size:85=""> </span><br />
<br />
<span family="verdana" size:85="">What's funny about this is how addicted these young'uns are to speed, to hurry up, to having it now bigger and better and faster than ever. Except when it comes to aging. Given how fast it happens, you'd think they'd be all for it. But they want slo-mo and lots of instant replay. Magazines
keep trying to convince everyone 70 is the new 40 and 80 the new 60. Well, even though most people are amazed that I am at least 25 years older than I look, reality has me convinced these are the same old, same old. Life is not
easily fooled, especially by the glitzy rhetoric of corporations
with products to push. Have they never seen the sag of a lifted faced? <i>Are those wrinkles me? If I lose my hearing, am I still fully me? </i></span><br />
<span family="verdana" size:85=""><br /></span>
<span family="verdana" size:85="">These days I find myself explaining, particularly to doctors, I can't tell if what's happening is perfectly normal--wear and tear, or a crisis I can't bear to recognize. Should I panic about stomach cancer because I don't eat the large portions I used to? Are these brown polka dots decorating my skin signs of melanoma or just age?</span><span family="verdana" size:85=""> I've never been where I am, so how can I know what to expect? Every year has become a new city never visited, a place I haven't explored before to get bearings and comfort level. Then just when I start to know the territory, I'm in some place totally new having to get acquainted with different terrain. I feel like a perpetual tourist: asking directions, clutching at maps, wandering wondering when I get to go home to the familiar. </span><br />
<br />
<span family="verdana" size:85=""><span family="verdana" size:85="">The
only part of me still in the passing lane, no where near as
close to the off ramp as the rest of me, the one piece of my pie not
noticeably deteriorating or diminishing is that ineffable,
intangible, secret "voice" that keeps on noticing everything and
gossiping about it. My mind is still teenage peppy even though my body
is anything but. It sees what's happening to
the rest of me while it is going nowhere. This energy that some call the spirit or soul is living proof the Rinpoches are right: one
part of me will survive because it is indestructible. It will go on and
on--where it goes depends on how I have trained, or tamed, it. <i>Is the mind me? What does it mean </i>to lose your mind<i>?</i></span> </span><br />
<span family="verdana" size:85=""><br /></span>
<span family="verdana" size:85="">Demise is the most inconvenient truth. Life is a conveyor belt we don't control. We have taken to barricading ourselves in stone mansions, tenured jobs, Kryptite and Botox to paralyze forward momentum, yet time still turns us into nomads who move from one pasture to another. Although we won't admit it, we are all migrants. We immigrate from 20 to 50 to 75 and onward. We migrate from peaks to plains to canyons, from oases to deserts, or maybe the other way around. We do not stay put. There is no holding steady. And no security line to guarantee safety. There is only getting used to those ideas. </span><br />
<br />
<span family="verdana" size:85="">Go to your 50th college reunion as I just did and you can't escape this truth. All those good looking hunks now had paunches, blotches, wrinkles, glasses and gray hair. And so triage. There's nothing left to do but save the only thing I now know I can. All this physical deterioration has begun to feel like a dirty trick the gurus are playing to force me to finally get what they've been trying so hard to say: give up the losing battle of the flesh and focus on the mind, the only part of you guaranteed to live forever. Get over into the break out lane.</span><br />
<br />
<span family="verdana" size:85="">~Sandy Garson
<i>"Wordsmithing to attest how the Dharma saved me from myself!"</i><br />
http://www.sandygarson.com<br />
http://yoursinthedharma.blogspot.com/</span><br />
<span family="verdana" size:85="">
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This work is licensed under a <a asnfcxep9587679737695261193766054782="true" bqvli183984952171318135487521412782="true" edq175148336921142217633804685727="true" gvugzhjcb19727529536610503999326816100="true" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.5/" jisfso625068132008354158464455202217="true" pflpknnk543892317802574775104321464185="true" rel="license" wja36855019196678423775409398499="true">Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 License</a>.<br /><b>Click here to request <a href="mailto:?subject=Reprint%20Request%20from%20%20YoursInTheDharma%20website&body=I%20am%20requesting%20permission%20to%20reprint%20the%20article%20mentioned%20below.%20My%20Full%20Name,%20Company,%20Full%20Address,%20Phone%20Number%20and%20Usage%20Intent%20are%20below:">Sandy Garson for reprint permission</a>.</b><!--/Creative Commons License--><!-- <rdf:rdf xmlns="http://web.resource.org/cc/" dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/" rdf="http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#"><br/> <work about=""><br/> <license resource="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.5/"><br /> <dc:type resource="http://purl.org/dc/dcmitype/Text"><br /> </work><br/> <license about="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.5/"><permits resource="http://web.resource.org/cc/Reproduction"><permits resource="http://web.resource.org/cc/Distribution"><requires resource="http://web.resource.org/cc/Notice"><requires resource="http://web.resource.org/cc/Attribution"><prohibits resource="http://web.resource.org/cc/CommercialUse"></license></rdf:RDF> --><br /><rdf:rdf dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/" rdf="http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#" xmlns="http://web.resource.org/cc/"><work about=""><dc:title>Yours In The Dharma </dc:title><dc:date>2001-2016, </dc:date><dc:creator><agent><dc:title>Sandy Garson </dc:title></agent></dc:creator><dc:rights>Copyright 2001-2016 <agent><dc:title>Sandy Garson</dc:title>
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<center>Powered by <a href="http://dir.webring.com/rw" target=_top>WebRing</a>.</center></div>Sandy Garsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09824736880802751211noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17873725.post-88622458448090692712016-05-07T07:27:00.001-07:002016-05-07T07:27:17.890-07:00I'm on a Himalayan Food panel<span family="verdana" size:85=""></span><br />
<span family="verdana" size:85=""> </span>
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<span style="color: #fb0007; font-family: Times; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Times;"> <span style="color: black;">I am among those "others" on the panel that night. I get to talk about how certain ingredients and cooking styles crossed the world's highest mountains and came down to earth for the rest of us. Very familiar foods! Come one and all!</span></span></div>
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<span style="color: #fb0007; font-family: Times; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Times;">BEYOND MOMOS</span></div>
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<span style="color: #852428; font-family: Times; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Times;">HIMALAYAN FOOD IN JACKSON HEIGHTS</span><span style="color: #fb0007; font-family: Times; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Times;"></span></div>
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<span style="color: #852428; font-family: Times; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Times;">JUNE 23 </span></div>
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<span style="color: #852428; font-family: Times; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Times;">6:30 - 8:00 PM </span></div>
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<span style="color: #fb0007; font-family: Times; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Times;">MUSEUM OF FOOD AND DRINKS PANEL
DISCUSSION ON HIMALAYAN CUISINE</span></div>
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<i><span style="color: #262626; font-family: Times; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Times;">This panel discussion is organized by
the Museum of Food and Drink (MOFAD) and co-presented by the Rubin Museum. The
event will take place off-site in the Jackson Heights neighborhood of Queens.</span></i><span style="font-family: Times; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Times;"></span></div>
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<span style="color: #262626; font-family: Times; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Times;">Jackson Heights, Queens, is one the
most diverse neighborhoods in the country. The neighborhood’s international
population is reflected in its dizzying array of food businesses, from Indian
mega-grocers to taco trucks. Since the 2000s Jackson Heights has also become
home to a large Himalayan population and many restaurants that serve that
community. Now it’s possible to savor Tibetan momo dumplings and milk tea, as
well as Nepali sukuti (meat jerky) and thali platters, all within a few blocks
of the subway.</span><span style="font-family: Times; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Times;"></span></div>
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<span style="color: #262626; font-family: Times; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Times;">Join us for a panel discussion
moderated by Yanki Tshering of the Business Center for New Americans with Tashi
Chodron of the Rubin Museum, Pema Yangzom and Tenzing Ukyab of Himalayan Yak,
and others. </span></div>
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<span style="color: #262626; font-family: Times; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Times;">Learn about the culinary and cultural diversity of
Himalayan cuisines, and hear the personal stories of Himalayan food entrepreneurs
in New York. Afterward, stick around for tastings from the neighborhood.</span><span style="font-size: 14.0pt;"></span></div>
<br />
<br />
<span family="verdana" size:85="">~Sandy Garson
<i>"Wordsmithing to attest how the Dharma saved me from myself!"</i><br />
http://www.sandygarson.com<br />
http://yoursinthedharma.blogspot.com/</span><br />
<span family="verdana" size:85="">
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<center>Powered by <a href="http://dir.webring.com/rw" target=_top>WebRing</a>.</center></div>Sandy Garsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09824736880802751211noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17873725.post-83702190172195871272016-04-27T21:05:00.004-07:002016-05-07T17:05:20.693-07:00Surfing the maverick waves of Samsara<span family="verdana" size:85=""></span><br />
<span family="verdana" size:85="">At the start of this year of the Fire Monkey, a Dharma brother of mine confided our beloved Rinpoche had been pushing him for three years with greater and greater ferocity to start a simple, free meditation group, perhaps in the afternoon to be available to seniors. Rinpoche intuited we are going through normal physical and mental changes while buffeted by the stressful swirl of cultural shift. "He told me we were heading into rough times and he wanted to make the umbrella of the lineage available for everyone during the storm. He wanted those of us having a rough time in a rough life to get under it to take shelter with the greatest masters." </span><br />
<span family="verdana" size:85=""><br /></span>
<span family="verdana" size:85="">Mark claims he finally gave up procrastinating and got a group going because of me: because I spontaneously reached out and contacted him to have coffee when I was in his neighborhood, because I agreed to help him with this group in any way, because our omniscient Rinpoche specifically wanted me to know he heard me praying and was responding with this embrace. </span><br />
<br />
<span family="verdana" size:85=""> </span><span family="verdana" size:85="">Apparently my coffee call to Mark was not spontaneous after all.</span><span family="verdana" size:85=""> Rinpoche was riding </span><span family="verdana" size:85="">to the rescue at the most auspicious of all calendar times: the start of a Guru Rinpoche year when actions and merit are exponentially magnified. </span><span family="verdana" size:85="">It
has been a rough time in an often rough life so I write beyond awed
that Rinpoche chose this moment of enormous changes at the last minute
to reveal himself as a magician.</span><span family="verdana" size:85=""> It's like discovering Tinkerbell really will twinkle again if only you will believe.</span><br />
<span family="verdana" size:85=""><br /></span>
<span family="verdana" size:85="">Rinpoche's move came simultaneously with the start of the Fire Monkey year. Every day since early February has lived up to that billing. Life has been a tornado of breathless energy and sweeping change, action and opportunity, innovation and enervation, whirlwind shake-ups and quantum leaps. In current lingo, mass disruption. Headlines tell us every day in every way, the whole culture, the whole country, and half the world is topsy-turvy. Institutions, ideologies, inventions, identities are falling apart, torn asunder by cyclones of human fury. It's very Yeats: "The center cannot hold, the worst are filled with passionate intensity." We are slouching toward... <i>who knows</i>. </span><br />
<br />
<span family="verdana" size:85="">I have not been spared. Endless physical and circumstantial punches seem to be sculpting me into somebody I don't recognize as me. It's almost impossible to see without glasses. My hearing has been diagnosed as sub par. I didn't get a job I was perfect for or any job I applied for because I am too old. My latest cooking project collapsed. My flat won't sublet no matter how many outlets I advertise it. And my closest loved one is taking a spouse who doesn't want to know me. Add to this, me who will never be accused of exercise now goes faithfully to a water aerobics class. And I who have always been a night owl am now asleep by 10, awake before 6.</span><br />
<br />
<span family="verdana" size:85="">Yesterday news reports confirmed what everybody who lives in what used to be the shining city on the hill, San Francisco, knows too well: the city has become the property crime center of the country. This has nothing to do with the well documented crime of landlords evicting low income tenants to get high Airbnb rates or put up luxury properties for the narcissistic techies. It's about auto burglaries being up 300% in two years, assaults happening regularly, the dissolution of rapid mass transit exacerbating low income rage, and the increase in derelict homeless shitting on the streets because they have "rights" here while committing crimes for drugs. The gloriously vaunted, fabled venture capital utopia by the bay is in reality dirty, dangerous and dysfunctional. </span><br />
<br />
<span family="verdana" size:85="">It's not just that I can't get to the grocery store without navigating a narrow path through pit bulls, punks, pushers and panhandlers. Five weeks ago today, my car was stolen from a legal parking spot on a very busy street at the busiest time in the very busy civic and cultural center of town. Vanished without a trace. I went from flabbergasted to infuriated when I discovered how hard it was to reach any official city number because of low staffing, then how uninterested the police were when I finally got through. They didn't even care there was a video camera on the portico of the closest building because, I later learned, the DA doesn't care to prosecute or deal with crimes like this.</span><span family="verdana" size:85=""> San Francisco supports crime without consequence. </span><span family="verdana" size:85="">Just another incident, what's new, shrug, sigh.</span><br />
<span family="verdana" size:85=""><br /></span>
<span family="verdana" size:85="">But this crime was my incident. And as life would have it, it happened on the very day I started working for the San Francisco Police. Having waited three weeks for the precinct Captain to have time for a meeting, I was in his office that very morning starting my volunteer position as Communication Liaison, being introduced to precinct personnel and warmly welcomed. In 21 years, I had never been in a San Francisco police station, and by some bizarre turn of events I was back that same evening as a crime victim.</span><br />
<br />
<span family="verdana" size:85="">How did I come to be volunteering as a reporter for the Police? Because hordes of homeless were overwhelming my front steps. Every morning there were human feces and urine in front of the garage, used needles and bottles on the steps. Often rags were strewn across the sidewalk. What broke me was the individual who refused to abandon her camp on the front steps to let the five-year-old upstairs get down for preschool, then threw all her rags, needles and dirty cups at the kid before running away. I went right to this computer and wrote the most politely scathing letter to the district supervisor--someone who has to be elected--asking where our tax money was going since we paid the same as the uppity folks in super clean Pacific Heights, why the police were never visible, and what exactly did she plan to make the city do to stop my street from being a public toilet? Didn't ordinary citizens have rights?</span><br />
<span family="verdana" size:85=""><br /></span>
Within<span family="verdana" size:85=""> an hour</span><span family="verdana" size:85="">, the Supervisor responded. She confessed I'd made her aware of huge gaps in a system she thought she had coordinated. Evidently clearing the homeless from one area merely pushed them to another that had been ignored. An hour later I got an email from the precinct police captain, saying he was going to beef up patrols so our street was no longer ignored because he takes complaints seriously. And speaking of complaints, I wrote the best letter he'd ever seen and he happened to be looking for a good writer to help the station communicate better with the community. Would I like to help him do that? </span><br />
<br />
<span family="verdana" size:85="">In conversation with neuroscientists and psychologists, </span><span family="verdana" size:85="">the Dalai Lama has often insisted you never find what you are not looking for. He was speaking about consciousness, about the Dharmakaya, the world wide web of invisible but powerfully tight connections. Everything is happening as part of a process, for a reason. We just have to understand the process and the reason is that the universe--the energy we are a piece of--wants us to float free and be well. </span><br />
<br />
<span family="verdana" size:85=""> So I've detected a pattern in the seemingly random circumstances of my life at the start of this tumultous year of the Fire Monkey. In its very first week, I was able to do a bit of good by getting our street cleared of the daily download of human shit and urine and used needles. I got a physical mess cleaned up. I was now a friendly face and helping hand in the police precinct where the Captain said I had "a good heart." He couldn't see it had been badly broken by recent turns of events, but his welcome started to clean up that mess. Then Rinpoche stepped in by finally getting </span><span family="verdana" size:85="">Mark's special meditation class started,
located perfectly on an uncrowded bus line. At the height of my plight, for an hour I got to meditate on
being swaddled by our guru's love, supported by his wisdom, protected by
his omniscience. Everything was going to turn out fine.</span><br />
<br />
<span family="verdana" size:85="">Sometimes amid the chaos, we don't get to know that until much later. That nerve-wracking night, while I was standing in front of the plexiglass windows of "my" police station filling out the requisite theft form, my Tibetan goddaughter phoned. I told her I couldn't talk because my car had just been stolen and I was at the police precinct. "Well good," she said cheerfully. "A big obstacle has been removed from your life." In the tension of that moment, I wanted to kill her and her unrelenting Tibetanness with my bare hands so I clicked the red hang up button. I walked home, newly terrified of the darkness, and spent the whole night awake, fuming about the brazen theft of my car, the callous police response, how dangerous San Francisco had become and Tashi saying my loss was good news. </span><br />
<br />
<span family="verdana" size:85="">Police officers I now worked with kept trying to assure me 90% of stolen cars in this city get recovered. The Captain took my welfare so personally, he sent a police escort to bring me home from returning my temporary insurance funded rental car. The precinct's chief investigator fed my information into all his databases. Ten days went by and the car did not surface. Stuck with San Francisco's dismal public transit and unable to do the things I loved like senior swimming, I cursed the statues on my shrine for not helping me. I put the entry fob in front of the Karmapa and sometimes Mahakala, remover of obstacles, to no avail. I dissed them both. </span><br />
<span family="verdana" size:85=""><br /></span>
<span family="verdana" size:85="">Well, friends began to say jovially, at least now you won't have to drive again across the country, which you didn't really want to do anyway. Yes. How about that! I didn't have to drive that damned car back to the East Coast, 10 excruciating days of white lines, bad food and ugly motels. Been there, done that, hated it. And now I didn't have to make the dreaded journey again. </span><span family="verdana" size:85="">Tashi was correct: an obstacle had been removed. That was quite a relief. It got even bigger after I found a free miles cross country air ticket at a decent time, not even a red eye. Getting from sea to shining sea was now going to be so easy and cheap, I found myself praying the police did not recover my car. I apologized to Mahakala and Karmapa and Rinpoche.</span><br />
<span family="verdana" size:85=""><br /></span>
<span family="verdana" size:85="">As life moved on, I began to see the theft was a message to stop going back and forth between two coasts, especially when life has gotten noticeably brighter on one of them but not the other. I don't have the money anymore for doubling up on everything including property taxes. A dual life is not sustainable because you are always leaving people who want to see you or not participating because of events after your time. I didn't want to hear that I had to give my beloved home up. The Buddha warned us amply about the suffering of impermanence and I am nowhere exempt from hanging on to what I love just because I love it. Rinpoche was pushing courage on me, forcing me to wind down and clear up so I could focus tightly now on what's most crucial.</span><br />
<span family="verdana" size:85=""><br /></span>
<span family="verdana" size:85="">I managed to find a new car. It's going to cost money I no longer have but a good friend long ago organized a loan I can still draw on. I have other financial problems that won't self-solve no matter how hard I try. But the police have chauffeured me around in moments of great need to thank me for my work on their behalf. I have met new people through that work. I have play dates with children and concert tickets, free food talks and Dharma events to attend so I get out of the little space I have. </span><br />
<br />
<span family="verdana" size:85="">I don't get around as much as I could with a car but I've survived. I get through the day with enough food, phone conversations, and activities to make me tired and I celebrate that fact. Day by day, bird by bird, I'm doing just fine. Looking ahead, out there two years, brings real stress but now is the time and there is food, friends, fun. So there isn't any stress if I stay focused on what I have at hand and what I have to do that minute. No ruing the past: can't change it now to make it better. No peeking at the future. Rinpoche's fast forwarded the action. Real Dharma practice has suddenly happened, ready or not. </span><br />
<span family="verdana" size:85=""><br /></span>
<span family="verdana" size:85="">When I started study 28 years ago, I was told the end game was to not get knocked over by killer waves in the ocean of Samsara. We start by letting little ones lap at our ankles and try to stand firm. We wade in up to our calves and use our dharma training to stay upright. Waves cut us off at the knees but we learn to stay afloat. Last week Mark asked us what we felt about our meeting and Rinpoche's words. I quickly volunteered that to my own amazement, while everything had been going wrong and I felt the me I know was drowning, I was totally all right. My life has become a scary mess but at the end of the day I feel fine. I just know what really matters is my mind and that Rinpoche is guiding me. "That's it!" Mark said. "That's what Rinpoche wants us to feel, safe under the umbrella. That's his blessing." </span><br />
<br />
<br />
<span family="verdana" size:85="">Oh yes, one last bizarre bit: the only image of the remover of obstacles, Mahakala, I could find for my altar has been this plastic amulet on the right. As you can see, I keep it supported</span><br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<span family="verdana" size:85=""><a cnmnnh417280784134471688806543109348="true" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhteffbRT_nYJ86Zaw68aIjS3L8jV9cl0bcnl869g7vf2EZWTwPzl7L9K7gWkzwhKvzrHNFVnNkSpmNQhRRmSNMRJ3If_UhAE53gCGdaJHerP4Q_6U1x_FuLkwf1rHP5UIeEumTXw/s1600/FullSizeRender+203.jpg" imageanchor="1" oimm805874423395857762286854266193="true" ppzsgx3106943483202203630213549155="true" rfl479320884361374730374206328215="true" rljggbuzz57033242267590417550446487372="true" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhteffbRT_nYJ86Zaw68aIjS3L8jV9cl0bcnl869g7vf2EZWTwPzl7L9K7gWkzwhKvzrHNFVnNkSpmNQhRRmSNMRJ3If_UhAE53gCGdaJHerP4Q_6U1x_FuLkwf1rHP5UIeEumTXw/s200/FullSizeRender+203.jpg" width="150" /></a></span></div>
<span family="verdana" size:85="">by the cup of my tea offering, which I place anew every morning. Normally when I take it away to change the tea, the plastic amulet falls over as does that tiny heart I put next to it. When I bring new tea in the morning, I have to re-position them both against the cup. I do not know how to account for the astonishing fact that about a week after my car was stolen and I began to realize it might be for the best, when I removed the tea cup, Mahakala and the heart remained standing unsupported and unmoved. This happened for several days. I have not been able to make it happen again. There really is magic in this universe.</span>
<br />
<span family="verdana" size:85=""><br /></span>
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<span family="verdana" size:85="">~Sandy Garson
<i>"Wordsmithing to attest how the Dharma saved me from myself!"</i><br />
http://www.sandygarson.com<br />
http://yoursinthedharma.blogspot.com/</span><br />
<span family="verdana" size:85="">
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<center>Powered by <a href="http://dir.webring.com/rw" target=_top>WebRing</a>.</center></div>Sandy Garsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09824736880802751211noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17873725.post-82714838964890326002016-04-10T20:49:00.002-07:002016-04-10T20:49:19.193-07:00sorry for the silence<span family="verdana" size:85=""></span><br />
<span family="verdana" size:85=""> I've been through a tumultuous time that I am sorting out so I can post something meaningful. Please stay tuned and forgive me.</span><br />
<span family="verdana" size:85=""><br /></span>
<br />
<br />
<span family="verdana" size:85="">~Sandy Garson
<i>"Wordsmithing to attest how the Dharma saved me from myself!"</i><br />
http://www.sandygarson.com<br />
http://yoursinthedharma.blogspot.com/</span><br />
<span family="verdana" size:85="">
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<center>Powered by <a href="http://dir.webring.com/rw" target=_top>WebRing</a>.</center></div>Sandy Garsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09824736880802751211noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17873725.post-54798752036608777852016-03-18T12:04:00.001-07:002016-03-18T14:04:27.038-07:00Ordinary Day<span family="verdana" size:85=""></span><br />
<span family="verdana" size:85="">My yesterday started with the usual cup of cappuccino in the ordinary one size fits all morning. I sipped. I sat at my computer trying to get it all together because I don't wake ready to roll. I wake up slowly. I opened my email and was immediately drawn to a message from an old college friend who had been spectacularly generous to me. She wrote to say her husband of 48 years, from whom she'd been inseparable--business partners, best friends, yacht crew--for the last 25 died two days earlier. "I'm already at the point where I realize I need to be around friends," she said. "This is hard... ." </span><br />
<span family="verdana" size:85=""><br /></span>
<span family="verdana" size:85="">I could only imagine. But what to do? I immediately wrote back offering to come right over and I invited her to join a mutual friend and I for dinner next week. With a heavy heart, I read the rest of my mail, three newspapers and my Facebook feed, always thinking about my friend suffering. Then I washed out my coffee mug and did something hard. I went to the public pool for morning swim. </span><span family="verdana" size:85="">I have such a long tradition of being lazy, I always say rather cheerfully: "Nobody will ever accuse me of exercise." </span><span family="verdana" size:85="">Lately though, I find exercise imperative because as my late aunt warned me: "If you don't move, you won't move." </span><br />
<br />
<span family="verdana" size:85="">Thinking about the loss of a life motivated me to make the effort to extend my life. I killed myself for 25 minutes in that pool, doing jumping jacks with Styrofoam barbells and laps with a kickboard, stretches with a noodle and breast strokes galore. I was grateful I could do this, glad I did and dedicated the merit of my good fortune to have access to this pool and time to use it.</span><br />
<br />
<span family="verdana" size:85=""> I was in the locker room elatedly exhausted when I heard a cell phone sound. Certain it couldn't be mine, which is normally quiet, I kept toweling myself. The phone kept ringing. How come nobody was answering? Just in time I realized, it was coming from my locker, my purse. I almost missed an even longer term friend, one from childhood. She's been the athletic one among us, queen of exercise. She's been encouraging me in my less and less feeble attempts. "So," I began brightly, "you got me in the locker room. I did all the things you told me to do in the pool. I hope you're proud."</span><br />
<span family="verdana" size:85=""><br /></span>
<span family="verdana" size:85="">"Not right now," she said just above a whisper. "I'm calling at this odd hour because i needed to tell someone my dear friend Joyce's daughter was just killed while riding her bike. I've known her since she was a baby and she became this terrific person. She's the one I was going to visit on the way to visit you. Now I won't be coming. This is just so so...horrible."</span><br />
<span family="verdana" size:85=""><br /></span>
<span family="verdana" size:85="">I told my shaken friend I'd call her later to see how she was doing. I dressed, drove home, sat in front of the computer and tried to continue an ordinary day. But I got other hints it wasn't the usual. In the midst of a brutal El Nino winter, spring was sending a save the date message: the sky was cloudless, the wind still and the air temperature a very balmy 74º. The next day was forecast as cold and cloudy, more rain on the way. </span><br />
<span family="verdana" size:85=""><br /></span>
<span family="verdana" size:85="">I made another coffee and went back to the computer and tried to keep on keeping on. But two deaths with signs of Spring gnawed at me, gnawed...pawed... . Finally, I got out of my cushy chair, grabbed my keys, put on my sunglasses and went outside. I needed to see the trees bursting into bloom, hear the birds chirping as they made their nests. I watched all the human beings in their various get-ups and brightly colored hair scampering along the sidewalks happily oblivious of their final destination. I walked on the brightest side of each street, stuck my face into the sun and eventually even threw my arms out wide. That I could courageously do this like jumping jacks in the pool made me smile. The sunshine took my thoughts to all the Dharma gurus and the message they're trying to deliver and the way every single one of them who gets the message so easily laughs at everything, and I said to no one in particular: "Yes!" Out here exulting in the sunshine, the fragrant blossoms, the melodious birds and gurgling babies being rollered by, I am alive!</span><br />
<br />
<span family="verdana" size:85="">Then I went back home. </span><br />
<br />
<br />
<span family="verdana" size:85="">~Sandy Garson
<i>"Wordsmithing to attest how the Dharma saved me from myself!"</i><br />
http://www.sandygarson.com<br />
http://yoursinthedharma.blogspot.com/</span><br />
<span family="verdana" size:85="">
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<center>Powered by <a href="http://dir.webring.com/rw" target=_top>WebRing</a>.</center></div>Sandy Garsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09824736880802751211noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17873725.post-22261956539803659282016-03-13T15:01:00.001-07:002016-03-15T14:40:38.778-07:00The mental transit system <div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a bedk5364353935866923615957384986="true" bwdxq62410511674522589840922985884="true" cfzbfr75465499179077430993666337231="true" gnhdm673936691554106372489453202970="true" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgUYiAj0jkOEe7j0ABPLZIvotocOlJRDcJBGURzWksozBttR3ONomfkw2MfJYk6bPUCKPMwhyBVUTm_0D9UtNbb32zTnjnJ0a4cnDbzObayzondvMjHCANwZxp-FD62naMCfNxwVA/s1600/12375235_1223300807764259_5039192375692581300_o.jpg" imageanchor="1" kznopes808214500893802615435918780416="true" ltjwp33946284024223934560094530907="true" muuarsu567200445112970697263157764871="true" ncfbr531602404179991804827007537050="true" oqdcd578120198914339852471985235908="true" ow8211089926299459450243788869="true" owivc862862659767467512655476256944="true" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;" tgrzo46249099094283457173701519228="true" ubek462075937388117086793253444259="true" vo406035480673761821832551195097="true" wplcr2871134626653815146461493617="true" wqjtl37757535448766730613215198457="true" xcengj896445607593535731168593185439="true"><img border="0" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgUYiAj0jkOEe7j0ABPLZIvotocOlJRDcJBGURzWksozBttR3ONomfkw2MfJYk6bPUCKPMwhyBVUTm_0D9UtNbb32zTnjnJ0a4cnDbzObayzondvMjHCANwZxp-FD62naMCfNxwVA/s200/12375235_1223300807764259_5039192375692581300_o.jpg" width="200" /></a></div>
About ten<span family="verdana" size:85=""> years ago at a group teaching, Rinpoche urged us to give up negative thoughts. </span><span family="verdana" size:85="">Mind has a direct route to the tongue</span><span family="verdana" size:85="">, he said, so whatever we think in private will inevitably</span><span family="verdana" size:85=""> exit and become public. Many thoughts shipped on this bullet train can be dangerous explosives and the hurt they inflict on someone else could easily boomerang back to harm us. So, he concluded, it's better not to have negative thoughts. </span><br />
<br />
<span family="verdana" size:85="">I didn't need Donald Trump's campaign to know just how deadly negative thoughts the mouth fires off like darts can be. "What's on her lung is on her tongue,"
is how kinder people described my grandmother whose mouth was an assault
rifle aimed at anybody in hearing distance. Since family was in closest
range, we were her constant target and her words permanently maimed all of
us one way or another. I don't think she even noticed. Asked in her mid 90s by a group of ladies who
lunch how she managed to stay so sharp and strong, she shot back: "i don't keep anything
in. I just let it all out." Those women thought my grandmother being a pistol was funny.</span><br />
<br />
<span family="verdana" size:85="">The one thing in life I did not want to be was a mental firing squad. Then, ironically, shortly after she died, </span><span family="verdana" size:85=""><span family="verdana" size:85="">I
participated in a blizzardy winter 30 day group retreat where we were
asked to note every time during one single day we got
peeved, annoyed, or irritated. I spent that day noticing nonstop silent
bitching: about having to eat tedious Oryoki style, and why didn't
anybody shovel the front path because it was icy dangerous to walk? How
dare someone move my shoes outside the meditation hall! Why did she push
her cushion back like that and crowd me? Why didn't someone put the
outside lights on since it was dark and perilous to walk out there?
Nothing was right. What was wrong with these people? Didn't they know
what they were supposed to do? How it should be? By evening, I was
exhausted piling up evidence of my discontent and shaken to the core discovering what a full time fault finder I was. Dissatisfied with everything and everyone, I was my grandmother.</span></span><br />
<br />
<span family="verdana" size:85="">You better believe I wanted to fix that right away, but I didn't know how to not have negative thoughts. That still feels like a very advanced practice for yogis isolated in caves instead of someone struggling along the crowded sidewalks of Samsara. Maybe this is because I seem to have come into this world equipped with an acute sense of right and wrong that is always demanding to be outted. One astrologer says: "According to Capricorns, there is only a right
way and a wrong way to do things and ...their way is usually right." Evidently, i</span><span family="verdana" size:85="">t's my nature to know what's best and get
everybody to shape up. I must say it did make me a good investigative reporter and opinion writer, maybe even why I started this blog. </span><br />
<br />
It is also<span family="verdana" size:85=""> unimpeachable psychological truth-- and a dead giveaway--that those perpetually disappointed by their own imperfection will be relentlessly hard on themselves, and by extension thanks to habit mercilessly critical of others. </span><br />
<br />
The jolt of that retreat made me try my eyes out to stay mindful of constant irritations so I could swallow them lest somebody discover my inner Bitch. Then Rinpoche came along and gave his teaching on the mind-to-mouth information highway, the mental transit system guaranteed to deliver news of negativity. Now alerted, I began to see even if I did manage to keep my critical opinions from spilling out, they leaked into my behavior. I was impatient or grouchy, snide,
stand offish or rejecting.<span family="verdana" size:85=""> "No thanks, I don't want to go there...or don't want to see them." As I got more adept at noticing my rejection of what was sent my way, I remembered the late Trungpa Rinpoche said boredom was simply resistance to accepting what's happening. It's a firewall that lets us refuse to participate because we don't like the scenario. What it really is, I find now, is petulance because we want something "better." We set up a huge pile of "might have beens", what we missed. O how we hurt ourselves.</span><br />
<br />
<span family="verdana" size:85="">Negative thoughts have so many on-ramps to the information highwa</span><span family="verdana" size:85="">y, it's impossible to patrol all the snits all the time. Rinpoche was right: it's best to stop negative thinking all together. </span><span family="verdana" size:85=""><br /></span><br />
<br />
<span family="verdana" size:85="">Since I don't know how to do that, I've been trying to stop<i> as much as possible, </i>just<i> </i>to get the feel<i>. </i></span>For instance, I share a two-unit house with the nicest young family anybody could
want for neighbors. Except for laundry. They don't do it and then
suddenly three or four humongous containers of dirty clothes show up in
front of the machines. The washer gets so stuffed to the gills, its
controls blink <i>Error</i>. Often for days. Or the dryer is equally jam packed and nobody empties it or notices what's in there is still damp. For days. They have to start all over again. I
try to do my laundry in the lulls, but I never know when the tsunami is
coming. So there are times I go down with a small basket of dirty
underwear and towels and want to scream: <i>Just pay attention to your laundry and g</i><i>ive me a chance</i>! But I don't say a word.<br />
<br />
In
my former two-unit house, the young family downstairs monopolized the
machines in the same selfish way, and while I struggled not to
voice my frustration, the roommate I had to take in went ballistic. She
lived by an absolutely inflexible routine that for some mysterious reason mandated
laundry on Thursday from 3 to 4. While I quickly figured that out and stayed out of her way, the folks downstairs definitely didn't know, so if they had stuff in
the machines at her <i>must </i>moment, the whole house exploded from her rage. I spent a lot of
time apologizing for how absurd she was, which brought that family and me to wink and nod intimacy-- and
forever stopped me from venting my own frustration with them.<br />
<br />
What
I started to do then, I do now: I take their stuff out of the machines,
put my stuff in, do my wash, dry it and put their stuff back. Usually
they never know. Or I bite my tongue and wait one day, leaving my
basket of dirty clothes in front of the machines as a message. This
resourcefulness keeps me on happy terms with my neighbors and causes at
most a day's delay. Annoying but no real harm: I still have clean
underwear in the drawer and towels in the closet. Just yesterday, the young woman upstairs texted me a long apologetic message whose drift was: "I know I've been doing laundry for 10 days but I am trying to create spaces for you so please tell me if it's working."<br />
<br />
I like to think quietly adjusting my expectation and irritation is what Sylvia Boorstein calls "managing gracefully."<span family="verdana" size:85=""><span family="verdana" size:85=""> Of course I now know those two--expectation and irritation--are joined at the hip. Give up the first and you automatically never get the second. You get nothing to grouse about. You can be sunnier. </span></span><br />
<br />
<span family="verdana" size:85=""><span family="verdana" size:85="">Expectation is "should be." It's our very own handmade opinion of what's right, how things are supposed to go--essentially happily ever after. Expectations are makeup and manicure, all the past conditioning we apply to the present moment to make us happy with it, to let us own it. We travel with overweight carry-on baggage so we can style every moment. What a waste when the moment is really just sailing off into the sunset and look! here's another. </span></span><br />
<br />
<span family="verdana" size:85=""><span family="verdana" size:85="">Wonder of wonders! Buddha said, when he discovered deep in our heart of hearts, every last one of us has our very own perspective on how things should be. We each have bespoke expectations. And we each expect them to be met or we go all negative. That's the art of the deal or maybe there's the rub: my "should" is not yours, neither is my <i>must-do </i>list. So who's right? What's wrong? Which opinions do <i>you </i>trust on Yelp! And what's so great about yours that it beats mine? Why do you have these opinions in the first place?</span></span><br />
<br />
<span family="verdana" size:85=""><span family="verdana" size:85="">More to the Buddha's point: trying to make those once upon a time "shoulds" come true is what causes our irritation and suffering. There's the harm boomeranging back. Remember the laundry on Thursday woman? Do you wonder why she had no friends? Expectations and opinions cut possibility off at the pass. They shoot us in the foot. </span></span><br />
<br />
<span family="verdana" size:85=""><span family="verdana" size:85="">We all know the sad jokes about the Jewish mother or the insufferably opinionated in-laws who have to be banished, or at least kept at bay. There's an easy way to see negativity boomeranging back to harm. When my peers got married, meddling parents were always a worry.</span> Now we are the parents, the in-laws. Our eyesight is dimming but experience lets us see very clearly what's going on and what the outcome is likely to be. Sadly we have all discovered nobody wants their life lacquered with our opinion. Everybody prefers their own. </span>As my cousin says: "I use the excuse of hearing. I pretend I don't hear
what's being said and that way I can't jump in or even comment negatively to my son. You just have to be deaf if you want to stay included."<br />
<br />
<span family="verdana" size:85="">Nobody likes a busybody because <i>shoulds </i>and<i> musts</i> are not necessarily shared. (See Culture Wars: zealous people busily interfering with other people's lives instead of the harder work of tending the hardship of their own.) Nobody wants to be bombed by a barrage of negative opinions. I can't be my grandmother any more because now that I am fully focused, I find steering my own life hard enough to not have the energy, time or inclination to interrupt anybody else's. </span><span family="verdana" size:85="">I can't know everything they are dealing with and factoring in. </span><span family="verdana" size:85="">Besides, the world has radically changed. What do I know?</span><br />
<br />
<span family="verdana" size:85="">When I don't expect, I find I can be pleasantly surprised. Discretion is a gift that keeps giving back, even laundry time.</span> I'm getting better at keeping my mouth shut. Of course, as Rinpoche says, negative thoughts eventually find a way out. On the phone or at lunch, we old folks tell each
other all the things we don't dare tell the young, and we agree that all we can do is silently hope for the best. Our version<i> </i>of course. <br />
<br />
<br />
<span family="verdana" size:85="">~Sandy Garson
<i>"Wordsmithing to attest how the Dharma saved me from myself!"</i><br />
http://www.sandygarson.com<br />
http://yoursinthedharma.blogspot.com/</span><br />
<span family="verdana" size:85="">
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bwdxq62410511674522589840922985884="true" cfzbfr75465499179077430993666337231="true" dibfslg38690918892464351655140867815="true" gnhdm673936691554106372489453202970="true" href="http://technorati.com/tag/Buddhism" kakqccq566692997993783321429301458="true" kznopes808214500893802615435918780416="true" ltjwp33946284024223934560094530907="true" muuarsu567200445112970697263157764871="true" ncfbr531602404179991804827007537050="true" oqdcd578120198914339852471985235908="true" ow8211089926299459450243788869="true" owivc862862659767467512655476256944="true" rel="tag" rhgsi875142167859194976381537199057="true" tgrzo46249099094283457173701519228="true" ubek462075937388117086793253444259="true" vo406035480673761821832551195097="true" wplcr2871134626653815146461493617="true" wqjtl37757535448766730613215198457="true" xcengj896445607593535731168593185439="true" znmpnx671376959528337573143261936903="true">Buddhism</a>, <a bedk5364353935866923615957384986="true" 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This work is licensed under a <a bedk5364353935866923615957384986="true" bwdxq62410511674522589840922985884="true" cfzbfr75465499179077430993666337231="true" dibfslg38690918892464351655140867815="true" gnhdm673936691554106372489453202970="true" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.5/" kakqccq566692997993783321429301458="true" kznopes808214500893802615435918780416="true" ltjwp33946284024223934560094530907="true" muuarsu567200445112970697263157764871="true" ncfbr531602404179991804827007537050="true" oqdcd578120198914339852471985235908="true" ow8211089926299459450243788869="true" owivc862862659767467512655476256944="true" rel="license" rhgsi875142167859194976381537199057="true" tgrzo46249099094283457173701519228="true" ubek462075937388117086793253444259="true" vo406035480673761821832551195097="true" wplcr2871134626653815146461493617="true" wqjtl37757535448766730613215198457="true" xcengj896445607593535731168593185439="true" znmpnx671376959528337573143261936903="true">Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 License</a>.<br /><b>Click here to request <a href="mailto:?subject=Reprint%20Request%20from%20%20YoursInTheDharma%20website&body=I%20am%20requesting%20permission%20to%20reprint%20the%20article%20mentioned%20below.%20My%20Full%20Name,%20Company,%20Full%20Address,%20Phone%20Number%20and%20Usage%20Intent%20are%20below:">Sandy Garson for reprint permission</a>.</b><!--/Creative Commons License--><!-- <rdf:rdf xmlns="http://web.resource.org/cc/" dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/" rdf="http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#"><br/> <work about=""><br/> <license resource="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.5/"><br /> <dc:type resource="http://purl.org/dc/dcmitype/Text"><br /> </work><br/> <license about="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.5/"><permits resource="http://web.resource.org/cc/Reproduction"><permits resource="http://web.resource.org/cc/Distribution"><requires resource="http://web.resource.org/cc/Notice"><requires resource="http://web.resource.org/cc/Attribution"><prohibits resource="http://web.resource.org/cc/CommercialUse"></license></rdf:RDF> --><br /><rdf:rdf dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/" rdf="http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#" xmlns="http://web.resource.org/cc/"><work about=""><dc:title>Yours In The Dharma </dc:title><dc:date>2001-2010, </dc:date><dc:creator><agent><dc:title>Sandy Garson </dc:title></agent></dc:creator><dc:rights>Copyright 2001-2010 <agent><dc:title>Sandy Garson</dc:title>
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<center>Powered by <a href="http://dir.webring.com/rw" target=_top>WebRing</a>.</center></div>Sandy Garsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09824736880802751211noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17873725.post-88687576217726749972016-03-07T21:27:00.000-08:002016-03-12T10:54:48.143-08:00International Women's Day: March 8, 2016<span family="verdana" size:85=""></span><br />
<b><span family="verdana" size:85="" style="font-size: large;"> Owed To Women</span></b><br />
<span family="verdana" size:85="" style="font-size: large;">(<span style="font-size: small;">I have published this before in slightly different form</span>)</span><b><span family="verdana" size:85="" style="font-size: large;"> </span></b><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;"><span family="verdana" size:85="" style="font-size: large;"> </span><span style="color: #ffffcc; font-size: large;"><span style="color: black;"><span style="color: black;"><span style="color: black;">Maya<br />
Dawn...Sunny...Eve...Stella<br />
Spring<br />
April...May...June... <br />
Flora<br />
Daisy...Iris...Heather...Lily...Rose<br />
Chloe...Daphne...Laurel...Myrtle<br />
Phyllis<br />
Sylvia...Ivy...Violet...Cherry <br />
Claire <br />
Bella...Linda...Bonnie<br />
Jewel <br />
Ruby...Beryl...Pearl...Crystal...Esmeralda<br />
Desirée<br />
Aimée...Amanda...Cara...Mabel<br />
Joy<br />
Constance...Prudence...Patience</span></span></span></span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;"><span style="color: #ffffcc; font-size: large;"><span style="color: black;"><span style="color: black;"><span style="color: black;">Selena <br />
Faith...Hope...Charity<br />
<span style="color: black;">Grace</span> <br />
Felicity...<span style="color: black;">Phoebe</span>...Hannah...<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">Dechen</span><br />
Celeste <br />
Elizabeth...Mercedes...Angela...Irene<br />
Melody<br />
Honey...Candy...Dulcie...Melissa<br />
Helga </span></span></span></span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;"><span style="color: #ffffcc; font-size: large;"><span style="color: black;"><span style="color: black;"><span style="color: black;">Dolores...Mona...Soledad</span></span></span></span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;"><span style="color: #ffffcc; font-size: large;"><span style="color: black;"><span style="color: black;"><span style="color: black;">Seraphina</span></span></span></span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;"><span style="color: #ffffcc; font-size: large;"><span style="color: black;"><span style="color: black;"><span style="color: black;">Aisha </span></span></span></span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;"><span style="color: #ffffcc; font-size: large;"><span style="color: black;"><span style="color: black;"><span style="color: black;">Vera...Alethea...Sophia</span></span></span></span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;"><span style="color: #ffffcc; font-size: large;"><span style="color: black;"><span style="color: black;"><span style="color: black;">Zoe <br />
Gloria<br />
</span></span></span></span></span><br />
<br />
<span family="verdana" size:85=""><br /></span>
<br />
<br />
<span family="verdana" size:85="">~Sandy Garson
<i>"Wordsmithing to attest how the Dharma saved me from myself!"</i><br />
http://www.sandygarson.com<br />
http://yoursinthedharma.blogspot.com/</span><br />
<span family="verdana" size:85="">
Technorati Tags: <a href="http://technorati.com/tag/Yours+in+the+dharma" otn545791347964218740771058723765="true" rel="tag" vpz61615535234428195842426526302="true">Yours In The Dharma</a>, <a href="http://technorati.com/tag/Sandy+Garson" otn545791347964218740771058723765="true" rel="tag" vpz61615535234428195842426526302="true">Sandy Garson</a>, <a href="http://technorati.com/tag/Dharma" otn545791347964218740771058723765="true" rel="tag" vpz61615535234428195842426526302="true">Dharma</a>, <a href="http://technorati.com/tag/Buddhist" otn545791347964218740771058723765="true" rel="tag" vpz61615535234428195842426526302="true">Buddhist</a>, <a href="http://technorati.com/tag/Buddhism" otn545791347964218740771058723765="true" rel="tag" vpz61615535234428195842426526302="true">Buddhism</a>, <a href="http://technorati.com/tag/Spirituality" otn545791347964218740771058723765="true" rel="tag" vpz61615535234428195842426526302="true">Spirituality</a>, <a href="http://technorati.com/tag/Religion" otn545791347964218740771058723765="true" rel="tag" vpz61615535234428195842426526302="true">Religion</a>
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This work is licensed under a <a href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.5/" otn545791347964218740771058723765="true" rel="license" vpz61615535234428195842426526302="true">Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 License</a>.<br /><b>Click here to request <a href="mailto:?subject=Reprint%20Request%20from%20%20YoursInTheDharma%20website&body=I%20am%20requesting%20permission%20to%20reprint%20the%20article%20mentioned%20below.%20My%20Full%20Name,%20Company,%20Full%20Address,%20Phone%20Number%20and%20Usage%20Intent%20are%20below:">Sandy Garson for reprint permission</a>.</b><!--/Creative Commons License--><!-- <rdf:rdf xmlns="http://web.resource.org/cc/" dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/" rdf="http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#"><br/> <work about=""><br/> <license resource="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.5/"><br /> <dc:type resource="http://purl.org/dc/dcmitype/Text"><br /> </work><br/> <license about="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.5/"><permits resource="http://web.resource.org/cc/Reproduction"><permits resource="http://web.resource.org/cc/Distribution"><requires resource="http://web.resource.org/cc/Notice"><requires resource="http://web.resource.org/cc/Attribution"><prohibits resource="http://web.resource.org/cc/CommercialUse"></license></rdf:RDF> --><br /><rdf:rdf dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/" rdf="http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#" xmlns="http://web.resource.org/cc/"><work about=""><dc:title>Yours In The Dharma </dc:title><dc:date>2001-2010, </dc:date><dc:creator><agent><dc:title>Sandy Garson </dc:title></agent></dc:creator><dc:rights>Copyright 2001-2010 <agent><dc:title>Sandy Garson</dc:title>
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<center>Powered by <a href="http://dir.webring.com/rw" target=_top>WebRing</a>.</center></div>Sandy Garsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09824736880802751211noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17873725.post-60526414585790959512016-03-03T14:56:00.002-08:002016-03-03T14:56:43.343-08:00Cooking as Dharma practice<span family="verdana" size:85=""></span><br />
<br />
<span family="verdana" size:85="">This is not what I intended to post this week, But after reading the answers I just spent two hours writing to a newspaper reporter's questions about me and my new alter ego Nana Chef in relation to her new program and Kickstarter campaign, I realized talking about Nana and cooking was talking about Dharma in my life. And I couldn't do it any better as just a post. So here's the Q and A:</span><br />
<span family="verdana" size:85=""><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><b><span style="color: #1a1a1a; font-family: Tahoma;">Can you tell me a little bit about yourself, your background in
cooking, etc? </span></b><span style="color: #1a1a1a;"></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="color: #1a1a1a; font-family: Tahoma;">I really started cooking big time when I moved to Maine in 1973
because there were no restaurants or quality food stores. I'd traveled widely
and learned in many kitchens. My kitchen became a kind of salon. From there I
was asked to cook for other people having parties and that led to the catering
business first in Georgetown as Captains Cook and then in Brunswick as the
very popular Tastewrights. Part of Tastewrights was the first upscale bakery in
Brunswick. That came after a season selling my baked goods at the Brunswick
Farmers' Market where I introduced baguettes. </span><span style="color: #1a1a1a;"></span></span></div>
<span style="font-size: small;">
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<span style="font-size: small;">
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="color: #1a1a1a; font-family: Tahoma;">Sadly, a massive orthopedic crisis forced me to immediately halt
the physical effort of cooking, so I went down to Radcliffe and into the first
ever Food History seminar. To help promote the farmers' market, with four area
farmers, in 1990 I wrote the first ever farmers' market guide based on all the
questions I heard people asking over and over while I worked in one. <i>How
to Fix a Leek...and Other Food from Your Maine Farmers' Market </i>turned out to be
popular and so beloved I did an updated edition in 2011 aimed at farmers'
markets everywhere. I believe you can still buy it on Kindle and at the
Brunswick Farmers' Market from Keogh Family Farm. Last summer (2015)
I worked with Bath Housing Authority to hands on help residents cook and preserve
the harvest from their organic gardens.</span><span style="color: #1a1a1a;"></span></span></div>
<span style="font-size: small;">
</span><div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<span style="font-size: small;">
</span><div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="color: #1a1a1a; font-family: Tahoma;">Even though after 1988, I became too handicapped to keep
cooking, people would call and ask me to do a small event or just please bake
them a batch of the special cookie I had developed at Tastewrights. Well,
baking those batches led to an explosion of demand and suddenly I was back in
the baking business as Cakesphere. Orders were flying in especially from
California where I was a huge hit but it was only me and my orthopedic
system broke down again and I was in so much pain, I had to stop instantly. My
Dr. said: "If you do this again, I won't help you." Sadly I did go to
the state's so called Business Development Center to see if I could get support
to hire people and grow without my having to do all the physical labor and the
response was pathetic--like it was for Roxanne Quimby at Burts' Bees. The guy said:
"Yes I know your cookies. I see them all the time at Bow Street Market but
I wouldn't spend $1 for one so as far as I'm concerned, your business won't get
our support." </span><span style="color: #1a1a1a;"></span></span></div>
<span style="font-size: small;">
</span><div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<span style="font-size: small;">
</span><div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="color: #1a1a1a; font-family: Tahoma;">By then I was deeply committed to Buddhism and became the go to
cook for gurus visiting Maine and Boston and Baltimore. Then it became
Vancouver and San Francisco. I was in Nepal a lot and after I spent a whole
day cooking 3 meals for 300 kids in a kitchen with no water, no floor, no
electricity and a stove that was a burning tree shoved into some bricks, I
started a cooking and better nutrition program for impoverished kids at my
teacher's boarding school: it's still going after 15 years! Then monks and nuns
asked for my help so I started a small charity, Veggiyana, registered in Maine,
to provide food, cooking lessons and food gardens to
Buddhist practitioners. </span><a bvnw919698575064567550310893730448="true" href="http://www.veggiyana.org/"><span style="color: #103cc0; font-family: Tahoma;">www.veggiyana.org
</span></a><span style="color: #1a1a1a; font-family: Tahoma;">From
all this Wisdom Publications in Somerville MA asked me to write a cookbook so
in 2011 they published<i> Veggiyana, the Dharma of Cooking</i>: essays on food history
with 108 deliciously simple vegetarian recipes I'd gathered from my travels and
cooking all over the world. In 2012 I was invited to Ulan Baator, Mongolia to
teach cooking and revitalize a Buddhist owned vegetarian cafe, which I
apparently did in my six nonstop weeks there because I was told it became a
huge success that year. The income funded free Dharma classes.</span><span style="color: #1a1a1a;"></span></span></div>
<span style="font-size: small;">
</span><div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<span style="font-size: small;">
</span><div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="color: #1a1a1a; font-family: Tahoma;">In 2014 I was invited by the Bath Freightshed Alliance to cook
their June Farm-to-Table fundraising dinner using all local ingredients i
helped to scavenge and I believe that dinner raised the most money of any in the three-year series. By then I was also starting to
make jam and cookies with my friends' granddaughters who came to visit. In 2014
and 15 I volunteered as a chef for San Francisco Cooking Matters elementary
school classes so I could test out this idea of being Nana and it was the kids
at the worst low income school in the system who named me Nana Chef. That's when
I decided to help all kids get skills, confidence and something to bring
to the table. I volunteered for Brunswick but nobody even bothered to answer
me. </span><span style="color: #1a1a1a;"></span></span></div>
<span style="font-size: small;">
</span><div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<span style="font-size: small;">
</span><div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="color: #1a1a1a; font-family: Tahoma;">2. <b>Can you tell me more about the Nana Chef program? </b></span><span style="color: #1a1a1a;"></span></span></div>
<span style="font-size: small;">
</span><div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="color: #1a1a1a; font-family: Tahoma;">First I want people to know RSU5 (Freeport, Durham, Pownal) is
offering a Nana Chef summer camp to all cookees for a week at the end of June
and I think it's going to be great fun to give these cookees joyous memories to
nourish a lifetime by making strawberry jam and peach tarts, fancy tuna fish
baguette sandwiches and pesto sauce with Nana.</span></span></div>
<span style="font-size: small;">
</span><div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<span style="font-size: small;">
</span><div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="color: #1a1a1a; font-family: Tahoma;">Nana offers her cookees basic training: safety, skill, sensing.
Kids smell spices and decide which ones they want to add or not. They learn the
magical medicinal properties of herbs and the differences in salt. They learn
simple baking, artful display, fast foods like smoothies and peanut butter and
pesto sauces. The essence of the program is to bring back the universal
tradition of elders passing wisdom down to the young by gently letting kids get
familiar with kitchen art and craft and its importance to their own survival.</span><span style="color: #1a1a1a;"></span></span></div>
<span style="font-size: small;">
</span><div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<span style="font-size: small;">
</span><div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="color: #1a1a1a; font-family: Tahoma;">Right now on her website, </span><a bvnw919698575064567550310893730448="true" href="http://www.nana-chef.com/"><span style="color: #103cc0; font-family: Tahoma;">www.Nana-chef.com</span></a><span style="color: #1a1a1a; font-family: Tahoma;">, cookees can learn to make applesauce, dilly
beans, and banana bread. They can watch a video to learn kitchen words
like mince and cream. They can learn a little about herbs and spices and above
all get some safety tips for being in the kitchen.</span><span style="color: #1a1a1a;"></span></span></div>
<span style="font-size: small;">
</span><div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<span style="font-size: small;">
</span><div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="color: #1a1a1a; font-family: Tahoma;">3. <b>What was the drive behind it? </b> </span><span style="color: #1a1a1a;"></span></span></div>
<span style="font-size: small;">
</span><div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="color: #1a1a1a; font-family: Tahoma;">Nana is coming back into the kitchen to nourish kids with a
lifetime of the joyful memories of smells, tastes and delicious love many of us
elders have when we remember growing up with an older woman spoiling us in the
kitchen. Now too many mothers and grandmothers have to work and too much
food is industrially processed to be nothing but fast, so kids won't have those
sublime memories to magnetize them into the kitchen as adults. That could
totally destroy cooking--humanity's greatest accomplishment, and we can't let
our lives be decimated like that. We're already suffering massive health
and environmental crises because that's underway.</span><span style="color: #1a1a1a;"></span></span></div>
<span style="font-size: small;">
</span><div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<span style="font-size: small;">
</span><div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="color: #1a1a1a; font-family: Tahoma;">Nana wants to show today's Harry Potter struck kids how magical
cooking is: the poof! of a popover, the smoosh of heated berries into jam, the
mystery of milk turning into yogurt, the cucumber into a pickle. Cooking
should not be cutthroat competition it has become or some AP pursuit for a
resume. It should wonder-full fun. Cooking is really all about survival,
sharing and love. Nana wants cookees to know preparing food is not a dumb dull
chore. It's where science meets art and sharing is everything. It's
giving life and showing love. Nana is real because there is no app for that!</span><span style="color: #1a1a1a;"></span></span></div>
<span style="font-size: small;">
</span><div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<span style="font-size: small;">
</span><div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="color: #1a1a1a; font-family: Tahoma;">4. <b>What do you hope students will learn?</b></span><span style="color: #1a1a1a;"></span></span></div>
<span style="font-size: small;">
</span><div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="color: #1a1a1a; font-family: Tahoma;">First, that they really can do something very very important for
themselves and the people they love. This means they are important.
Secondly they learn actual skills, survival skills, that give them confidence
they can take care of themselves and survive. And thirdly, that everybody
brings something to the table; everybody in the world cooks and eats so they
are not alone in the kitchen but part of something huge and important that
binds them to every other human on Earth as an equal.</span><span style="color: #1a1a1a;"></span></span></div>
<span style="font-size: small;">
</span><div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<span style="font-size: small;">
</span><div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="color: #1a1a1a; font-family: Tahoma;">5.<b> Tell me more about your YouTube channel and why you are
starting that up.</b></span><span style="color: #1a1a1a;"></span></span></div>
<span style="font-size: small;">
</span><div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="color: #1a1a1a; font-family: Tahoma;">It's very hard for one person to break through all the noise,
clutter and firewalls to reach the world. The easiest way nowadays seems to be
via video and indeed some young mothers familiar with Nana Chef suggested I
introduce her on a You Tube channel. The idea is similar to the old Mr. Rogers'
shows: Nana talks directly and gently while imparting wisdom and love. She
can't do that in print, only in life and the only way to bring it to life for
kids so scattered is via a video. So to get this idea of Nana into public
consciousness, I'm trying to put together a video channel.</span><span style="color: #1a1a1a;"></span></span></div>
<span style="font-size: small;">
</span><div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<span style="font-size: small;">
</span><div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="color: #1a1a1a; font-family: Tahoma;">6. <b>What has the community response been like to your
efforts? </b></span><span style="color: #1a1a1a;"></span></span></div>
<span style="font-size: small;">
</span><div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="color: #1a1a1a; font-family: Tahoma;">Whenever even the most sophisticated or most technological
people hear the phrase Nana in the kitchen they instantly fill with rapture,
glow and smile as they remember some smell or taste and show of pure, non
judgmental love. Nana turns out to be a powerful concept I am trying to
restore, at least to cooking. </span><span style="color: #1a1a1a;"></span></span></div>
<span style="font-size: small;">
</span><div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<span style="font-size: small;">
</span><div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="color: #1a1a1a; font-family: Tahoma;">7. <b>Why is cooking your passion? </b></span><span style="color: #1a1a1a;"></span></span></div>
<span style="font-size: small;">
</span><div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="color: #1a1a1a; font-family: Tahoma;">I started as a political scientist in international relations
and when I got out into the world, the first thing that hit me was how politics
divided people and killed people but food, food always brought people together
and nobody got hurt. I can go anywhere in the world and immediately relate by
asking someone what they eat or how they cook a particular ingredient. It never
fails. Everybody on this planet brings something to the table; we are all
equals in the kitchen. So cooking became my politics. </span><span style="color: #1a1a1a;"></span></span></div>
<span style="font-size: small;">
</span><div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<span style="font-size: small;">
</span><div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="color: #1a1a1a; font-family: Tahoma;">Equally important, when I started to cook a lot I discovered
cooking is the cross of science with art, nature and nurture. It's
endlessly fascinating. And magical. And it's traditional every which way, so it
binds you to the whole of humanity past and present. But most of all it's about
love--love of life itself and love for others, and about sharing that love.
It's a very spiritually satisfying activity.</span><span style="color: #1a1a1a;"></span></span></div>
<span style="font-size: small;">
</span><div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<span style="font-size: small;">
</span><br />
<span family="verdana" size:85="">~Sandy Garson
<i>"Wordsmithing to attest how the Dharma saved me from myself!"</i><br />
http://www.sandygarson.com<br />
http://yoursinthedharma.blogspot.com/</span><br />
<span family="verdana" size:85="">
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<center>Powered by <a href="http://dir.webring.com/rw" target=_top>WebRing</a>.</center></div>Sandy Garsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09824736880802751211noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17873725.post-69851172126085392592016-02-23T15:41:00.004-08:002016-02-23T15:54:50.918-08:00Down...Up...Down<span family="verdana" size:85=""></span><br />
<span family="verdana" size:85=""> A friend just wrote to say among the life shifting events of her hectic weekend, she got word a good friend dropped dead while on a Caribbean cruise. That loss overshadowed better news she wanted to share: the purchase of a fixer upper summerhouse for recent grand kids. "So crazy," she wrote, "down...up...down. First death of a close friend."</span><br />
<span family="verdana" size:85=""><br /></span>
<span family="verdana" size:85="">I have been there, done that. Given how unscripted and un-guaranteed real life is, that my friend made it into her 70s without losing a friend feels miraculous and worth cheering, an up in the down. I lost my first friend when I was 28. He was 29 and married to my best childhood friend, who was 27. When he was committed to the hospital with terminal brain cancer, </span><span family="verdana" size:85="">I was the one she called to come, t</span><span family="verdana" size:85="">he one who had to stand by when she broke down, who had to make the plans and drive the car and keep things going on both ends. Five months of down... down...down the rabbit hole never knowing what to expect or improvise made the funeral a relief. </span><br />
<br />
<span family="verdana" size:85="">Six years later I lost my best friend, also to a fatal cancer. I was the one her husband called to come when the diagnosis was certain. He did not know how to deal with loss and didn't want to learn. "I only win. I've never lost a game or a job or person. I can't do this," he said. "I'm going back home. You come and be here for her." For a year I was, faithfully shuttling back and forth between my life and Boston's Dana Farber Cancer Hospital, then the local upstate NY hospital where she finally died. It was a relief.</span><br />
<br />
<span family="verdana" size:85="">I lost my friends the long way. </span><span family="verdana" size:85="">On short or no notice at all, </span><span family="verdana" size:85="">death is much harder to wrap your spirit around. The news is: you've just been robbed of closure. You'll never get the chance to tell them about that new restaurant or make amends or find out about their latest triumph. Whatever you wanted to say next time will torment your mind. I understand what my friend is trying to say.</span><br />
<br />
T<span family="verdana" size:85="">he long way round has similar agony. On short or no notice at all, you're told the relationship is over. In too many ways, the person you related to is not that person any more. Something has come between you. Right there mourning begins. You've lost what you had. It's never going to back up and be the way it was. Everyday you have to face that. Everyday you improvise a new relationship while mourning the old one. You play the inevitable waiting game. The clock ticks, ticks, ticks. You do and do not want it to. Death is a relief for both of you. </span><br />
<span family="verdana" size:85=""><br /></span>
Most people think funerals are to pay respect to the dead. In truth, funerals are to wake up the living. They exist to provide closure, especially when there's been short or no notice. Not just a chance to get out that <i>goodbye </i>or praise (eulogy),<i> </i>but more vitally a chance to have thrown in your face the indisputable fact your relationship is definitely over. Usually, right before your very eyes, it's buried or burnt to ashes. <span family="verdana" size:85="">The
late great master Dilgo Khyentse pointedly observed that when we cry over death, we're
just crying like spoiled children who've lost something we wanted to
keep. The dead has been released from all suffering; that should be good news we cheer.</span><br />
<br />
As I wrote back to my friend, impermanence happens. Down...up...down...that's life unfolding. Actors come and go from our stage as the play changes acts. Sometimes the players change roles, sometimes they disappear completely from the visible story line. But we are still in it. We are still writing it. And they are still part of our makeup. Somewhere they've left a mark on us. There's up in the down.<br />
<br />
We say <i>goodbye</i> and we say <i>hello</i>. Life flows like a river. It moves on. I did. You can. Hug your husband, call your kids and fix that new house for the grandbabies. Now or maybe never. A long time ago, I learned you can't know if there will be later. Death is the only reminder of that. So maybe it's a good thing.<br />
<span family="verdana" size:85=""><br /></span>
<span family="verdana" size:85=""><br /></span>
<span family="verdana" size:85=""><br /></span>
<span family="verdana" size:85=""><br /></span>
<span family="verdana" size:85=""><br /></span>
<br />
<br />
<span family="verdana" size:85="">~Sandy Garson
<i>"Wordsmithing to attest how the Dharma saved me from myself!"</i><br />
http://www.sandygarson.com<br />
http://yoursinthedharma.blogspot.com/</span><br />
<span family="verdana" size:85="">
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<center>Powered by <a href="http://dir.webring.com/rw" target=_top>WebRing</a>.</center></div>Sandy Garsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09824736880802751211noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17873725.post-81081383230143214102016-02-13T20:30:00.004-08:002016-02-15T10:36:21.332-08:00A New Year StoryFor many months, I had a large white box store plastic bag gathering dust on my bedroom floor. It often tripped me, but I told myself I'd deal with it later. And of course I didn't or I wouldn't be telling you this.<br />
<br />
The bag contained clothes that came from concerted closet cleaning. Finding myself short of hangers for new stuff bought during January sales, I decided anything not worn in two years had to go. It turned out the game of musical hangers was lost by what hadn't been worn in at least five years. Actually, what went into the bag was between 15 and 30 years old: shoulder padded jackets, a silk shirt with gigantic Elizabethan ruffles, heavy winter weights nobody needs in California, and of course party pants I would somehow zip
and button again. No consignment shop-- not even ones that professed to be <i>vintage--</i> wanted this stuff.<br />
<br />
So it was now out of the closet, but evidently I didn't want it out of my life. I kept it on the floor. I didn't want it there, but I didn't want to toss away elegantly crafted, classic designer clothes not made in China. I couldn't bear to see the quality and integrity they represented so easily ejected. So I just kept tripping over them.<br />
<br />
Two weeks ago, I got a <i>Eureka</i>! jolt. I saw a soft news story about dust mites, microscopic creatures that nest in dust fuzz and eat human skin. The timing was, as Tibetans say, auspicious. I had been suffering so many sleepless nights of mysterious unstoppable dry coughing fits, asthmatic breathing and strange little bites, I'd started to suspect the problem was not going to be cured by medical intervention. It was environmental. Something in my bedroom was killing me. And now the dust mite exposé in the nick of time. Reading it made me recall when I was a teenager tested for allergies and dust mites hit the doctor's very short list. I laughed at him, certain being allergic to dust or its imaginary mites was the most ridiculous thing I'd ever heard.<br />
<br />
I turned into a killer possessed. I spent a heave-ho Saturday moving furniture, disinfecting floors, wet wiping lampshades and window shades, stripping textiles and machine washing at the highest temperature anything not attached to anything else-- even a yak wool blanket and an area rug that said: <i>Do Not Wash in a Machine. </i>I was on a ladder. I was on my hands and knees. I was on a mission. I vacuumed, squeegied, squirted and strained to get to the high ceiling. Nothing was left unturned. I even wet-wiped the exterior of that white plastic bag on the floor and then for good measure kicked it out into the hallway.<br />
<br />
That night, for the first time in over a month, I slept without waking to cough or catch my breath. It was miraculous. And all my own doing. I had destroyed a threat to my life. I felt cocky proud and powerful. I had become master of my universe. How clever I was. Then on the way to the bathroom, I tripped over the big white plastic bag of clothes still in the narrow hallway. Later, I told myself, I'll deal with that.<br />
<br />
Later finally came this week, on Losar, New Year for Tibetans and Tibetan Buddhists. Its run-up and rituals are essentially about getting everything spic and span to enter the new year uncontaminated by the past, all super clean for a totally fresh start. Like me cleaning the hell out of my bedroom so I could breathe again, on the eve, I took apart my altar. I washed the surface and the floor underneath. I wiped the photos and thangkha. I polished the brass statues with freshly squeezed lemon juice until they glowed. I cleaned the seven copper offering bowls and two candle holders. I left nothing untouched, nothing impure to infect the energy of my new year--a monkey year. I was on a mission. This monkey wanted--make that needed-- a banner year. Anything to crush obstacles piled so high, I can't seem to pass GO. <br />
<br />
To emphasize my hope for help, I greeted the New Year day with cookie and fruit offerings on the shrine. I got daffodils. I filled the seven offering bowls with new enriched rice. I started to put the seven offering items back on top and realized I was putting "back." I was using last year's stuff, that was in truth the year before's and back even beyond that. I was hanging on. It was so easy. Besides, I liked those little things. How clever I'd been to have found such appropriate symbols, especially the little Christmas tree ornament apple for food and the miniature copper tuba as the offering of music. Now they felt threatening: yesterday polluting tomorrow. Quicker than you can say <i>Buddha,</i> I jammed that old stuff in a Baggie and took off on a scavenger hunt. With ingenuity and a few dollars at the handicraft supply store around the corner, I pulled together seven brand new offerings for a brand new year, including a fridge magnet pretzel for food and a paper thin wooden guitar for music. I sat in front of my new altar glowing with pride and power. Once again in challenge, I triumphed. I changed the world. <br />
<br />
I said mantras and recited prayers to get off to a pure (as in undefiled by negative karma) start. I sat quietly, basking in thankfulness for this opportunity to start fresh and clean. I long ago discovered cleaning a closet or a bedroom or an altar is truly satisfying because you see the positive results of your effort right away. You won't die wondering if you made a difference. But by now I've been around Dharma long enough to understand cleaning closets, cleaning house, cleaning yourself and your clothes means you are clearing your mind. The physical work is just the manifestation of a mental catharsis that removes the cobwebs and vintage thoughts that always trip you up. Tibetan Buddhists are very clear that whatever is going on in your physical world--including illness-- is just the manifestation of what's happening in your mind. That's why it felt so good to seem so clean.<br />
<br />
Not wanting to that feeling to end, I decided to make a day of it. Today would truly be a fresh start. I would stand at the door like a bouncer and let no old habits in. I sat at the altar in meditation, did a puja and then, no I wasn't going to sit around staring at the computer screen, no. I'd join the world. I'd go out for a walk in the park. <br />
<br />
I'm sure I would have if, as I headed for the door, I hadn't tripped over that bag of vintage clothes. This day of all days. Maybe that's why I finally got the message. We all kick aside things we don't want to deal with, hoping they will somehow evaporate on their own: the tangled relationship, the unspoken job grievances, the person not taken, the life not led. They never do, do they? They just hang around to haunt and trip us, to make us choke the way dust mites do. <br />
<br />
I grabbed the bag, grabbed my keys and left the house. I walked the same three blocks to the Goodwill Store I've walked many times, and was almost at the door when a tall, lanky, gray haired guy stepped out from the wall to ask me what I was delivering in my bag. "Nothing for you," I replied and kept walking. "Just some women's clothes."<br />
<br />
"My wife could use some clothes," he said.<br />
<br />
WTF? My trip to Goodwill had never been interrupted before. Was he a trick? Were those highly polished brass deities on my altar testing me? Was this day really going to be like all other days? Or not? I hemmed, I "ummed". I tried not to look at the man looking at me. I didn't like the thought of some stranger, some homeless woman wearing designer clothes I had been saving as valuable. My clothes. I didn't like the idea this guy was trying to get for free what he'd have to pay a few dollars for inside. Maybe he didn't even have a wife and was looking for stuff to sell to buy drugs.<br />
<br />
<i>Yoo hoo, Losar here,</i> a voice said. What are you thinking? Why are you thinking? Get with the program.<br />
<br />
To make this new start new--extra-ordinary, I could be extraordinarily generous. I could remember to be as unbiased as the sun that shines on everyone without asking questions. I could be the Buddha by not discriminating, just seeing equality-- the Buddha nature in everyone. I could let go judging a guy in need who wanted something for nothing. I could let go of clothes I considered valuable even though they no longer had any real use for me. Hell, they weren't valuable at all, just in thoughts of time gone by, time that was not here now. They were choking my mind like dust mites. With a WTF shrug, I tossed the guy the white plastic bag, u-turned and walked back to my sparkling clean altar to dedicate the merit. <br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<span family="verdana" size:85="">~Sandy Garson
<i>"Wordsmithing to attest how the Dharma saved me from myself!"</i><br />
http://www.sandygarson.com<br />
http://yoursinthedharma.blogspot.com/</span><br />
<span family="verdana" size:85="">
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