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.