Evil and it's Opposite

I just finished a wonderful book, The Signature of All Things by Elizabeth Gilbert. This is not the place for a book review (the book is excellent, though), but there is one aspect of it that has captivated and held my attention, namely the main character's assertion that there is a flaw in the theory of evolution because it cannot account for altruism in the human (and in some cases non-human) species.

I find this odd. It seems to me clear that we are a cooperative species because we would have died out long ago if we were not, simple as that. I know that many acts of kindness or heroism have nothing to do with the survival of one's offspring, but I don't think evolution needs to be quite so literal. Birds, for instance, evolved wings because it made it more possible for them to survive, but they swoop and soar sometimes simply for the pleasure of it. There is no evolutionary adaptation there; it is more or less a side effect of a desirable trait. Just so, the extremes of altruism may not have anything directly to do with evolution, but the trait itself is highly adaptive. Or, so it seems to me.

Of more interest to me is the nature and persistence of evil. Here we truly do have a human characteristic that would seem to fly in the face of evolutionary theory. While it's true that the mass extermination of others (for instance) would seem to lead to the perpetuation of one's own offspring, such extreme acts go far beyond the level necessary for evolution to take place. Indeed, such extremes (history suggests) will eventually rebound upon the perpetrator and make the survival of his or her offspring less likely.

Caligula

I am thinking of the big evildoers here: Hitler, Idi Amin, Pol Pot, Joseph Stalin, Caligula, Torquemada, King Leopold. What could possibly have motivated these men (and it's worth noting that they are all men) to the heights of murder, rape, and torture? To simply call them evil and leave it at that seems disingenuous. These were men like any others; they were not substantially different in form from any of us.

This addresses what I believe Hannah Arendt was getting at when she coined the term "the banality of evil". It is both a disservice to humanity and an untoward exaltation of the evil one to think of Evil as something exceptional or outlandish. This way of thinking can lead to an attitude that can serve to sanitize or even romanticize evil acts. Just think about how we sometimes speak of a man like Rasputin, as someone extraordinary and mystical instead of just one more normal man gone bad.

Closer to home is the thorny situations where neither good nor bad is entirely clear. Take, for instance, the aversion most of us have for lying. We nonetheless engage in this vice on a fairly regular basis—and a good thing, too! Part of the social contract is those lies that make life possible ("Does this dress make me look fat?") On a deeper level, there is the thought experiment dreamed up (I believe) by Kant: a man who believed that lying was always wrong was sheltering his brother from a man who wanted to kill him. The potential killer came to the man's door and asked if his brother was there. What does the man say? It seems clear to me that one must always consider the greater good. To be a moral absolutist is to be a moral idiot.

I ran across two linked philosophical thought experiments the other day that also challenge the way we think about such choices. Here they are:

An out-of-control trolley is careening toward a large crowd of people and will undoubtedly kill dozens of them if it continues on its way. However, you have access to a track switch. If you throw the switch, the trolley will divert to a different track where only a few people stand; they will surely be killed in the collision. You only have time to throw the switch but not enough time to warn anyone. What do you do?

Usually people recognize in this scenario that the greater good takes precedence and, even though your action will lead directly to the death of some people, it will also save many others. But what about this?:

The same scenario as above, but this time there is no switch.You are on an overpass above where the trolley will pass. The only way to stop the trolley from killing all those people is to push the fat man standing next to you onto the tracks below, which will stop the trolley. (And, no, you are not adequately hefty to serve the purpose). You don't have time to warn anyone, including him, and you have the necessary strength to do the deed. Do you do it?

For most of us, this is a much more difficult scenario. Interestingly enough, in the latter scenario, you are responsible for the death of only one person versus "several" in the first one. Yet because you must actually put your hands on someone and directly cause his death, this is much more difficult for most of us to imagine doing. (Another twist on the scenario is that the fat man is responsible for the trolley being out of control—he rigged the controls and you know it. Is it easier to contemplate throwing him in the path of the trolley now? Why?)

I don't pretend to have facile answers to any of these questions, but I find them interesting. I think the only way we can survive is through a bit of moral relativism. Yet when we take this relativism to an extreme it can lead to horrendous injustice and indifference.

Which brings us back to altruism. It is essential that we feel compassion and openheartedness toward all of those beings in our world in order for us to survive. With all that is going on around us, this can be extraordinarily difficult. How can I hold in my heart every last refugee and starving person, every whale and polar bear, and still lead a life joyful enough to be worth living? The Buddha would say that our hearts have an infinite capacity to consider and address the problems of the world, but it doesn't always feel that way, does it?

I wish you all wonderful holidays. I will write here again after the New Year. Watch out for those trolleys.

Observations II

As I did last year, I come to you, hat in hand, with observations gleaned from the world and the scary place inside my head that wonders about such things, things that in the past 12 months have made me go, "Huh!" Enjoy! (Or not, as you choose).

*I am utterly confused by people taking airlines up on the offer to board early if they are not using the

overhead bins. As far as I can tell, the passenger's thinking is this: "Yes, please, I would like to sit in a tight, confined space the size and shape of a coffin for an extra 15 minutes for no reason whatsoever". Good thinking, folks.

* Why does every credit card scanner have to have different rules? Sometime I swipe the card, sometimes the clerk does. Sometimes I sign on the screen, sometimes I sign a piece of paper; yesterday I signed on a tablet with my finger (!). Sometimes I must sign for over 25 dollars, sometimes over 50, sometimes no matter what. Can't they all just agree on one system?

* Who exactly buys all those records Bjork sells?

* How do public radio pledge drives work? I know that as soon as I hear the pitch I switch to another station or put on a CD or something. The way I figure, there are three kinds of people who listen to public radio: those (like me) who already support it, who are annoyed that they have to hear the sales talk anyway; those who have no intention of supporting it and are annoyed by the intrusion; and those who are wavering. Does this third group really tip over into the support category because they are hectored and badgered? Do they sit there and listen to the importuning until they enter one of the two other categories? That's a fairly sad statement on the human condition, if you ask me.

* My phone has a program that syncs my iTunes with the phone's mp3 player. In order to do this, it reaches out through the Wi-Fi and opens iTunes on my computer. I think this is way cool and a little creepy.

* Traffic lights are primarily a technological expression of our sense of fairness. If you don't think so, just

watch and see how quickly we ignore them if they are unfair (too long, in an absurd place, etc).

* Has anyone else noticed how common it is these days for cars (and trucks and buses) to have one headlight out? It seems to happen all the time. Weird. (I assume this is not a Wallflowers homage).

* Didn't there used to be a courtesy understanding about how early in the morning it was OK to start doing noisy stuff? My brother's neighbor mows his lawn as early as 6:45 on Saturdays or has loud conversations in his driveway at about the same time of day. I have noticed construction going on as early as 6:00 on weekdays in residential areas. We shouldn't need laws to tell us that's just too damn early to be doing these things. I mean, jeez....

* I like to think that I can get inside of people's heads enough to understand even the strangest behavior and the motivation behind it, but I admit to being entirely flurmuzzled by people who let their dogs poop just anywhere and don't clean it up. I can't even imagine being that person. I'm not saying I disapprove (though I do), just that being them would be about as weird as being a Sontaran. Unfathomable.

* I have had three or four encounters with people in parking lots, on ferries, and places like that where cars are parked close together, who get all bent out of shape when my car door touches theirs. I am talking about the lightest touch, just enough for me to get out of my car. C'mon folks, get a grip. These are cars, they encounter one another. I am being careful, I promise, but the surface of your car is not a sacred space.

* Rather than taking umbrage all the time, I'd really like to give it now and then (I know, I know, I do, don't I?). Speaking of which, why do we always go back and forth? I would like the option to go forth and back sometimes (which really makes more sense, anyway, since I must go forth in order to come back). I would prefer, now and then (then and now?) to go fro and to. And is something any less clean because it is span and spic? Just wondering.

* I have an earring that is the symbol for "Om". If I wear it upside down is it the symbol for "Wo"?

* Why are all drinking fountains everywhere adjusted so only the merest trickle escapes? Is this a prostate issue? If drinking fountains have prostates, we are all in much more trouble than we ever knew (and I am certainly going to stop using them!).

* Why do shoe manufacturers ship shoes out laced in such strange ways? And who comes up with these bizarre lacing patterns, anyway? Are there professional lacers? Are they tatty dressers? (OK, I admit it, that's an obscure joke).

* Pedestrians: please don't push the crosswalk button if you intend to jaywalk. Here I sit waiting for the light to change, and you are already a half mile on your way.

* Why can businesses sign you up instantly for their stupid email "alerts" but it can take up to 10 business days to unsubscribe?

* Why can't we just eliminate the numbers 0 & 1 and the letters O and I from all serial numbers, confirmation codes, coupon verifications and such, so there's no possibility of confusing them? There would still be plenty of number and letter combinations left. We could think of it as a digital homage.

* What exactly am I supposed to say when you knock on a locked bathroom door? Isn't that fact that it's locked information enough?

* Isn't it odd that the word "cervical" refers to two such divergent anatomical structures? I can't imagine two body parts with less in common (well, yes, I can, but let's not go there).

OK, that's it for another year. Admittedly not particularly profound, but a little peek inside my mind. Sorry if you are frightened by the glimpse. We will now return to our regularly scheduled programming....

My input was not sought

Last Sunday I went to the memorial service for my good friend Debbi. I have written several times here about her and her progression toward death.

Toward the end of the day, after all the songs had been sung and poems recited, the memories relived and rehashed, I was standing at a large, beautiful collage of photos, all of Debbi at various stages of her life, lovingly put together by her husband, Sam. The whole trajectory of her life, from beginning to end, laid out in such an orderly way. I turned to my daughter-in-law and said, "death is chaos".

Death is Chaos.

It's the best I can do. I wish I could be of more comfort, but as far as I can tell, this is the truth of it. Because death (or, more accurately, grief) is felt in the heart and not the head, I cannot think my way through this thing. Intellectually, death makes a lot of sense. We all know it's coming, and thank goodness for that. Life would have little meaning if there weren't a period at the end of this particular sentence (living a semicolonic life would be misery, I think). In Debbi's case, it was particularly clear that death was a desirable ending to her last chapter. She had been suffering, in one way or another, for over a decade, and the last year or so she was almost entirely immobile. If you knew her, you know that was a form of hell for her. So—good on her for dying, we all say.

But....

But grief is experienced by the heart, and the heart knows no such thing. The heart still expects to be able to pick up the thread of a conversation, finish that letter, make the visit not made. The heart knows only infinity; it doesn't consider the possibility of endings. It's not that the heart shies away from them, mind you, just that it never occurs to it. To the heart, death is as if one had awakened with legs where arms used to be and vice versa. No matter how much everyone told you that this was a normal state of being and to be expected, still, it would come as something of a shock. One might even be rather skeptical of the reassurance. It would feel like chaos. Such is the heart's incredulity.

I suspect this was, at least in part, what T.S. Eliot was speaking of when he wrote:

I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope
For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love
For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith
But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.
Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought:
So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.
(From "The Four Quartets")

And it turns out, at least in my experience of it, that once activated, grief is indiscriminate. It becomes greif for every damn thing, every relationship I neglected, every opportunity that passed me by, every experience that never came my way. In the final analysis, we struggle to make sense of the finality of things not only because it makes us sad but because our hearts cannot fathom the utter completeness of loss. There is no going back there, to that person, to those moments.

John Updike:

And another regrettable thing about death
is the ceasing of your own brand of magic,
which took a whole life to develop and market—
the quips, the witticisms, the slant
adjusted to a few, those loved ones nearest
the lip of the stage, their soft faces blanched
in the footlight glow, their laughter close to tears,
their tears confused with their diamond earrings,
their warm pooled breath in and out with your heartbeat,
their response and your performance twinned.
The jokes over the phone. The memories packed
in the rapid-access file. The whole act.
Who will do it again? That's it: no one;
imitators and descendants aren't the same.
("Pefection Wasted")

But I think the poem that most captures how the heart speaking to the mind feels is "Dirge Without Music" by Edna St. Vincent Millay:

I am not resigned to the shutting away of loving hearts in the hard ground.
So it is, and so it will be, for so it has been, time out of mind:
Into the darkness they go, the wise and the lovely. Crowned
With lillies and with laurel they go; but I am not resigned.

Lovers and thinkers, into the earth with you.
Be one with the dull, the indiscriminate dust.
A fragment of what you felt, of what you knew,
A formula, a phrase remains;—but the best is lost.

The answers quick and keen, the honest look, the laughter, the love,—
They are gone. They are gone to feed the roses. Elegant and curled
Is the blossom. Fragrant is the blossom. I know. But I do not approve.
More precious was the light in your eyes than all the roses in the world.

Down, down, down into the darkness of the grave
Gently they go, the beautiful, the tender, the kind;
Quietly they go, the intelligent, the witty, the brave.
I know. But I do not approve. And I am not resigned.

Good-bye, dear Deb. I love you and am glad you are at peace.

But my heart does not approve.

Anicca

As I walk to work, I pick up trash. Why I chose to start doing this is lost in the mists of time, but now it is simply part of what I do—I would no more leave the house without my trash-picking gloves than I would without my pants.

As I walk to work, I practice metta (lovingkindness). I first list all those whom I wish to include in my good wishes: friends, family, neighbors, pets, coworkers, difficult people. I include a broader and broader range of beings as I go, eventually including in my well-wishing all beings, everywhere. At the end, I include myself.

I am somewhat limited in the routes to work, but I have a few options. Some of them are more trash-strewn than others. Most days, these feel like the right place to be, where I can do the most good. On some days, it is far too discouraging to walk there, in places where I have, over the years, picked up a ton or two of trash, yet are sometimes still blanketed with it.

When I have completed my litany of those in my circle of loving wishes, I wish for them these things:

May you be happy.
May you be healthy.
May you be free of suffering.
May you know the end of pain and fear.
May your hearts be open.
May you live in unconditional friendliness.
May you live with ease.
May you know peace.

It would be a miracle, of course, if even one of these came to anyone in its totality. The idea that we could be thoroughly happy or entirely well, eternally free of suffering or that pain and fear should disappear entirely, are devoutly to be wished, but hardly to be expected. Yet it is to be hoped for nonetheless, with all our hearts.

Today I am planting bulbs for flowers that will appear in the spring.

Today I am beginning to pack for a trip to California to help celebrate Debbi's life and the release of her death.

I remind myself that the cleanliness of a place is not the point of what I am doing. I am working to open my heart and be of service to all beings everywhere. I do my best to refrain from parceling out my assistance based on my perception of merit. The trashy street is just as worthy of my attention as the nearly pristine—and is clearly more in need. Still, there are days, especially dark and gloomy days, when I cannot bring myself to go those neglected routes.

I wish these things with all my heart—well, to the best of my ability, anyway—and equally. My wife is in the list, but so is Osama bin Laden's family. My son is here, but so is Dick Cheney. As far as that goes, "all beings" includes all beings, no matter how loathsome. So mosquitoes are here, and Congress, Barak Obama and George W. Bush, the coworkers who drive me nuts and those I am drawn to. I wish them all the best of everything, always. For reasons I am not sure I understand, I do not include the dead, so there are gaps where people used to be. We arise and pass away, that is the teaching there. My list changes as there are births and marriages and divorces and death.

Sometimes I pick up pieces of trash that were part of something that was at one time, perhaps long ago, lovingly acquired, or I like to think so. The beauty or utility of a thing arises in our minds and we take it into our lives. Then it fades and becomes less useful or attractive until we entirely forget why we desired it in the first place. Then it becomes trash. And sometimes, with the heedlessness of the distracted or the misguided flip of a garbage can, it becomes litter, trash on the ground, my fodder.

Everyone is working toward the end of suffering. Hitler thought he was working toward the end of suffering, Idi Amin thought so, as did Pol Pot and Saddam Hussein. Their means were unskillful in the extreme, but their goal was the same as mine—to end suffering in this life and always, so that we might have true and lasting joy. It is difficult to bring this realization into my heart, the more so with examples that are less remote and affect me more directly: does my boss really have my best interest at heart? Does the government of this country really care about the well-being of the poor? The answer is, it doesn't matter. They all wish, as I do, for the end of suffering, and I wish this for them. I wish them peace and happiness and harmony. Wishing them ill does nothing to punish them and only harms me.

Just as we all seek the end of suffering, so, too, there is nothing created by humans in this world that someone, somewhere didn't think would be useful, if only in a limited way. Junk mail, rotting food, plastic bags, old mops, hard drives, broken lamps, bottle caps, cigarette packs, napkins, drink cups—all had their day in the sun. Sometimes I imagine them with preferences, glad to have been of service and now resigned—proud, even—to be sent back into the stream of reuse and decay. They were purposeful, then discarded, their constituent elements recommitted to usefulness.

Which is not to say that it is right to allow wrong to happen in this world. Those who are so unskillful as to create suffering for others in the process of attempting to find an end to their own must be confronted, and the greater the harm, the more urgent this need. But even this can be done with love in our hearts, not only for those who are victims of harm or threatened with harm, but toward the perpetrator. If we proceed with hate, we will inevitably cause more harm.

And the lesson is contained in this: tomorrow there will be yet more trash. In the worst places, it is never completely clean, for I can only spare a small amount of time to the effort and it seems that few others are making any. This is impermanence (known as anicca in the world of Buddhism), the knowledge that all things arise and pass away. Even trash arises and passes away...and then arises again in a different form. These streets will never be clean, and this is as it should be. My job is to be of service, to do what I can, to stoop and bend and take that one piece of paper to the recycle bin. And then another.

This is the lesson of metta. The practice of asking that good come to all beings is not a process of wishful thinking or a form of magic. These are not incantations that will bring about goodness through some esoteric process. This is an inclining of our hearts toward goodness, toward kindness, generosity and love. Though we may feel as if our contribution to the whole is minuscule, imagine what could come to pass if millions of us, billions, even, were actively hoping for good to come to pass for all beings! War would be impossible, murder would cease, rape would be a thing of the past, cruelty a fever dream. We would not tolerate evil among us and would smother it, not with swords, but with our hearts. 

Choosing freedom

I am reading the book "Work" by Thich Nhat Hanh. Sometimes I am disturbed by his writing because it seems to me rather unsophisticated—simplistic, even. But I think this is fully intentional on his part. What I am looking for, what I think of as sophistication, is a form of intellectual engagement which makes me feel as if I understand what is going on in the world, that I have a grasp of it that is somewhat superior to the average human. I know this sounds arrogant, but my point is that we do this very thing all the time, seek to be engaged on an intellectual level, at a level of sophistication that has nothing to do with true understanding. We try to live in a sort of academic model of the Buddha's teachings in which we begin with Enlightenment 101 and progress through the syllabus to Final Realization, the PhD of Buddhism.

But the Buddha himself rejected even the idea of "Buddhism" as being antithetical to his teachings. The problem with identifying oneself as a Buddhist is two-fold: it assumes that there is something which is not of the Dharma and it assumes that there is a class of people who are non-Buddhists. Both of these are fallacious concepts and do nothing but feed into the very egoism that is the core of suffering. So I think that the simplicity of Hanh's teachings is purposeful. This is the whole answer, he seems to be saying. Sometimes I can sense the Buddha smiling indulgently when I try to overcomplicate this thing.

Here is one realization that has become more real for me lately: the end of suffering is a choice, and not a particularly difficult one. Now, I have understood this intellectually for a long time. This is, after all, the core of the Buddha's teachings. But recently I have begun to incorporate this idea more viscerally. I have a choice, in each moment, for suffering or for freedom. Let me be even more clear about this. Nirvana is the end of suffering; that's all it is. And since we have it within our power to choose freedom, Nirvana, too, is within our grasp, right now, today, in this very life. No, but really. There is no further sophistication required and the seeking of such complexity creates suffering.

The question that immediately arises, then, is why can't we consistently choose freedom? What's stopping us? I sometimes feel I would like to march up to Dharma teachers and take them by the collar of their saffron robes and demand that they tell me the secret. Yes, yes, it's a simple thing to choose freedom. It also seems to be damn near impossible.

Of course, the answer is complicated. But it's only complicated by our twisty minds. We have been conditioned to certain ways of thinking and being in the world that are antithetical to freedom. And we completely and utterly believe in our conditioning, so even if we come to an understanding of the nature of freedom we still seek comfort from those things that cannot supply it. Recall that in my last post I quoted the Buddha as saying "Everything the world considers a source of suffering I consider a source of freedom. Everything the world considers a source of freedom, I consider a source of suffering." This is worth musing on. He said, "everything", not most things or a few. Renunciation, for instance, which simply means giving up everything that does not and cannot give us happiness, a pizza, for instance, feels like deprivation in the practice. On the other hand, the attempt to derive lasting pleasure from a pizza would be considered by the Buddha a source of suffering. But life is too short, we think, to give up such pleasures as these. Life is hard enough, isn't it? The Buddha would reply, I think, that life is too short to ask pleasures like these to give us true happiness and divert us from the path that can lead to the real thing. These create suffering, not relieve it, because using them to supply happiness requires that they be constantly renewed. No sooner have we had the pleasurable experience than it must be re-experienced to sustain the pleasure. The deep joy that comes from true freedom, on the other hand, is perpetual, indestructible, and ever-present.

Last week, I listened to a fascinating talk on this subject by Robina Courtin. She makes the case that what the Buddha called "attachment" (the grasping onto something that gives us pleasure, the rejection of that which is perceived as unpleasant) we might more accurately call "addiction". Of course, this is not a new idea, but she gave it new life for me. It is instructive to look at the destructive cycle of a true addict, say one hooked on crystal meth, where the craving is constant and implacable, to the exclusion of everything wholesome and useful. It is easy to consider ourselves entirely above this kind of behavior, yet Courtin emphasizes that "we are all addicts; it's only a matter of degree." This is hard to hear, but is precisely what I was speaking of above. Because we have freedom within our grasp and take actions that stand between us and that freedom, we must be addicted to experiences that move counter to freedom, otherwise, why would we do them? We are just like the meth addict in this, but we use donuts and Starbucks and cars, television and shopping and wine, sex and vacations and food.

Now, you'll have to excuse me. I am going down the street to buy some gelato. I'm then going to come home and watch the World Series. I'm sure these will bring me lasting happiness. Just see if they don't.

(After I wrote this, I really did go down the street to buy some gelato. They didn't have any of my flavors, so I had to settle for sorbet, which I like, but not nearly as much. Then on the way home, a bird shit on my head. I kid you not.

Well played, Mr. Buddha, sir, well played).

Suffering

The other day, I read an article in the New York Times by an author (Pico Iyer, who should know better) who said that the Buddha was of the opinion that suffering is an inextricable part of being alive as a human. This is not true. In fact, what the Buddha taught is precisely the opposite. The first Noble Truth is, indeed, that there is suffering. But rather than a prescriptive statement, it is merely a descriptive one. It's a fact. There is suffering. But the Buddha also said, "I have come to teach only two things: suffering and the end of suffering." All of his teachings point toward how we can end suffering. Nowhere in them is the idea floated that we must simply put up with it.

Which is not to say that that painful will not come. We all know it will. As one famous formula has it, suffering is pain times resistance. It is not that the pain or grief or difficulty is avoidable. But what we do with what comes our way, how personally we take it, how vigorously we push it away is what creates our suffering.

This is worth dwelling on for a moment, because it is so entirely opposite what we usually think. Our suffering, so the usual thought goes, is caused by the source of our pain. For instance, I have recently been suffering around a conflict at work and it took me several weeks and a great deal of concentrated meditation to realize that the other person was not the source of my suffering. She was the source of my pain, perhaps, though a great deal of that was my stuff, too. But the suffering was 100% my doing because I was living in resistance to the painful experience.

Which is not to say that others can't be entirely and sometimes egregiously wrong. This is not a method for letting others off the hook (though it's worth considering whether or not their presence on or off the hook is any of our business, really). What the Buddha was telling us is that precisely what we believe to be a solution to our suffering (blaming, criticizing, being right) is what is, in fact, causing us to suffer.

One of the Buddha's most radical teachings was when he said, "Everything the world considers a source of suffering I consider a source of freedom. Everything the world considers a source of freedom, I consider a source of suffering." We reach for substances, experiences, people and other sources of distraction, believing they will bring us lasting happiness and they only bring us the most fleeting pleasure. We look with horror at the prospect of renunciation, of no longer relying on shopping, drinking, eating, sex, travel, television, and other distractions as a source of happiness. (Don't get me wrong—unless you are addicted to these, I am not advocating giving them up entirely, just the idea that they can bring us true happiness).
In other words, the Buddha's teachings can be summed up in three vital points:

1. There is suffering.
2. We believe we know what will end suffering.
3. We are wrong.

One of the most compelling images in all of Buddhism is that of the Hungry Ghost, a being who is eternally ravenous, who eats and eats and eats but has a stomach so capacious it can never be satisfied. He is always hungry and never thinks that perhaps not giving in to the hunger might bring him more happiness than trying to feed it. This is a perfect image of us as we go through nearly every day. It is not an easy matter to give this up, this delusion. But, look at those around you and at your own life. How often do we go through days, weeks, months, lifetimes seeking for joy outside ourselves without realizing that the treasure we seek is here where we are, how we are, right now, today, this moment. We can live here in perfect peace if that is what we choose.

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P.S. I doubt any of you were waiting with trepidation and anxiety to hear the outcome of my job search, about which I wrote a few weeks ago. I withdrew my application for the job I applied for and have not yet decided whether or not to look for another job after the first of the year, but I won't do anything until then. The reasons for my withdrawal are both complex and fairly boring, so just let me say that it is a decision about which I feel good. 

She, Dancing

My dear friend Deborah Bell Dancer died yesterday. She was (I believe) 59 years old.

I posted She, Dying about Debbi several months ago. Please click on the link if you wish to know more about who she was. She was a unique, delightful, gifted, loving, amazing person.

And now she is dancing again. May angels and devas and gods and demons join her. She will be missed. But her suffering has ended and that is all to the good. My love and everlasting devotion go with her.

Incomplete: Completed

Something I quoted in last week's post (from the Third Zen Patriarch) has stuck with me and grown ever more significant:

The Great Way is not hard
For those who have no preferences.

No preferences? How could that possibly work? But I have an inkling, a nagging feeling, that this is one of the most important statements I have ever heard. I have been there, have at times had no preferences. This happens almost exclusively at meditation retreats and is most noticeable when doing mundane chores we call "yogi tasks".

Let me explain breifly about yogi tasks. No retreat center is set up to provide for every need of those who come there to meditate (we call ourselves yogis). Rather, part of the practice is to take on a chore to keep the place running. Some yogis clean bathrooms, others chop vegetables or wash dishes (I have done all these). When I am truly invested in the retreat, everything I do is enveloped in what has been called "choiceless awareness". Whether sitting on a cushion watching my breath or using an old toothbrush to scrub grout in a shower stall, I am equally at peace. I have no preference.

But real life is, alas, not a meditation retreat.

I am having a great deal of trouble at work. I am in conflict with someone and it seems to be getting worse. I don't want to get into all of the details or who is right or wrong (for one thing, how should I know?). What interests me here is meditating on how I can apply the Patriarch's prescription to this situation. How can I have no preferences here? I wish this person thought well of me. I wish our personalities did not clash. I wish I could come to work and be at peace. I wish I didn't feel as if my every action was under scrutiny. These are my preferences. And this much is certainly true: my preferences are causing suffering for me. If I could not prefer these things, I would not suffer from their lack.

But how is this "no preferences" dissimilar to indifference? No matter how far down the road to freedom I travel, I always run up against this question. How can I not prefer harmony to disharmony or pleasure to pain? The Buddha listed eight paired states (usually called vicissitudes) that can cause us disquiet:

Pleasure and Pain

Gain and Loss

Praise and Blame

Fame and Disrepute

his point being that preferring either of the pair will cause us to suffer.

But how can I have no preference when it comes to my own emotional pain? For example, how do I feel in this situation at work? Well, let's see...hurt, offended, angry, misunderstood, disrespected, threatened, afraid. All this week I have been using this situation as a meditation on the question of preference. Would it be possible for me to have no preference here? This is not an invitation to suppress these feelings; if I were able to have no preference, I wouldn't feel them to begin with.

Now, I am not asking whether or not this is possible—it clearly is. This lack of preference is, as the Patriarch said, The Great Way. I believe with all my heart that the Buddha had reached this plateau of choiceless awareness and that many people before and since have also achieved this state. So, a person can do this; the question is, can I? And how does one achieve this without becoming indifferent?

There is a classic Zen story of an abbot who heard a knock at his door and upon opening it was confronted with two angry grandparents. "You are a terrible man!" they said, holding an infant out to him. "Our daughter tells us it was you who fathered this child. We had so much respect for you and now that is all gone. Well, you take this child, he is yours!" And the abbot replied, "Ah, is that so?" and took the child.

A few weeks later the couple came to his door abashed and ashamed, saying, "Oh, great abbot, please accept our most abject apologies. The father of this child is a village boy. Our daughter was afraid to tell us so and blamed it on the first man she thought of. He is not your child, and we have come to take him home." To which the abbot replied, "Ah, is that so?" and gave them the child.

I have thought about this story a lot over the past few weeks. The central question facing the abbot, it seems to me is, who will be best served by whatever action he chooses to take? If he denies the accusation of paternity, will the child benefit? The young woman? Her parents? Clearly, none of them would. He cannot lie and admit to fathering the child, but he can minimize the harm he might do by simply accepting the fact of what they have to say and taking the child into his house and into his heart.

There is a limit to this tolerance, however. If his ability to carry out his duties or to remain a Zen priest were threatened by this accusation, he might have to consider differently. Not because this would be bad for him, but because it was his role to serve not just his monastery but the entire community. Under these circumstances, he might have to make clear that, although he was willing to accept the child into his care, he denied fathering him. But the most vital point here is that this choice would not be made on the basis of selfishness or self-interest, that in this regard he had reached the place where he truly had no preference.

We can also see from this story that having no preferences is clearly not indifference. The abbot could not be indifferent to the needs of others—the child, the grandparents, the mother, the monks at his abbey, the people of his community. He was able to be blind to his own preferences and in that way was far from indifferent, was, in fact, quite the opposite of indifferent—compassionate.

This is a question without easy answers. There are also many stories of those who purport to have achieved this freedom who, when tested, demonstrate that they have merely made themselves indifferent and, when pushed far enough, the true selfishness of their motives came to the fore. I don't pretend to have come close to having no preferences, but I see the outlines of freedom in the far distance. I intend to walk in that direction.

Incomplete, Part II

(This is a continuation of last week's subject. This post will probably make more sense if you read that one first, if you haven't already).

What this really speaks to is the failure of egocentric thought. The word "egocentric" here is taken not as a judgment but literally, simply the self being the center of the universe. From this perspective, there is no denigration of this literally self-centered view as wrong or bad. But in the way of thinking and being I am proposing here, there is an essential recognition of this mode of thought as a failure, at least if one is seeking happiness, well-being, peace, joy, wholeness, or freedom.

This is all fine and well in theory, intellectually I thoroughly understand it, but when life comes up, when push comes to shove, I return to the same selfish attitudes I have fostered all my 57 years.

"If not me, whom?"
 "No one else has my interests at heart."
"If I don't protect myself, I will be taken advantage of."
"If I don't speak up, they will get away with it."
"They have no right to judge me, exclude me, not acknowledge my goodness, find fault, or seek inferior ways of doing things. If I don't say my piece, I have allowed them to persist in error."
"I only have enough time and energy to take care of my own needs. If I had extra, then I would certainly devote it to the well-being of others."

And on and on and on. The question is not whether these are failed strategies for living a joyful life—they are, both from the teachings of every spiritual tradition I know of and from personal experience—but how do I break the chain of these obsessive, self-centered thoughts and truly enter on a more fruitful path?

The Third Zen Patriarch said this:

The Great Way is not difficult

For those who have no preferences.

When like and dislike are both absent,

Everything becomes clear and undisguised.

Make the smallest distinction, however,

And Heaven and Earth are set infinitely apart.

To set up what you like

Against what you dislike

Is the disease of the mind.

But I keep wanting to say to all these great teachers, "Yes, but, how? Release myself from all preferences? What, are you nuts? I know this sounds like a good idea, but how does one get there? And what is the difference between having no preferences and being indifferent? Look (I want to say), when I hurt my shoulder, the physical therapist said, 'Do this, and eventually you will feel better,' and I did. Then she said, 'Oh, and do these exercises for the rest of your life and you will continue to feel better', and that's what I intend to do. Where is the pith spiritual instruction that will break through the delusions that rule my life?"

Now, don't get me wrong; I have done a great deal of work in this direction and it would be dishonest and self-defeating to say I am nothing but a selfish bastard—I'm not and know it. But Selfish Bastard can and does rear his head on a fairly regular basis, particularly in times of stress (and most especially when I am afraid). This is the default I would most like to change, to find the magic word that would unravel the tightly wound skein of my self-concern and remind me that the path of joy, as well as the path of goodness, lies elsewhere. Because I know it does, but knowledge alone will not guide me to that place.

Next week I will address what I have learned (and what I have still to learn) about the answer to these questions.  

Incomplete

I have recognized but not entirely integrated into my thinking that accomplishing anything, any completion will not (cannot) provide gratification or catharsis. Like Sisyphus pushing his boulder up the same hill over and over again, we complete nothing and operate only on the delusion we do. After all, in order to go on, each morning Sisyphus must have awakened to a sense of duty, not just futility. There is a forgetfulness in our Sisyphean natures that allows us to carry on.

This, then, is the profound error: to believe even in the possibility of completion. Which is not to be confused with completeness, or wholeness. It could be argued (and has been) that everything is already complete in its current state and requires no improvement. But completion is an entirely different matter, assuming as it does a beginning in a state of disorder and a restoration to a permanent state of order. But the nature of all things in change, and the idea of that which has been completed as immutable is in defiance of the nature of things to change, therefore antithetical. We may reach the end of something, but never its completion.

Why does this matter? Because in my life the form suffering takes is this delusion that Getting Things Done is the point. Since I cannot truly complete a damn thing, I am perpetually frustrated (I suffer). The fact is, I will never have enough time or energy to do the things I wish to do or even those I feel I must do.Yes, I know, anyone can point to counterexamples to contradict this philosophy: I graduated from college, completed my daily walk, cooked an entire meal and was done with it, but it is at a more profound level that completion never happens. As we have learned, so we forget and must relearn; to have any benefit, the walk must be taken again tomorrow; we will eat again, today's meal will be forgotten. So it goes. Yet I continue to seek this form of control, an attempt to build my our Valhalla (and anyone who knows the operas knows how well that turned out!)

The abandonment of the striving for completion (the perpetual to-do list in my head) is motivated in me, though, not by futility but through an awareness that there is something more worthwhile pursuing. Now that I am sensitized to it, I see it all the time, both in myself and others, this desire to control, to eke out territory and the abject misery the inevitable failure to do so engenders. It seems to me that I see on most of the faces around me a perplexed bafflement, genuine surprise that the failed strategies of yesterday didn't work today, either. I spent the weekend around fellow spiritual seekers and my perception was that even there, at every turn this was true, except in the teacher, who has clearly abandoned striving.

This feels like unsafe territory. It calls into question the underpinnings of how I have lived my life up to now. How does the old pop song go? "The things you think are precious I can't understand." It calls into question, in fact, the underpinnings of our very social fabric. We want The Answer or, worse yet, believe we know it and strive to impose it on others. But it seems we have not been asking the right question, so the answer must be false. And if the question is, how can I be infinite? Or, what is the nature of love without limit? it becomes clear how meaningless an Answer can be.

But things are not hopeless; quite the opposite. The abandonment of the urge for completion could be the ultimate freedom. More next week.

Anxiety, too

Yesterday in meditation, a crystal clear image came to me of anxiety having at its core a wounded child surrounded by snarling dogs. The feeling of anxiety is the dogs growling and biting and tearing at anything that comes close. They do not and cannot understand that the love and concern being brought is precisely what would heal the child. All the dogs know is that their sole aim, their assignment, is to protect the child, no matter the cost. They are all the more vicious because the child is injured.

I have been lacerated by these dogs over the past few days. In my last post I mentioned how dissatisfied I have become with my current work. I had no intention of doing anything about it quite yet. Remember the scene in the film Roxanne where Steve Martin's character is trying on new noses at the plastic surgeon's, even though he can't have one? To make myself feel better about my work (licking my wounds after another staff meeting), I was trolling the website that lists available internal jobs. I do this in part because I was once told by a wise person that "depression is a lack of options", and it's always good to know there are options out there. But, much to my surprise, one of these jobs stood out to me, all but got up and sang to me. After a few days of not-very-seriously considering it, then going through an agonizing but brief process of internal exploration and vetting with my wife, I applied. Bring on the dogs!

Now, in order to really understand the irrationality of this anxiety, you have to grok a few things: I probably won't get this job (I am both under- and overqualified); though I think it would be a good job to have, I am not so excited about it that I will be devastated if I am not hired; I will continue to have my current job if I don't get it; if this job is offered to me, I can say no to it without any negative consequences; this would be a parallel shift within the same organization and I would see no interruption in pay, benefits, or pretty much anything else. In other words, there really is nothing to worry about.

Tell that to the dogs.

When I spoke with my spiritual teacher, Heather Martin, the other day, one of the things she encouraged me to do is recognize how quickly things change, that what I call "anxiety" is a rapidly shifting kaleidoscope of feelings, images, fears, concerns, vulnerabilities, and reactivity. It is neither constant nor any one thing. She also encouraged me to see that it is not personal, no matter how personal it feels. The image of the dogs helps here, too—they see me as a threat, impersonally. I could be a bear, a wolf, a dinosaur, or a fly, and they would respond the same way. It is also helpful for me to see how the sharp uptick in awareness that comes with the heightened state of anxiety is often ecstatic. My senses are honed and on high alert (a side-effect of the awareness-of-predators system installed by my ancient forebears, no doubt) and I am feeling, seeing, hearing, tasting, and smelling more acutely and it is glorious, in its own unnerving way. One more thing: meditation is very, very helpful because it helps me realize that there is absolutely nothing I can or should do about these feelings. The only thing to do is to allow them to be, to arise and pass away, which all things do, given the chance. 

But I have made myself vulnerable, naked before the dogs, as it were. After 13 years in the same job, I have exposed myself to the scrutiny of strangers. I had to inform my current bosses I was considering a new job, with all the silent recrimination and head-shaking encouragement that comes with that. I'm also worried that they will be relieved I am going, and to a certain extent they probably will be. I can be a pain in the ass sometimes, but more to the point, there is a new regime at the clinic and I am the only old-guard nurse there. I really do think I am standing in the way of the new nurse manager making the clinic over in her own image. Just because I think this will be a mistake is pretty much irrelevant, just an opinion. She is in that position and has a right to do whatever she wishes; I keep resisting her from the stance of someone who has been there longer than just about anyone else (including her). This is not constructive. So leaving might just be the best thing for everyone.

Yeah, well, the dogs didn't get the memo.

I'll keep you posted.

*******************

Went to the farmers market yesterday:

What the hell are these? I forgot to look.

(By the way, I titled this post as I did because I have written on this topic before [here it is, if you want to see]).

Hello, it's me

It came as something of a shock to have it pointed out to me that much of what runs my life is a matter of choices I have made (and am making) rather than these being circumstances dictated by others. I can't blame them if they are not the ones making those choices. Damn. It reminds me of the old Buddhist story of the monk who set his bag down in dog shit and then wandered the world looking for a place that didn't smell so bad. If it is me that is causing my life to stink, it is also only me that can clean it up.

It also came as a shock that this realization came as a shock. I know this stuff, intellectually I understand all of it. Of course I am responsible for my own choices. I am a grown-up. I am a mature man. I am a healthcare professional. I am well into middle age. I have successfully raised a son and sent him out into the world.

Yeah, good luck with all that.

Here is another shock: it came as an enormous relief when I finally understood at a profound level that I am the only one I can "blame" for most of my suffering, because if it's my stuff then there is something I can do about it. If it's my boss's stuff, if it's my mother's, if it's yours, I can't do a damn thing about it except bitch. I can blame you and resent you and wish you were dead, but none of that is real action.

I still somehow believe that the more I do, the better person I am. I have no evidence for this assumption, but there it is. I live my life inside a to-do list and the more I check off, the more worthwhile my existence. Once again, I don't believe this in my head, but in my heart it's quite clear that I do. It is a belief inculcated in me in childhood. Because it is impossible to complete everything, I will never be perfect. And only perfection will make me a good boy, worthy of love. Pathetic, eh? As much as I would love to make fun of those feelings, the fact is that I have been running around for 57 years (or so; I have to assume it didn't start until I was 5 or something) acting on them.

Owl in the tree

So, what in the world does one do about all this? Well, I think what the counselor is counseling is that I stop. I mean, just cut it out. Live within choices, not compulsions. I do, you know, I really do. My life often feels like I am going from one obligation to another to another. Even the right amount of sleep and the books I read are dictated to some degree by that feeling. How screwed up is that?

Well, you know, fuck it. I'm not going to do that anymore. I know, I know, it's not that easy; I would feel unmoored without any kind of list to guide me, but I need to get out and have some fun, for God sakes. When did the round of my life become so grimly centered on duty?

So, I'm working on it. I still don't know what to do about my job; it has just changed so much that it's ceased being fun. But I can't blame anyone else if I stay there, either. I have options and it is merely fear that holds me back. The fear is that this is actually also about me, which means that, since I will still be there, my new job might just suck, too. But there might be only one way to figure that out.

Ah, well. There is no need for drastic changes. For one thing, there have been enough drastic changes in my life for the moment: my son and his wife left this morning to move across the country and my friend Debbi (who has been dying for some time) is on the downhill slope. But I will take responsibility for my happiness. I thought I had been, but I was wrong. The future begins today.

Wotan

August 14, 2013

Let me make a recommendation: until you have seen it for yourself, don't let anyone tell you what Wagner's Ring Cycle is about. We think we know something about Wagner (he was a bit of an asshole, the Nazi's loved him) and about the Ring (looooooong, weird story, women on flying horses, they played that cool song from the helicopters in "Apocalypse Now"), but for years I have been told that the Ring packed an emotional punch that could not be appreciated without first-hand experience. Now I am beginning to understand what was meant. So, you might still not want to sit through it, but don't let anyone tell you it's boring or overbearing or dark. It's none of these.

I am in the middle of the four-opera cycle. I took the whole week off work to make this feasible. On Tuesday I saw "Die Walküre" (that's the one with the flying women--well, goddesses, technically) and, hoo boy, it was not what I expected at all. I even read the story and the entire libretto before plunging into the operas. This did not help much. It is (as I probably should have known) the music that communicates with the soul and sends the deep currents of feeling into the heart. What I think most of us have not appreciated about Wagner is that the overriding theme of all his work is the redeeming power of love. And, as Wagner well knew, while love is often delightful, it can sometimes be very, very painful.

Wotan

"Die Walküre" is, above all, about the love of a father for his children. Who knew? Wotan is a god and made up all the rules to please himself but, as he sings at one point, "I am caught in my own trap". It turns out that if one has any integrity at all (and he has plenty), the rules must apply to all beings, including the god who made them. Even when it means abandoning his two most beloved children to the fates they have chosen.

Every now and then someone will ask me what it's like having a child and I am fond of replying, "Oh, don't worry about it, it's just like having meat hooks in your heart. Every time your child has the slightest misfortune--tug!--it feels as if your heart is being pulled from your chest. And if you are the cause of that misfortune in any way--tug! tug! tug!--you feel as if you will never heal again." (You do, though). So, I understand, to a certain extent, what Wotan feels when he must consign one of his children to death and the other to exile.

In another very important way I can empathize with Wotan. Which of us has not wanted to put a ring of fire around our children? How else can we protect them from the harms and tragedies of everyday life? (Speaking of which, there was an excellent article in the New York Times of August 4 about the trauma of being alive). But unless you are a god (you're not, trust me on this), the ring of fire will not work. It will, in fact, most likely be seen by your children as the problem rather than protection. And even if you are a god, the outcome may not be what you hope for, in fact, most likely will not be. Wouldn't, after all, Brünnhilde have been better off with a common mortal for a husband rather than a hero? But I can tell you from personal experience that the urge to shield our children from all harm is something that never leaves us.

**************************************************************

August 17, 2013

Tonight is the last of the four operas, "Götterdämmerung", which is about as long as it's name. (In fact, some wag was wearing a shirt the other day which transformed the title into "Göttdamnitslong". Funny). This last opera in the series is also the longest, a whopping 5-1/2 hours (including two 30 minute intermissions). What amazes me most, I think, is that 2900 people (the hall's capacity) fill the place. Seattle Opera does three full cycles, meaning that 8700 people voluntarily sit through 17-1/2 hours of Wagner (which calculates out to 152,250 total Wagner hours, in case you were wondering. You weren't? Oh, well). This is an event, and many people do it every four years, or more often if they go elsewhere to see a Ring. This is astonishing to me. And, of course, that's only the numbers for the Seattle production. In other places, most notably Beyreuth, it is performed nearly every year for much larger audiences (about 58,000 per season), and there are dozens of places around the world where it is staged.

I have enjoyed opera for four or five years. I have been told that The Ring is the ultimate opera-going experience and one cannot call oneself a true opera buff until it is checked off the list. Before going, I might have said, "until it is endured", but I kept an open mind about it.

And now, of course, I understand what was meant. Wagner treats every theme of grand drama and nearly every aspect of a human life in these operas. A bold statement, I know, but it appears to be true, or nearly so. And I have to believe that I have only scratched the surface. There is more scholarly (and not so scholarly) writing on this cycle of operas than (I would bet) all other operas combined.

************************************************************

August 18, 2013

Well, it didn't feel 5-1/2 hours long.

So, now I have experienced the whole thing. Is it all that? Actually, yes, it is. I have concluded over many years of considering works of art that, for the most part, they concern redemption or the lack of it. Think of "Romeo and Juliet"; the world of Verona is entirely out of balance and only through the sacrifice of the title characters is order restored to the world. Redemption is achieved. Of course, Shakespeare followed the story arcs that were considered classically mandated (though he played fast and loose with many other conventions), so all of his plays follow this basic formula. In the tragedies the redemption takes the form of death, whereas in the comedies it is usually reunion and the clearing up of misunderstandings. In the romances the form redemption takes is generally the restoration of balance through a shift in power or the contravention of authority. (If you want to get into a rousing discussion of all this, raise with a Shakespearean scholar the lack of redemption, which is to say, complete resolution, at the end of "The Merchant of Venice" and what that might mean). 

In the Ring cycle, Wagner has given us redemption writ large. Yes, yes, it's all about Norse gods and outsized heroes, but that's just the story. What it's really about is the fact that life is full of opportunities to make good and bad choices and all of us fall on the latter side at least as often as we do on the former. And what do we do about that? Wagner would argue, I think, that there is a universal right and a universal wrong and to restore the world to order, one must atone in direct proportion to the deviation from the Good. For you and me, that usually doesn't mean much: say you're sorry, pay back the money, change your behavior. But if you are a god and have entirely disrupted the balance of nature, utter destruction of all you love is the only course. Harsh toke.

I won't go further, at least not now. I don't want to risk being overbearing with my own passions. But if someone asks you if you want to spend 17-1/2 hours at the opera some day, maybe you will consider the possibility. It might just change your life.

MIA

I am acutely aware of how long it has been since I posted to my blog. Life got amazingly busy in the interim and I have been scrabbling just to get the day-to-day things done. I know there isn't anyone out there who hangs on my every word and goes into deep depression if I do not post, but I feel a certain obligation—if only an internally sourced obligation—to post here often, if not weekly, and of late I have not been able to do that. I've been feeling the lack.

What does this blog thing do for me, anyway? I understand the contempt sometimes expressed in popular culture toward the fact that everybody and his hamster has a blog these days. A quick Google search tells me there are over 60 million blogs in the world. We must be finding something worth writing about and, one would hope, worth reading about. But the question is, why do I do it?

This began as a blog about weight loss from a Buddhist perspective or, more accurately, how my relationship to food is warped and addictive and the Dharma helps me come to terms with that without guilt or remorse, but with understanding and love. Which, I hoped, would also lead to weight loss. Which it has. But the blog has transformed over the years into something much more generic but at the same time truer to my heart. Yes, I needed (and need) to lose weight, but that is only a meager slice of who I am, and it began to feel as if I was shortchanging both you and (I flatter myself) those who read this blog to give only that small part of me. And, truthfully, there is only so much one can say about the subject, right? "The Buddha says to accept myself as I am but to recognize where I am stuck and work, gently, to move beyond my stuckness. Part of that is my relationship to food. I am working on it." That's pretty much the gist of it.

So I moved on to being more general and writing more generally about me, who I am, what drives me, my joys and dreams and goals and sadnesses and challenges and terrors. But why should you care? Am I only being egotistical to think that I am important enough (or articulate or clever enough) to make it worthwhile?

Truthfully, I don't think that's the point at all. I believe with all my heart that we crave connection to one another. In our modern era we find less and less opportunity for connection. Though I distrust the kneejerk reaction to modern technology that decries every new gadget as inherently bad for interpersonal relations, I do recognize that most of us spend an inordinate amount of time inwardly focused, which includes whatever device we might be peering into during most of our waking hours. I laugh every time I go to the lunch room at work and, though a crowd is gathered, each of us is in the world of an iPhone or a tablet, ignoring everyone else in the room. Of course, part of this is that our employer does not allow us to use our devices during the work day, so lunch is the only time we have to check our texts and emails. Still, it wasn't that many years ago that our friends and family would just have to wait until evening or even a day or two to hear from us. Instead, the opportunity for connection with our co-workers is lost. Even when we do engage in conversation, if the Android calls, we feel we must check to see what it wants.

So this blog is, for me, a way of reaching out and being in touch with others. I realize this is somewhat antithetical, since it is almost entirely a one-way communication and comes to you electronically. Still, I hope it is clear that what I write here comes from my heart, that my soul is in it, that I am sharing with you as deeply as I can, always. I promise to do better about writing weekly, or nearly so. If not for you, then for me. Thank you for continuing to read.

P.S. Part of what has been keeping me so busy is a photography class. This won't become a photog blog, I swear, but I did want to point out that all of the pics in this post are mine (just so you know I haven't been out there wasting my time!). I feel more confident with my camera now and also intimidated by what I do not know and that of which I am not yet capable. I will continue to post photos from time to time but will try not to be obnoxious about it.