"So this guy, he tells me he's a skinhead. And I say bullshit. Look at you, tipping a black girl all night, getting a couch dance from her -- you ain't no skinhead, I tell him. He's just talking shit. I'm not a racist," she adds suddenly. "But you go saying you're a skinhead? You know?"

Race comes up often, with Dionna. Tells me how her daughter came home saying nigger and... "and all kinds of words that I don't even say and I asked her 'where'd you get that? Who taught you to talk like that?' and she said 'Daddy.' I told her, don't you talk like that. Look, I don't believe in mixing races, right? But I'm telling you, honey, I'd rather see you married to a black man who treats you right than to a white man who hits you and shit, understand?"

A man appears at her shoulder, very handsome, high-cheekboned, dressed in a wide-shouldered olive suit. Dionna lights up. She looks suddenly girlish, delighted. They chat a little. Dionna introduces me. When he goes, she leans forward to me, and says in a low voice. "We were together for a little while. But he's too pretty for me. I don't want a man who's prettier than me, that's no good. But he took me out, got me a manicure, a pedicure? I'd never got one of those. And then he took me out to this like four-star restaurant." She sighs.

Later, giving me a couch dance, she spies him still in the club, through the little window, and she pauses reflectively, "he's got a really big dick, but he doesn't know what to do with it."

She was thirty, she says, before she came, using a vibrator. "I was like, wow!"

"So *that's* what all the fuss's about." I offer.

"Yeah, exactly. And I never came with a man, before my husband. Girls, yeah. The first one was this little eighteen-year old girl. I had rug burns, man, she did me that good. But no men, not till my husband. He's not fully loaded, you know, but he knows what to do with it." She rattles off a complicated little rhyme. I miss most of it, but it's clearly along the lines of "it ain't the meat, it's the motion"

Quiet. Can't last long: Dionna doesn't do silence. I say "you're really beautiful, you know." A sudden vulnerable glance, evaluating me, wondering if I'm making fun of her. She decides I'm not. "I'm really, I've got no self-esteem. For a long time, when Cassidy was here? I wouldn't let him come in. Finally he comes in when she's here, and I say, 'isn't she hot?' and he says no. Can you believe that? I didn't believe him." Dionna laughs merrily. "Like, we go to the video store and look at videos, and I turn it over to see if there's any nudity. There is, we don't rent it. I don't want him seeing those other women. I didn't used to be like that, you know? But then I had this boyfriend and he used to tell me all the time all the stuff he'd like different about me. And it got so the only times we ever made it were looking at porn or right after he'd come back from the titty bars."

In I Capture the Castle there's a young man who keeps leaving love-poems for the narrator, which he's copied out of books (Herrick mostly, I think) but pretends are his own. It's endearing in the book, so I guess I can hope my new habit of thieving from French poets will be too. (By the way, did anyone see the movie of I Capture the Castle? Was it any good? It's hard for me to picture translating that wonderful narrative voice to film. Seems like it would go flat, like those disastrous attempts to make TV episodes out of Wodehouse stories.)


Words do not Lie

--pour la tigresse du soleil, volé á Paul Eluard

Wasps flowering green;
The dawn threads around its throat
A necklace of windows;
Wings cover the leaves.

You have all the sunlit joys --
All the sun upon the earth,
Upon the roads of your beauty.

The earth is blue as an orange.
The inroads of your beauty
Are exact; never an error;
If your friends have heard lies from the earth,
Then believe me, they have not listened closely.
Words do not lie.

After (loosely) Marceline Desbordes-Valmore

I stumbled on the cape, and the flowers I had gathered
Spilled, and were swept away by the wind.

The waves went red with roses.

My hands are empty. But lift my fingers to your face;
They hold still the smell of roses and the sea.

There's an important piece of context missing here, I bet. Lamas in the Tibetan tradition are trained by doing a three-year cloistered retreat, during which they practice pretty much all the time. A "spiritual boot camp," Michael's called it. (He's also said that if he had to give up any three years of his life, his years in retreat would be the last three he'd choose.)

So maybe "building a retreat center" gives a misleading impression. A closer description of what we're trying to do might be "founding a seminary." I wrote to a friend yesterday about this:

The long retreat is so central to how we train the next generation of teachers -- it's critical to the survival of the Kagyu lineage in America. We're not talking luxury, here. We're really talking about whether our kids will even have the option to practice.... what we have in my sangha is a fragile imported plant trying to put down
roots. Its contemplative traditions seem to me very rare, and very precious. And they've been driven off their native ground -- they could very easily disappear, in a generation or two.

Here's a piece of an email lama Michael sent to me after I sent him a long bitchy letter detailing all the objections I laid out in my last post, and added that I felt that saying all that in public would be heresy --

Having said all the above, I also don't have any sense at all that what you're saying is heresy... It seems nearly axiomatic to me at this point that humans really do hate diversity of all kinds. Perhaps it's a reminder of impermanence and the possibility that things are not as they seem. Therefore, it shouldn't come as a surprise that there are individuals who can't help themselves even in the context of working in the Dharma; they will shun diversity of all kinds.

Here's a deal for you. Voice your position (and it doesn't have to be a fixed position) as stated above whenever the spirit moves you. When you're done, tell people that I encouraged you to say those things because I, as Resident Lama, was afraid to say them myself. I'd support you in that. The act of solidifying our opinions and shunning diverse views (without even the benefit of consideration sometimes), is a much deeper level of confusion than that which arises from embracing diversity. That's my solid opinion.

Knowing Michael, I'm sure he meant this quite literally. Whatever impulses toward conformity there may be at KCC, they certainly don't emanate from the top.

The trouble, you see, is that I don't know what's what. Or maybe it's that I don't want to know what's what.

There's a piece of just plain dumb anti-clericalism. I am Presbyterian by culture, Atheist by upbringing, Puritan by temperament. So when my Sangha gets serious about fundraising for a retreat center -- a place where we can raise our own lamas -- I get all twitchy. It's so -- so -- Catholic, you know? We'll be importing a church hierarchy (the Presbyterian shudders), formalizing a leap of faith (the Atheist recoils), and depending on external forms to work internal changes (the Puritan winces.)

Then there's the piece of pure jealousy. Goodbye to being in the inner circle. Already the people who go annually to India to do retreat with the lineage-in-exile have gradually superseded me and Martha as core members of the Sangha. Or so it seems to Martha. I can't tell. But when half my spiritual community disappears for November, and comes back wearing their new blessing cords and sharing a history I'm not part of, I feel a little woebegone. And now some of them will disappear for three years into a cloistered retreat. How wide a gulf of unshared experience will that open between us?

Then there's the Zen piece. Doing anything special is suspect, one more form of entertainment. All this business about raising money and buying land and building buildings is just one more way of not practicing. Of not facing up to the horrors of the ordinary. Of being unable to face the blank wall and be alone with our minds. (Calling this Zen, my Zen readers no doubt will recognize, has little or nothing to do with Zen, which has a very strong retreat tradition itself, and everything to do with the way Tibetan practitioners stereotype Zen practice as stern, no-nonsense, and iconoclastic.)

Then there's what I think of as the American pragmatic "good-works" tradition. What you do is what you are. Actions speak louder than words. Who cares about sitting in a box thinking generating perfect generosity? Compassion is only real if it manifests in the world. One person who shares his sandwich with a hungry dog is worth all the pious mala-twiddlers in the world.

Now, I have perfectly sufficient -- in most cases, slam-dunk -- intellectual answers to all these. They change my mind, but they don't succeed so well in turning my heart.

Ironic, maybe, that my volunteer work for the sangha has largely been for this project (I keep up a database for it), which I've never been able to raise enthusiasm for. We've bought the land -- beautiful land in Central Washington. We've already put work into it -- my daughter planted scores of trees; my wife took down old barb-wire fencing, I lugged slash to burn-piles -- and we were very minor workers, every once in a while. Other people have poured their lives into this work.

For one evening, early last week, I was on a fund-raising strategy committee. I bailed in panic. And I keep pushing to understand why. It's plain to me that I keep inventing reasons why I shouldn't support this project, or this committee, and that they are remarkably stupid reasons. What's the real resistance here? Is it just the dread of having my free time absorbed? Of having time commitments to the Dharma and to Martha finally come openly into conflict? Or am I simply afraid that at some point I'll have to ask for something, actually call somebody on the phone and ask them for money? (At the mere thought that, my heart shrivels.)

One thing is plain: there's a failure of courage in this, somewhere. I know this feeling intimately. It's the sensation of cowardice, the most horrible sensation I know.

So shaken as we are, so wan with care,
Find we a time for frighted peace to pant,
And breathe short-winded accents of new broils
To be commenced in strands afar remote.

I had last week off, so I seized the opportunity to have one long emotional and spiritual crisis. (One terrific advantage of identifying oneself as a religious person is that you get to call what anyone else would call a tantrum a spiritual crisis.)

Coming into calmer waters, I hope, but dead tired.

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.

Much love to you all.

The emptiness of self, I said, was not a difficult concept to grasp. But there's a big difference between understanding it conceptually and understanding it experientially, and understanding it experientially is what's transformative.

Which is why disciplined meditation is fundamental. Clinging to self is such an ingrained habit that loosening it requires an equally habitual experience of its insubstantiality. Sure, you hear of those people who get one kick in the head and go straight to enlightenment -- but if you look at those stories you'll see that they're usually about people who have spent a lot of their lives in disciplined meditation.

Somebody -- was it Kalu Rinpoche? -- once remarked that expecting a little haphazard meditation practice to loosen our clinging to self was like expecting to be able to free ourselves of wanting tobacco by practicing not smoking for fifteen or twenty minutes at a time, a couple times a week.

all night I have closed my hands
over a blind eye where desire
no longer smiles to me

Ye Emptynesse of Selfe

Incidentally, I hope you all know that "Ye" is an old spelling of "The" -- the letter which looks like a capital 'Y' there being actually a capital thorn, the letter which the Old English and Old Norse, among others, used to represent the "th" sound. ("Th" is an abomination introduced by Norman scribes who couldn't pronounce the Old English sound, and tried to write down something that would approximate it in their own alphabet.) It has nothing whatever to do with the word "ye" which means "you all."

So. The emptiness of self. Not a difficult concept to grasp, once the bogus difficulties have been cleared away.

First difficulty: you'll hear Buddhists speak of "the delusion of self." You may even hear them say "there is no self." And the fact that "self" is a reflexive pronoun in English results in what seems to be a very mysterious (or maybe just very stupid) contention: that people don't exist, that you and I aren't here. We're not here, we just think we are. And the obvious rejoinder to that is "well, who is it then, who thinks we're here?"

Substitute the word "soul" for "self" and things begin to clear up. What we mean is that there is no permanent, immutable essence at the core of a person's being -- divinely made or otherwise. There is no unchangeable Daleness about me. Just as my body appears to be a separate static object, when it is actually a dynamic, constantly changing system that can't survive even for five minutes without drawing on other systems outside of itself, so also we take our minds, our personalities, to be independent, permanent things. And so seriously do we take these things that we spend the bulk of our time anxiously protecting them, worrying about them, criticizing them, looking for their validation, dreading their exposure as inadequate. We take them very seriously indeed.

But they're not there. Not as things. Whole contemplative traditions are devoted to systematically searching for this thing, this essence, this unique identity we supposedly have. Traditions in which you try to follow your thoughts backward to their source. What you find is that, look as you may, they have no source -- no source but other thoughts. One thought jostling after another is all there is in that mind. There may be plenty that's repetitive, but there is certainly nothing that's permanent.

Not only is there no permanent core "underneath" or "behind" these thoughts. They also are not independent. Other people's thoughts are floating in among them all the time. Bits of things we read, conversations with other people, glances from strangers are all mixed up in there. Our thoughts are porous, soluble. Thoughts and images that take their proximate origin from Tonio, from T.S. Eliot, from Buddha Shakyamuni are all floating around in my mind. Any sense in which they're mine is a very loose one. They happen to have shown up in the "same" (don't even start) stream of thoughts that sometimes appear to precipitate motor responses in this particular animal. It's all quite chaotic and quite open, quite permeable.

Second bogus difficulty: the word "emptiness." I suppose it may have been the least misleading of the possible translations for Shunyata, but in that case maybe the word should have been left untranslated, and imported wholesale into English. I don't know any Sanskrit, but the Tibetan, tong pa nyi, might also be translated as "openness" or "transparency." It's the same word that's used to describe the openness of a glade in a forest, or the transparency of a pool of water. It indicates spaciousness or clarity. English "emptiness" has completely negative emotional connotations -- an "empty feeling" is certainly nothing like an "open feeling."

Form is emptiness and emptiness is form. So the standard English translation of the Heart Sutra has it. But one might also say Matter is open and openness is matter. Or Stuff is clear and clarity is stuff. That fact that the self is empty is not a cause for lamentation. It's cause for the deepest, gladdest celebration. Because if it were not empty, we would be locked into our suffering forever.

Deep breath. All better. Now just the tiredness Susurra speaks of. But it's not a difficult empty tiredness for me. Back in the cradle of the right world.

Love to you all, "you who think you are travelling."

An old grief, an old rage.

But I hadn't been here for a long time. The poison of anger sitting in my belly, moving slowly through my veins. So angry that I can't think straight. I just have to stop. If I let my mind off the leash it starts building up elaborate lies to try to justify the anger. Stupid lies, obvious falsehoods.

So I just wait. Maybe I'll be able to think eventually. Because I do need to think. It's not possible, I think, to get this angry without having gotten something wrong.

It's like being ill. Exactly like being ill. Unable to enjoy anything, unable to do anything important. Just having to wait, because I know that any exertion of discursive mind is likely to make it worse, and that anything I undertake I will do wrong. Shantideva says -- wait.

So. I think of everyone suffering from anger right now, and wish that I could take on all that suffering, take it off of them and take it on myself. (What the hell. How can it get worse?)

I practice. Every time I notice the constriction, the congestion of anger, I try to release it. Open my hands. Breathe. Nothing holds still in the mind unless I hold it still. If I just wait, and release the clutch when I become aware of it, it will change. It has to.

Visualization Blues

One odd limitation in my visualizations: I don't seem to be able to work the dimmer switch. Lately my refuge tree, towards the edges, is almost black: dark, dark leaves flutter against the sky. And while sometimes Vajradhara is a brilliant, radiant dark blue, as he's supposed to be (and yes, that's a hard one to pull off in the first place) sometimes he goes a dim navy blue and sometimes he lightens to a cheery but not properly awe-inspiring sky blue. All this, so far as I can tell, completely unsteerable by my will. I can be willing Vajradhara to go a darker blue with all the concentration I can muster, and there he'll sit, untroubled -- pure sky blue.

I don't know if this is a good thing or a bad thing, but since it doesn't seem to be under my control at all, it just has to be whatever it is, I guess. Slightly unnerving.

A Confession of Literary Sins

Confession #1

Recently in a comment on Via Negativa Dave remarked upon the tinny metronome of Victorian verse. I can't pretend not to know what he means, but I have to confess that I love that tinny metronome. Sitting in my cafe this morning, vainly wishing my friend would unexpectedly show for breakfast, I had Tennyson's Mariana running through my head for nearly an hour --

All day within the dreamy house,
The doors upon their hinges creaked;
The blue fly sung i' the pane; the mouse
Behind the mouldering wainscot shrieked,
Or from the crevice peer'd about.
Old faces glimmered through the doors,
Old footsteps trod the upper floors,
Old voices called her from without.
She only said, "My life is dreary,
He cometh not," she said;
She said, "I am aweary, aweary,
I would that I were dead!"

It's cast in a woman's voice, of course, because male poets are generally too bashful or too macho to speak about the feelings of abandonment in their own voices. Give them a woman's voice though, and they descend to the utmost maudlin, down to Hardy's line, which not even I can take seriously:

O woe is me, O woe is me, O woe is me, O misery!

The Victorians make a gorgeous fat target. Probably no one is easier or more fun to parody than Tennyson. "Mariana" and "The Charge of the Light Brigade" and "The Lady of Shalott" must have inspired thousands of parodies. But they also give a shape to my own maudlin moments. I'm glad I had Tennyson's murmur in my head this morning. Tennyson himself found the Charge of the Light Brigade embarassing, but whenever he contemplated withdrawing it from his collected poems, he remembered the survivors of that charge who had written him and thanked him for the poem. It belonged to them, he said, not to him.

Whereyn the Bloggiste discourseth upon the Pytching of Base Bals and the Holdynge of Views, and waxeth intolerably Didactick

A young pitcher from the backwoods was struggling with his game. His coach, Nick Copernicus, soon discovered that the youth was so ignorant as to believe that the Earth held still, while being circled by the Sun.

"There's your problem, son," said Nick. "You're trying the throw the ball, and you don't know nothin' about how things really are! It's the Sun that holds still, kid! The Earth is moving!"

So Nick put him through a rigorous course of mental training. Every time he went to pitch, he was to visualize the Sun standing still, not moving, and estimate exactly how fast, and in what direction, the Earth was travelling at that moment. ("'Cause that's the way things really are, kid!") His own pitching needed to take these motions into account: how was he going to get the ball over the plate if he didn't realize that it was moving, moving, in fact, some sixty thousand miles per hour?

The pitcher worked hard at this. His game got worse. He was finally pulled when he walked four batters straight. "You're just not gettin' the hang of how things really move, kid," said Nick.

That season was so abysmal for the team that Copernicus was sacked, and in desperation the owner brought back their former coach, Claude "the Greek" Ptolemaeus.

The kid told Ptolemaeus what he'd been trying to do.

"Look, kid," said the Greek. "Put all that crap outta your head. You get up on that mound, I want you to think that it's been standing still forever. I want you to think that home plate's never moved a inch, okay? Just throw the goddamn ball over the plate. The ball's the only thing that moves. Got it?"

The next season was a good one, and the young pitcher got his game back and did fine. But he still worried. "I mean, the Earth really does go around the Sun, right? We're not standing still, the Sun's standing still."

"Maybe so, kid. I doan' know. Now they got guys saying even the Sun moves around. What I do know, though, is that the pitcher's mound ain't the place to think about it!"

Lama Michael often talks about "holding a view."

"We tend to think," he says, "that there are only two things you can do with an idea like reincarnation -- believe it or not believe it. But there are other things you can do with it. You can just try it on, try it on like a pair of glasses, and see what the world looks like. See what holding that view does."

See what the world looks like with no strangers in it. The person taking your pizza order is someone you've been hopelessly in love with, someone you've put to death for heresy, someone who's changed your diapers and lovingly cared for you. They've been your favorite dog, your husband, and the deer you killed for food. There are no strangers. There's no such thing as a one-off, disposable relationship. No such thing as a loving or hateful act that doesn't have consequences -- maybe tomorrow, maybe ten thousand years from now. See what it does to your perceptions when you seriously view a serial killer as someone who has been, in the past, your cherished son. Maybe you still execute him -- but not gladly, with your heart full of contempt and righteous anger.

Seriously holding a different view has another effect. It makes you aware of what holding your former view did. What does holding "the bounded view" -- as Michael calls it -- the view that our consciousness comes into being as our brain develops, remains hermetically sealed up in our brain, and then totally disappears when the brain stops getting oxygen -- what does that do to our relationships with people, to our relationship with the natural world, to our sense of time and scale?

It's a commonplace of modern thought that conceptual frameworks are provisional, to be kept so long as they work, and abandoned when they do not. Lots of people say they subscribe to that point of view. But few are willing really to experiment with changing frameworks, even for five minutes, let alone a week or a month. Really they're clinging to those frameworks grimly, desperately, and they're unwilling to loosen their hold on them for even a second. And that's another thing that trying to hold a different view teaches us. We can wonder, as we look at the resistance, just why is it that I'm clinging so very tightly to this? What am I afraid of? What do I think will happen if I let go? And what really does happen when I let go?

If our dearest wish is to be correct about the relationship of the body and mind, then it makes sense, I guess, to hang on grimly to our best guess about it. If that's what we take ourselves to be doing with our life. But if what we want to do is to live a fruitful life, lessening our own suffering and others', and making meaningful connections with people, and expanding our sense of the possibilities of human life, then it makes more sense to experiment. Just give it a go. Imagine for a minute that home plate is holding perfectly still, and throw a few pitches.

Of course, the real reason for not writing more than 500 words at a time is that I can't keep my mind on anything that long. Well, one thing, maybe. Speaking of which, here is Mr Shelley again:

The fountains mingle with the river,
And the rivers with the ocean;
The winds of heaven mix forever
With a sweet emotion;
Nothing in the world is single;
All things by a law divine
In another's being mingle--
Why not I with thine?

See the mountains kiss high heaven,
And the waves clasp one another;
No sister flower could be forgiven
If it disdained its brother;
And the sunlight clasps the earth,
And the moonbeams kiss the sea;--
What is all this sweet work worth,
If thou kiss not me?

And then, (same topic, but moving in the opposite direction) I read "The Leaden Echo and the Golden Echo" (Gerard Manley Hopkins) for the first time today, and I wish I had read it earlier, since it sums up everything of any value that I've learned in the past thirty years. But I suppose that only means that if I'd read it thirty years ago I would have smugly dismissed it.

It begins:

HOW to kéep—is there ány any, is there none such, nowhere known some, bow or brooch or braid or brace, láce, latch or catch or key to keep
Back beauty, keep it, beauty, beauty, beauty, … from vanishing away?

In whyche the Bloggiste sheweth forth three Hesytatyons

A couple people have asked me what I mean when I say I don't particularly believe in reincarnation. I've been hesitating to explain it, for several reasons. One is that my opinions are somewhat heterodox, and I do not have any desire to innovate, or challenge doctrine: I hold the opinions I do because they allow me to go on practicing, not because I think they're better than received Buddhist opinion. Coming from a devoutly athiest background, I find the notion of an afterlife difficult to digest, and I've cobbled together a way of coping with that, a provisional way of making sense of the teachings on reincarnation. This has nothing to do with the intrinsic probability of reincarnation, and everything to do with making accomodations for the prejudices of my upbringing. I would never try to argue anyone out of a belief in reincarnation. I just offer this to those who are interested in Buddhism but who, like me, have long believed that consciousness grows slowly in an infant as "an emergent property of the brain" and stops abruptly at death.

My second hesitation is a local and personal one. My ideas about this have been deeply influenced by Michael's, and this creates two contending (but not mutually exclusive) difficulties -- either that i might appear to be claiming Michael's thoughts as my own, strutting in borrowed feathers, or that I might appear to be foisting my own ideas and heterodoxy on Michael. Both possibilities distress me, thought I can't imagine Michael would care a bean about either one.

I hesitate, third, because whenever I try to explain it, I find I have to explain other things first -- it's part of a network of interlocked ideas -- and I don't think I can roll it out properly in a single blog entry. Other Buddhist ideas, or Michael-isms (I'm not always very good at telling the difference) are involved. And yet a blog entry should be short. I know I tend to drift away after five hundred words or so, and don't see why my readers would be any different.

Heere endeth the manuscrypte, in seemynge shortliche ybrooken off. Beliche for to bee resumyd att a layter time

Patrul Rinpoche at some point in Words of my Perfect Teacher (which I just finished this morning) describes the horror of being in the womb, the dark, the slime, the suffocation, the stink of it -- and then the culminating torture of being wrung through the birth canal, and the sudden intolerable glare and noise and confusion of birth. A terrible ordeal, from start to finish.

I've read these descriptions before in Buddhist literature. Such a different fantasy than the typical modern Western one, of floating serenely in the comforting amniotic sea, and then surfacing blissfully into a higher consciousness at birth. So ingrained is this fantasy that the Tibetan fantasy comes as a shock, even an obscenity, to a Western mind. It's so different. So obviously wrong.

And our birth fantasy is echoed and supported by our Eden myth, of course. That lovely, rather unintelligent song of Carly Simon's, a few years ago, that plaintively reiterates "we are all born / innocent" -- is just restating thousands of years of Judaeo-Christian-Muslim conviction. The human race started pure. Each person started pure. Everything that's gone wrong with the human race is contained within historical human time, and everything that's gone wrong with each individual person is contained within his or her lifetime.

And so you get the characteristic Western extremism. If human society went wrong inside of historical time, it can also be put right in historical time. Things went to hell only a few thousand years ago, so it's only optimistic -- not demented -- to think a few generations could serve to put things right again. Likewise the Judaeo-Christian-Muslim insistence on having a single life to work out one's salvation, to put things right with God. It all went wrong in this lifetime, and it all has to be put right in this lifetime. The Dalai Lama, when he visited Merton's monastery, was most struck by the urgency there, the desperate seriousness of people who know they have only this life, only this one chance, to repair the damage of their lives and re-establish a relationship with God that they themselves, in this very lifetime, have wrecked.

The myth of Eden has transferred smoothly to secular humanists and neo-pagans; without missing a beat, they too have adopted original innocence and purity -- of humanity and of human individuals -- as articles of faith. (Weirdly they try to characterize this as a rebellion against the J-C-M faiths, when in fact it's a direct inheritance from them; I've never quite understood this).

A standard prayer in my tradition of Buddhism asks to be released from "the ocean of suffering -- the stormy waves of birth, old age, illness, and death." When I first met this foursome, the first seemed bizarrely out of place. It wasn't till I understood two critical things -- one, that birth was thought of as a deeply painful trauma, and two, that it wasn't thought of as the beginning of our consciousness -- that I could make any sense of it.

But once I'd thoroughly understood those two things, I could look backward at my own unexamined assumption of original -- and recent -- innocence, and see how much it contributed to my own intolerance and fanaticism. The people who were ruining the innocent world were still walking around in it, unpunished! Innocent children were being warped and depraved before my very eyes! The desperation and urgency of my poltical convictions stemmed largely from this convicton of recent innocence -- which is purely fantasy. Nothing in my own memory of childhood suggests that I was innocent and unsuffering at any time in my past. Nothing in the historical or archeological record suggests that human beings used to be one happy un-neurotic family. (Those who get all dewy-eyed about the supposed reign of the Goddess would do well to note that evidence of the cult of the Goddess generally appears alongside evidence of human sacrifice.)

The Tibetan idea of what the experience of gestation and birth are like may well be all wrong. But it's founded on no less evidence than our idea. Maybe on more. Babies sure don't look or sound like they're having a lovely serene awakening when they're born. They look and sound anguished and terrified.

Direction

No conditioned good actions have a direction of their own,
So make vast prayers of aspiration for the benefit of beings.

Geshe Khampa Lungpa, quoted in Words of my Perfect Teacher

Training in Compassion

My waitress wandered over to refill my coffee. A slow morning. She glanced idly at the book I was reading -- Patrul Rinpoche, Words of my Perfect Teacher -- and wandered off again. So of course I looked at the text then, with new eyes -- the eyes I imagine (extremely inaccurately, I'm sure) to be those of a bored waitress in a Greek diner. The words that leapt out at me were about developing compassion. And I thought of what a strange concept that would have seemed to me, before I came to the Dharma. A concept that would have made no sense, carrying the assumptions I carried then.

In the first place, I was accustomed to thinking of my compassion as being a more-or-less permanent quality of my more-or-less permanent self, not as a skill that could be developed. Someone who has never radically changed their physical activity imagines that the shape of their body and its capacities are simply given, and they're shocked when a cast comes off revealing a dwindled arm, or when they find their legs hardening and changing shape in just a couple days after taking up running. In the same way, I thought of my compassion as simply given. I had never tried to change that quality of mind, so I thought it was just there, as the color of my eyes is just there. How would a person "develop" it? It seemed like undertaking to "develop" my eyes to be an intenser blue.

So that was the first hurdle. The next was, even supposing it could be developed -- why would anyone want to? I plumed myself on my compassion, as I imagine most people do. I was compassionate, I thought, at the right time, towards the right people, in the right degree. I didn't waste time feeling sorry for upper- and middle-class Americans who yammered and whined whenever their pipeline of luxury goods threatened to slow down a bit. I was sorry for the people who really deserved it, the working poor, the down-and-outers, the homeless, the people struggling in places like the Sudan or Rwanda in really nightmare circumstances. I gave money to people on the street (if they looked really miserable). I gave money to Save the Children, and Amnesty International, and so forth -- organizations that were helping people nobody else seemed to give a damn about. What was wrong with my compassion? It was other people who were deficient in compassion, not me.

Moreover -- the third hurdle -- my compassion was a burden to me. I suffered under it. I already had compassion for more people than I could ever help. What could possibly be the point of trying to increase it? I felt bad enough as it was.

This is already looking like a long blog entry, so lets just set hurdle #1 aside. Take my word for it, for the moment -- it is possible to train in compassion: there are simple, effective techniques for it that have been in use for centuries. Tong Len ("Taking and Sending") pre-eminently, but there are others. And just aspiring to be more compassionate has an immediate, significant effect.

Hurdle #2 I overcame by practicing. Once I got really working on it -- really trying to sensitize myself to the suffering of those around me -- I discovered that I was in fact deficient, terribly deficient, in compassion. (I discovered also that I had been conducting a thriving anti-compassion practice. "Don't feel sorry for those white landowners who were dispossessed: they deserved it. Don't feel sorry for Dick Cheney, having heart surgery: the sooner he dies the better off the world will be. Don't feel sorry for Tosi's son ranting about business taxes: he's an idiot and doesn't understand that the taxes benefit him more than they ding him." Etcetera: I could extend this list ad infinitum. I excluded a really huge range of people from my compassion. And I worked hard on excluding them.) I excluded everyone who "deserved it" or "brought it on themselves." Which included me, of course. None of my suffering was legitimate. I deserved it all. I had brought it all on myself. But of course, from the Buddhist point of view *all* suffering has been brought on ourselves: you can't exclude someone on that account.

Hurdle #3 I overcame partly by study, partly by practicing. It wasn't long before I realized that what Dharma texts meant by compassion was quite a bit different from what I usually meant by compassion. For one thing, they talked about it as a joyous experience, sometimes, which was wholly foreign (and pretty damn suspicious sounding) to me. "Feeling sorry for people," though it played a part, was a minor. The point wasn't to suffer along with people. The point was to accurately perceive their pain, and aspire to lessen it. "Feeling sorry for people" was where I had gotten tangled and stuck. Not only does feeling sorry for people feel bad, it also implied that I endorsed their suffering, that I accepted their understanding of it. So the man who's suffering because his wife is such a goddamn bitch -- I couldn't feel sorry for him without accepting that his wife is a goddamn bitch, and I happened to know that she was just a decent woman pushed past all endurance by his continual hostility. Feeling sorry for him, according to my old understanding, would be worse than mistaken -- it would be complicity in abuse.

Strange things happen when you stop trying to evaluate the legitimacy of people's suffering. Barriers come down. Motives that seemed clearly malicious or perverse suddenly come into focus as mistaken, sometimes even nobly mistaken. The amount of suffering I perceive in the world since taking on the project of developing compassion has grown enormously -- but the amount of evil I perceive has dropped even more precipitately. The world has become easier to live in, not harder, since I've begun working on opening myself more fully to its pain.

Tout comprendre, c'est tout pardonner -- "To understand all is to forgive all" -- gets it exactly backwards. It's by forgiving that we understand. We need to cultivate compassion so we can see more clearly. Without it we are blind.

Breakfast

Just yesterday the dawn light was blue, all blue, and it gleamed on the line of your brow, on the curve of your cheek, on the silver strands in your dark hair, and it made two tiny circles of brilliant blue light, Vega-light, Sirius-light, on your eyes, as you laughed. Then you stuck your tongue for a moment between your teeth. When you did suddenly a five-year-old girl looked out of your eyes, full of delight and wonder.

You sit by your Daddy in the cab of the pick-up truck, with your lunch pail on your lap, still and sleepy, and the warm air blows over your hands from the heater. Going hunting.

Your tongue diappears, and so does the five-year-old. The gleam and shadow shifts, and your eyes are looking into other countries, places I've never gone. I never watch you go without a tiny lift of terror. Will you come back? Why would you? (Watch the terror rise, and fall.) You come back, and your eyes are kindly, but full of news that can't be reported, histories that can't be translated. I watch you searching for a story that maybe I would be able to understand. Not easy. Maybe this?

We talk, and I watch your hands, hands that have driven pitons into cliff-walls, that have lifted teacups in Nepal, that I've watched flying over the keyboard of a laptop. Small hands. Hands that have seen some service. I don't reach for them. Not reaching for them is exhausting work.

And today the dawn light was blue, all blue, again. But it faded to the common gray of morning, and I was alone.

Visualization Practices

CB commented: To go back to one of Kurt's excellent points ("a repeat customer who asks much in the way of service"): porn is also marked out by the fact that it is a fucking waste of time.

That set me off thinking, in my usual contrary fashion, about what we might think about it if it weren't a waste of time. Suppose we just changed its name, and called it a spiritual practice. what kind of practice is it? What does it cultivate? It behooves me to know, since I've spent more time practicing it than I'm ever likely to spend in any other practice.

What it cultivates is not all negative. There is that extraordinary moment, the few seconds' wind-down after orgasm, which is a faint echo or parody of the dissolution phase of a visualization practice. The images that were so vivid and compelling fade away, transformed into simple pixels or glossy paper. If you have any introspective turn at all, you have to think, "what kind of thing is desire, that it can so involve me with a computer monitor or a magazine? And are any of my other desires really different, except in scale and accidental detail?

In this time of pornographic abundance, too, I can locate the exact images that most move me, and the strangeness of that specificity has a similar effect of turning the mind. Yes, this is the exact image I chased with such resource and determination when I was young and porn was scarce. Here it is, the image that has haunted my imagination . So... so what? Why this particular image? And then, too, in the searching I've sorted through millions (I'm afraid that number is probably accurate) of images that don't interest me in the least, but which clearly are the precise image that a thousand other men were desperately seeking. Pause at this brassy, over-lit, over-titted, fake-smiling, long-legged, vapid-staring blonde. This is the summit and end of all desire?

Well, yes, for someone. Mine is no different in essence. When I was young I took it, somehow, as a great virtue and distinction in myself that my taste in women didn't run on the Raquel Welch theme. Seriously, I did -- there is nothing, nothing, that can't be turned into ego and personal territory. I somehow managed to identify a taste for dark-haired women with small breasts as a signal of some moral distinction. The distinction escapes me, now, but I believed in it devoutly, once upon a time.

So much for the positive. What of the negative training? A narrowing of the sense of beauty, and of what one does with it. A practice in the sort of single-minded predatory trance that so many men seem to go into when they're aroused, by which all context and compassion is excluded. The long, intent, baleful glare of wanting, and only wanting. It doesn't seem to have bled over into my non-virtual sexuality, which is a wonder. But it must have bled into something -- what? Will I ever know?

Yes, I did delete a couple splenetic and enigmatic posts. For three reasons: 1) I'm a dreadful poet -- I recall a professor diplomatically spinning his wheels trying to respond to some poetry I'd given him, & eventually getting traction by saying "Well, Dale, there are poetry people and prose people, and I think maybe you're a prose person." 2) They were enigmatic to the point of being unintelligible, and 3) If it's spleen you want (and I know that on Valentine's Day that is precisely what many of us want) then you should go the House of Toast.

In honor of Valentine's Day, this poem --

Jenny kiss'd me when we met,
Jumping from the chair she sat in;
Time, you thief, who love to get
Sweets into your list, put that in!
Say I'm weary, say I'm sad,
Say that health and wealth have miss'd me,
Say I'm growing old, but add,
Jenny kiss'd me.

-- Leigh Hunt

The cold hour before dawn. I tuck one cold foot under my thigh, huddle down, and let my mind wander back. Back to before the dharma.

The echo of a foolish loneliness -- I will not see my friend today -- resonates down the long hallway, and I remember the persistent theme of my old journals and letters. That my love was wasted, isolated, under glass. Painful to me and useless to others. Invisible.

For, when the power of imparting joy
Is equal to the will, the human soul
Requires no other heaven.

Shelley was close to my heart. Like him, I imagined that sexual trangression could break the glass and bring my love into real contact with others. The truth turned out to be much more complicated than that. Almost the reverse of that.

I was incapable of friendship, then, and sensitive people knew that. The storm of need that arose in me when I drew close to people attracted them (disastrously) or put them off. But there was no way, without practice, that any relationship could change my isolation, because it wasn't in my relationships. It was in me.

I know, this is an old song, a platitude and a truism, and something that everyone but me and Shelley figured out a long time ago. I've taken the long road home, gone the awkward and inconvenient way. But I met the dharma on the way, so I could hardly call the trip wasted.

Just to sit. I was so pig-ignorant of what happened in my mind. The first time I sat, in an attic with a small Chogyam-inspired group in New Haven -- the first time I really sat -- I was apalled. Horrified. My mind was a mess. A huge, embarassing clot of anxious posturing and fantasizing. I could have dealt with that: what I couldn't stand was how repetitive it was. Over and over, the same pathetic stories would unroll in my head. They had bored into my mind and repeated endlessly, endlessly. In the course of half an hour the same stories might unroll fifty times.

The bravest thing I have ever done in my life, I think, was sitting down to meditate the second time.

No time right now to detail -- even if I could, which is doubtful -- how meditation undid the habits of mind that isolated me. But it did. My love is not under glass any more. I am not isolated, not like that. I'm naked and shivering in a new world. & I require no other heaven.

Kurt of the Coffee Sutras, guest-blogging about lust on Common Beauty:

Lust is a repeat customer who asks much in the way of service, but purchases very little.

No intelligence, no power,
No wealth can help
Someone without diligence--
He is like a boatman whose boat
Has everything but oars.

Jigme Lingpa (quoted in Words of my Perfect Teacher)

Speaking of Sloth...

Do not wait another second to practise. Do something about it immediately, like a coward finding a snake in his lap or a dancing-girl whose hair has just caught fire.

Patrul Rinpoche, Words of my Perfect Teacher

Grief

Like coming the ill-considered third time, the testicles aching because there's no more seminal fluid to give. Or like retching, wishing to God you'd been able to eat something, so you'd have something to throw up. Or like sobbing when the tears are all long spent.

Like that. The spasm of grief that racked Chenrezig, when he paused from working for millenia to end the sufferings of the Tibetans, and saw that their sufferings were still infinite. When he despaired, and broke his vow, and splintered into a thousand pieces.

Go yonder for vice -->

I guest-blogged on Common Beauty yesterday about sloth, my pet vice. He's hosting a series on vices, and there's some wonderful stuff there. (There's always wonderful stuff there.)

You wrote, Beth:
From my viewpoint, peace on these issues [identity/masquerade] is possible only when one is conscious of the decisions one has made and more or less accepts them, as well as the fact that we are, essentially, unknowable. But I wonder what you think.

I think you're quite right. And of course I was not giving anything like the whole story. I am also a prudent, even calculating, man, the sort who hedges his bets, keeps his insurance up to date, and carefully chooses when & where to come unglued. It's just a story. All these characterizations of myself are just stories. "Essentially unknowable" -- you are so right -- not only because even the paltriest of us is too large to fit into any story, but also because there's nothing essential there to be known. The wind blows through us, whether we acknowledge it or not, and what it blows through is air.

Choices. I wonder. I'm responsible for them, of course, if anyone is. Certainly laying the responsibility for them upon anyone else would be absurd. But I find the concepts of choice and responsibility difficult. Increasingly I wonder if they really describe anything, or if they're just more stories we tell, when we're trying to convince ourselves that we're more like a statue than like a brief gust of wind. I look for the decider, I look for the decision -- I don't find anything. Nothing but stories made up after the fact. "Once upon a time there was a boy named Dale, and he decided not to waste his life, and later he decided not to become an academic, and then he decided to become a programmer" -- what a pack of lies. All those things just happened. I just happened. At some point something becomes obvious -- say, that I'm never going to be a professor. So I announce my "decision." My firm resolve not to pursue an academic career. But that's just because people needed a story, and the old one, a little too obviously, didn't fit any more.

And all the time the wind blows harder.

I'm spinning along on a couple hours sleep, and I may well be making no sense. "Enough, or too much!" -- it doesn't matter. You matter, Beth. Even I matter. But this little sequence of thought, crawling in my mind, like a spider doggedly trying to climb out of a slippery sink -- no.

Love. I give you the wind and the stars and the gray clouds. The flowers of Santa Cruz, Yeats's rose, and Padmasambhava's lotus. Good night.

Standing In

Ah, well, you see, it's true: I love the quick bright doomed ones, the loudmouthed girls who've had too much to drink and don't take shit offa nobody, the cutters, the speed-freaks, the falling girls. Girls who ask you for a drink and look you in the eye while they drink it.

It's where I belong, in that world where desire swamps prudence, where push comes to shove every day, where oppression doesn't consist of "authorized discourse" and "marginalization," but of guys with badges and bulky belts taking your old man to jail. I am so accidentally respectable. I walked into the wrong life. I try to do right by it, since I'm here, but the conviction that the whole thing is a charade never leaves me.

I'm the sort of person who knows exactly how many beers puts him at the top of his pool game (three) and how many ruins it (five). Who gets in incoherent political arguments, with "fuckin" or "goddam" in front of every noun. Whom the bartenders, inexplicably, have a soft spot for. Who launches into invectives from Shakespeare's histories, or goes maudlin and mumbles Eliot into his ouzo, or who suddenly finds it terribly important to explain why he never entered a monastery to a young woman who doesn't even know what monasteries are. Who staggers home in the night air arguing with phantoms in pandit hats.

People talk to me. They always have. They tell me secrets; they trust me. I don't know why. Maybe it's because I suddenly ask inappropriate questions. "So what would you do, if you could do anything at all?" or "Do you talk to God?" But probably it's just that I listen. I listen with all my heart. Maybe this is the person who knows. Maybe this is the Buddha.

So now --- it's been ages since I've gotten drunk, and I have, so help me God, a pension accumulating, and I'm on church committees, and I painstakingly talk to my son about peer-pressure and how everyone's pretending to know and to have done a lot more than they have -- I feel like I should wear a little sign, careful black letters on white, explaining that I'm just temporarily standing in for someone respectable. Just to keep things straight, and prevent confusion.

Where I Come From, Part 3: Empty Boxes

This is the bit that Susan's poem reminded me of... it was written elsewhere, in the context of tragic, "unhappily ever after" stories, some time ago. It's about the summer in between my two years at the New School.

-------------

When I was fifteen I got tangled up with K, a tall thin pale girl, two years older than I. She had TB -- missed a lot of school, coughed up blood occasionally. Had attempted suicide a couple of times. Claimed that relatives of hers claimed that she was of the Stuart royal house, in right line to the throne of Scotland.

Anyway, we spent the summer mostly in bed together, "friends with privileges," as I'm told kids say these days. In the fall just before I was leaving for school, two hundred miles away, she became, or believed she became, pregnant. Believed also that I wouldn't come back, and that she was deeply in love with me.

She attempted to abort this possibly existent fetus with a knitting needle. Horrified herself, because, among other things, she had recently become Catholic, and she had murdered an innocent. There was blood, not lots of it. God knows what she had done to herself.

Why do I bring up this unhappy old story from 30 years ago? Because for many many years I told this tragic story to myself, how I screwed up this person's life, which was doubtless short and desperately unhappy after I left. Then some fifteen years later I met her again. Married, kids, going to school, doing interesting things. She remembered our relations very vaguely. "That was a pretty crazy summer," she said. It became clear as we talked that she was under the impression that at the end of the summer she had dumped me, leaving me in a state of dangerous despair.

So... I bring it up because the tragic unhappily-ever-after endings are every bit as fairy-tale unrealistic as the rosy happily-ever-after endings. We tell ourselves these stories, but they're just stories. If we really opened up these boxes we've stored people away in, we'd find that every one of the boxes was empty. The people have all slipped away; all we keep is the boxes, which we made ourselves.

Susan wrote a lovely poem, "Spin Doctor,", which has me thinking about revisions of the past. I wrote something, years ago, that I may try to find again and post here, about that.

I don't think I've ever seen it so clear: watching fear turn into compulsion. An hour of doubt and uncertainty -- and then an apparent subsidence -- and suddenly, like an algae bloom, compulsive desire is simply everywhere in my mind, reaching into every perception. Little eddies of it spin on the surface of every passing thought. Everything is tinged, darkened, blurred.

Half the power, at least, of this compulsion, comes from its ability to convince me that by caving into it I can get rid of it. Which is surely, demonstrably, a lie. But such a plausible one. But if I turn to look right at it -- it cringes; it doesn't like to be looked at, it's always pointing, and urging "Over there! Over there! Look at the object of desire, not at the desire itself! The desire isn't real, the object is."

No. You're lying, Mr Compulsion. The object isn't real at all. It's a figment of my imagination, a fantasy spun out of the memory of a fantasy. You, Mr Compulsion, are real, if we're going to talk real. If we're going to talk here and now. I feel you in my skin and I taste you on my tongue. This is suffering. You want the textbook example? This is it. Right here.

No wonder the prospect of getting rid of you is so appealing. So clever of you to turn that to your advantage. And it has just enough of truth to keep its power. Giving in does end the apparent suffering. For a little bit. But it sets the conditions for more suffering to come. It's like whiskey curing a hangover. Sure, it works, all right. For now. But tomorrow it'll be worse. And next year it's the DT's.

I can see it as suffering, now. Intermittently. Even in the moments of supposed enjoyment, I can feel it rasping, sometimes.

Not enough, yet, to deter me every time. But sometimes. And i don't know what else would ever deter me. Resolution and determination crumble at its first onset. They're no good. Awareness is my only reliable ally. Awareness, and habit: what the Tibetans call, so oddly, "merit."

Sugar in the gourd, boys, honey in the horn;
Balance to your partners, honey in the horn.

I look up from drawing points of light on my napkin, and there you are. I try to be composed, and not to grin like an idiot, to be self-possessed and adult. But it's a shock even when I expect it, and I rummage distractedly in my mind for the power of speech (now where did I put that? I know I had it earlier this morning). I'm quite sure I am grinning like an idiot. Everything, everything entrances me.

I know. This is a piece of that bizarre rag-coat that people call "being in love." I'm unstitching the pieces of being in love. I don't want all of them. But this piece I'll keep, thank you very much: being overbalanced by beauty. I've always been susceptible. A sudden slant of light through leaves will stop me dead on the sidewalk (to the annoyance of those walking behind me.) A face glimpsed on the bus will haunt me for days. The curve of a telephone wire against a blue-steel sky can bring me to the verge of tears.

In exactly the same way, the movement of mind can stop me dead, overwhelm me. Graceful, powerful movements of thought: it's like watching a great cat hunting, perfectly sure, perfectly intent.

I collect myself. You always give me time to collect myself; I'm grateful for that. One of the pieces that needs to be unstitched is the piece that asks for acknowledgement. (Which is why I might not post this. ) Looking for the acknowledgement is one of those movements of mind that looks like openness, looks like taking the dare -- but it's not. No. It's one of the million ways of trying to tame it. As if a tamed great cat, were such a thing possible, would not be a travesty, a pollution.

I learn. Slowly. Learning to leave things be.

I was told a great many lies, when I was young. One of the worst was this: that only things that are acknowledged are real. It's that same turn of mind that always has to fill silence with chatter, that puts television sets in waiting rooms, and muzak in elevators. Busily reifying, naming, cataloguing. Getting "buy-in."

Let it go. Send it away, even -- off with you!

The universe is on fire, from end to end, a blazing tunnel of light. Here. Take it.

Dream World

Winter on the northwest coast of America is a muted concept. Reading Dave's description of winter in much of America, much of the world outside the tropics, in fact, made me pause and think about it, think about how different winter is here. Figure and ground change places in winter, said Dave, with his usual insight and precision. A snow landscape in Connecticut is all reversed, the bones become the skin and the skin becomes the bone.

But not here. Here the sky draws down, a little darker, a little grayer. The rains set in harder; the lawns grow and no one can mow them, because they're wet for weeks at a time. The deciduous trees do drop their leaves eventually, but they're in the minority and don't really change the gestalt: the douglas firs still rule the skyline with their ragged-needled arms, in winter as in summer. Nothing changes. The gutters rush in torrents often. But they do that in the summertime too. Vivid wet brown and green, gray sky, sudden brief sun: all year round. In the middle of January there can be blue sky and shirtsleeve weather; in the middle of July it can be foggy and pouring cold rain.

Winter is dark, here. Not for us the dazzling white of new-fallen snow, the suddenly opened stark landscapes. Winter is dreamtime, quiet time, the shroud of the fog, the endless beat of the rain. The smell of wet cedar and the irridescent sheen of oil on sopping asphalt. The land never really falls asleep, and in the summer it never really wakes. This is the dream world.

This week, for the first time in months, if not years, I found myself enjoying work. Eager to solve problems, to learn new tools, to experiment with radical solutions. I've done more this week than in the last two months, I think. Is it because my boss is on vacation? Because I finally got a mediocre review, after deserving one for three years but still getting disorientingly good ones? Because I've been eaten by a dragon and crunched to little bits? All of the above, I'm sure, though If I had to pick one, it would be being chomped.

Last night Martha and I took turns camping on the floor by the dog bed, while Christmas whimpered. Not a big-deal surgery, just subcutaneous, but the tumor was already goose-egg size when we spotted it and the incision goes clear across her side, a good foot long, and it clearly hurts like hell. Dozed, from three to six, stroking her head when the volume went up, sometimes murmuring "om mani"s till I fell asleep. At least once I woke up still saying them. Thought of what a sap so many people would think me, spending half the night on the floor to comfort a dog. Holding a saucer for her to lap water from. Tracking how long since her last pain meds.

I wondered of course whether I was in fact affording any comfort, or just indulging in the anthropomorphic fantasy that scientists warn us so sternly about, until I left her to go upstairs. She howled, then, and didn't quit till I came back down.

Hey You --

You think you're going to live forever?

Turn off the damn computer and go meditate.

Offering

Look: this is where the ghosts live.

Step over the rusted iron rails and the creosoted ties. Cross the field of cracked cement; thread my way through corroded housings of forgotten machines. People worked here once. Now, under the stars, far from the streetlights, it is quiet.

Only the chittering of panicked ghosts, scrambling away from my footsteps.

Say: don't be afraid, ghosts. I have brought you something.

Sit down on the old split concrete. Open my pack. Take out my offering bowl. The ghosts come, trembling, sniffing, wary.

Pour out water, just a bowlful. More would be useless. The ghosts drink, lapping water with their tiny tongues. Such little ghosts. Even a bowlful is far too much: they can't finish it, though they crowd desperately to the brim, terrified, in death as in life, that there won't be enough.

The rumble of a diesel engine starting, though the sky is still living black, and the stars bright enough to cast shadows. No trace of dawn there. But the ghosts scatter. In moments they are gone.

Pour out the rest of the water, dark on the dusty, pale cement.

Say: I will come again. As long as you are here, I will come.

Can they listen? No one knows.

Batter my Heart

Batter my heart, three person'd God; for, you
As yet but knocke, breathe, shine, and seeke to mend;
That I may rise, and stand, o'erthrow mee, and bend
Your force, to breake, blowe, burn and make me new.
I, like an usurpt towne, to another due,
Labour to admit you, but Oh, to no end,
Reason your viceroy in mee, mee should defend,
But is captiv'd, and proves weake or untrue.
Yet dearely I love you, and would be loved faine,
But am betroth'd unto your enemie:
Divorce mee, untie, or breake that knot againe;
Take mee to you, imprison mee, for I
Except you enthrall mee, never shall be free,
Nor ever chast, except you ravish mee.

John Donne

Where I Come From (part two: Bored in Paradise)

We were bored. Hellishly bored, sometimes. There were only some forty of us -- ten boarding students, twenty day students, and "the little kids," the elementary-school-age kids. There were one or two classes per day that we could go to, if we wanted. (The single requirement was that everyone show up for the weekly community meeting. Since it was the only rule we could find to break, Billy and I played hooky one week; we took off and wandered around downtown Spokane, reveling in transgression.)

When people ask me what the best thing about my experience at the school was -- since it doesn't take long talking to me to see that I value the experience, and remain tremendously grateful and loyal to the place, thirty years after -- I say, "being bored." It was analogous, on a different time scale, to sitting zazen, facing a blank wall. We were bored, but without being able to blame it on teachers or parents or bosses. Our boredom was our own. Our failure. An incredible luxury, to be able to discover that.

My time at the New School -- that was the name of it, which makes it impossible to google for: I've never discovered a trace of it on the web -- my time at the New School was a failure. But the richest failure, maybe, of my life. The utopia failed. It was always a fake utopia, of course; we knew that. But even within its own circle, all the wickedness of the world reasserted itself. My family was flush of money at the time, and I received a handsome allowance. I sometimes actually -- I'm ashamed of it to this day, and it takes an effort to write it -- paid Annie, whose family was not flush, a couple times to wash the dishes when it was my turn. A trivial thing, I guess, it might seem -- but it represented a complete betrayal of my communal ideal. And somehow the universal love that I thought we should all be practicing never quite came into focus. There was jealousy, loneliness, misunderstanding. You'll laugh, I know, that I could have expected otherwise. But I did. All evil came from a culture and political structure of domination -- so I earnestly believed then. We had created a little enclave that was supposed to be free of that -- why, then, weren't we happy? Joyful? Ecstatic, even?

It was a loving, affectionate place, in a random, loose-jointed way. We hugged, snuggled, traded backrubs and footrubs. Nobody could be greatly distressed without waves of distress running through the whole little community. But there was no way for me to pretend to myself that this was what I had imagined, at thirteen, dreaming of a secular paradise. It should not be possible to be bored, in paradise. To feel out of place.

Ernie showed up the second year I was there. A heavily pockmarked face and weedy hair. He was thirty-something, with an air of permanent, embittered exile about him. His intensity was unsettling. He wasn't a teacher: a friend of Annie's, maybe, or a connection from the gay men's group that met in the evenings at the school. He chain-smoked, and tended to look away from me uneasily, when our eyes met. He made a proposal at a community meeting -- or was it just talked about? I don't remember for sure -- that we transform the place into a real, sustainable commune. Make our own money, and share what we had. I don't remember if the scheme made any financial sense. Probably not, almost none of those proposed communes did. But I didn't think about that. All I knew was that the idea filled me with dread. I didn't want to lose my room, lose my leisure. I didn't want to work; I didn't know how to work. In my cowardice I wouldn't own to any of that. I wouldn't argue for it or against it. Nor would anyone else. The proposal died in silence. But I knew that utopia had failed, right there, in that silence.

The failure, clearly, was in me (that the utopian project was flawed, I did not allow myself to doubt.) Not only was I not destined to be a great apostle of utopia, I didn't even belong in one. The first order of business, for any prudent utopia I might stumble into, would be to throw me out.

Where I Come From (part one)

It was an big gray three-story house in Spokane, smelling faintly, as old houses will, of damp paper and mold and mouse-droppings. A big wide staircase went up to the second floor, with a dark polished wood rail and balusters. Then a narrow staircase, a servants' staircase, leading up to the third floor, where there were five little bedrooms. The ten of us lived up there.

On the left was the room that Nannette painted deep, deep blue, so that you sank into it as if it were a sea-grotto. Moria shared the room with her at one point.

Second left was the room I shared with Don, smelling comfortably of the cigarettes he rolled. I liked watching him roll cigarettes -- something I had never seen before, growing up in a strictly nonsmoking household: I remember vividly the light blue can of tobacco, the quick sure movements of his fingers. Don had long straight dark hair that hung to the middle of his back, a languid habit of speech and movement, and a slight nasal problem. He would end a sentence, typically, with a long, deliberate sniff. The first openly gay person I knew. He was a couple years older than me -- was he seventeen? eighteen? Terribly old and sophisticated, anyway. Cynical, calm, kindly. A godsend to a wrought-up, self-absorbed, emotionally unstable fourteen year old on the run from his family. A still place in the turbulent world.

Then opposite the stairhead was Marcel's room; later on, the room I shared with Billy. The nicest room, with three windows overlooking the city. We built the fire escape from that window, and we would go and sit on it on warm days, or climb up to the roof (though we weren't supposed to do that) and sunbathe, sometimes nude, on the little flat tar roof.

On the right was my sister's room, which she shared with Annie; later to be Monique's room. It had a lovely wallpaper pattern -- several of the rooms did, old Morris wallpapers. That was the room I stayed in one night, a couple of years later, when I came back for a visit in hopes of being old and sophisticated myself. New students were there. We smoked dope, and watched the smoke curl up through the rays of the late afternoon sun. But the magic was already going, inexorably, draining away. The school's days were numbered; the heyday of free schools had passed; and -- far from being the vanguard we had fondly imagined -- we were become the rearguard, haphazardly covering the retreat of the Sixties.

But in truth an elegiac nostalgia hung over the place from the moment I arrived there. The school had burnt down the year before: and on the first day I went to see the new building, we began our journey by visiting the old, burned-out buildings. People told stories of waking that night, the red wavering light, the tears as they stood outside, watching it burn. The real heart of the school, some hinted, had died that night. It could never be the same.

My heart was fierce and utopian, and I was determined it would be the real school still. We worked together, getting the new building ready. Building the fire escape, among other things. At some point we demolished the ancient garage out back, covering ourselves with black, oily dust. The first day we had the kitchen up and running I happily washed the dishes, and announced -- making it up on the spot -- that I really liked washing dishes. (Within weeks, I was notorious for wriggling out of my turn at the dishes, any way I could. The flush of utopian enthusiasm lasts only so long.)

Footnotes to the post below

1. Weeping. For joy

2. "One word is too often profaned," the beginning of a lyric by Shelley, written to the wife (well, pseudo-wife) of a friend. He's anxious and distraught, sleep-deprived and nightmare-ridden; and as usual, he deals with it by having a crush on someone. But he's beginning to think about what erotic love could be if it weren't, well, erotic love. "The desire of the moth for the star, / of the night for the morrow." Written within weeks of his death.

3. Ramparts and mousetraps. The defenses are psychological defenses against committing adultery.

4. I will not name this thing. The author is probably (like Shelley) avoiding the 'L' word here.

5. Jamgon Kongtrul, the great Tibetan scholar and yogin. The chronology doesn't really work, unless we put Shelley wandering through India for thirty years first.

6. The good time. Shelley, always a utopian, had a ring made for him in Italy, which bore the inscription Il buon tempo verra. ("The good time will come.")

7. Shelley's first wife, Harriet, drowned herself. The suicide is reasonably attributable to his having eloped with Mary Shelley (yes, the author of Frankenstein). The theory was that none of them believed in marriage. Shelley was always a bit stronger on theory than on practice.

8. little graves dotted across Italy only one of Shelley's children lived to adulthood. Two (at least) died very young in Italy. Shelley was devoted to all his children, however irregularly come by, and the deaths haunted him.

All the same, and all different. I am on the verge of weeping half a dozen times a day. It's been such a long exile. Day by day, painstakingly putting my words into a foreign language. And suddenly to find someone from home.

No, it's not safe. But what is? Boredom is more dangerous by far.

I have the dharma this time. And I am older. (I may not be wiser, but at least I move slower.)

I've started writing a couple times, and stopped, and only now have I realized what was wrong. I was starting at the wrong end. Starting with catchphrases, platitudes, explanations. All that is worse than useless.

So I walk through this transfigured world. I am unsafe, unwarded. And now, walking among the old, decayed fortifications, it's clear that they were never any use anyway. They never made me a whit the safer. Vast cement ramparts to hold back mice, and mousetraps to stop the tanks. It's only accident that held this line. Or grace.

I will not name this thing.

One word is too often profaned,
For me to profane it;
One feeling too falsely disdain'd
For thee to disdain it.
One hope is too like despair
For prudence to smother,
And pity from thee more dear
Than that from another.

There is no need, and there is no way.

But Shelley was wrong, disastrously wrong. I wish he'd lived to make his expedition to the East. Finding his way at last to Kham, to sit at Jamgon Kongtrul's feet, and say, "Master, what was I doing wrong?"

And Kongtrul grins. "Just trying a little too hard to make it real, boy. Just trying too hard. It's already real, with no help from you."

Already real. The good time has already come.

No, not to ignore Harriet, drowned in the river, nor the little graves dotted across Italy. That would just be trying to make it real in another way.

It's never been real, and it's always been real. Now have some tea, and get some sleep, boy. You can sleep now.

You try to block thoughts and yet they are not blocked --
First one unblocked thought arises, then a second -- let them arise.
When they arise, send them wherever they go and stand guard.
Since there is no place for them to go, they have returned,
Like a crow who has taken off from a ship.
Rest like the movement of swells at sea.

-- Jamgon Kongtrul, Creation and Completion

Mr Dale grinds to a halt. Or rather, contracts to a dizzying spin. Another exposure, and lost to do anything, think anything, be anything till the response comes in. Clickitey clickitey click.

Okay. Sit up straight, boy. (Straighter than that, come on!) Breathe deep. Say a little prayer. (Uh-uh! don't slump down again!) Luminous and unimpeded, remember? Thoughts only spin when they're tethered. Let these go.

Accept the gift. This momentary light. Not because you should, O lunkinhead peasant, but because it's riches beyond the dreams of ignorance. Eat because you're hungry, silly mawk -- not because I told you to. This is not an empty room. Not even an empty cubicle. And certainly not an empty heart.

Note

We talked for two hours and I didn't say the only thing that mattered. You have given me my whole life. From the blood under my fingernails to the light entering my eyes.

I will not build high towers and golden stupas for you, I will not lay proud empires waste, or write down codes of law to stupefy the centuries. But I will lay one hand on the edge of a cafe table and pay attention as I do so.

No swaggering God of Hosts has ever received such tribute, or ever will.

Chris has written an extraordinary piece about Dillard's Cat. Truth and lies in writing.

this, quoted from William Stafford, on field notes:

If you begin to believe what others say about you, you become like a compass that listens to the hunches of the pilot. You may be good company, but you are useless as a compass--I mean a poet.

Dave, incidentally, apologized for "putting me on the spot." Thinking about that, being surprised by that, I realized how much I like being put on the spot. That is, I love trying to answer the fundamental questions, the questions that people are all too often too polite to ask, the questions that cast doubt on the validity of the whole organization of my life. Both because I know people will be interested in the answers to those questions, and because I am really a reactionary thinker, rather than a creative one. (And there's always the possibility with such questions, however remote, that I might actually learn something by trying to answer them.) So ask, please!

A piece of an email I sent to Dave yesterday, more on the challenge & comfort theme:

Actually I felt that I was probably unfairly jumping on the wording of the question. (I tried to emphasize that I didn't really know what Idries Shah had said, but that's a poor substitute for actually going and finding out before pontificating about it).

I read what you excerpted with interest. I guess I have the same double response to what he writes that I often have to Zen writings: simultaneously, gratitude for the insistence on immediate experience and immediate practice, and disgruntlement on behalf of myself and all weaker vessels. "Let them not challenge to themselves a strength they have not," wrote Richard Hooker, answering the Puritans, "lest they lose the comfortable support of that weakness which indeed they have." We're not all redoubtable yogins, ready to plunge into the wilderness. And nobody (except buddhas, if there are such things) is *always* a redoubtable yogin, not even, I imagine, the redoubtable yogins. A church should be a place of refuge, as well as a place of challenge.

Once upon a time a man of a certain age, who lived in a certain town, met a dragon.

"Dragon," he said, "May I take you home and keep you as a pet?"

"O honored sir," said the dragon (for dragons are very polite), "I think, rather, I will tear your flesh, splinter your bones, and scatter your limbs across the valley floor."

This gave the man some occasion for thought. "Dragon," he said, "Perhaps we could be friends, like, instead."

The dragon answered, "Perhaps we could, honored sir. But I am rather hungry and it might be thought that your respected self was not altogether polite. So I think on the balance it would be better for me to eat you."

"Honored Dragon," said the man, "Maybe I have not understood things very well. I am an ignorant man and one does not meet many dragons, in my trade. Maybe you could take me home as a pet, instead?"

"I am infinitely obliged to you for the offer, sir, but my circumstances are not such as conduce to the care of pets. You would pine, I think, honored sir, without proper feeding and exercise; and I should hate to see you grow thin and stringy." The dragon licked its lips.

"Most Reverend Dragon," said the man, "I think I have been mistaken about a great many things."

"That may well be so," said the dragon. Then he tore the man to pieces and ate him.

"Not a clever man," he mused, as he cracked the last bones to suck the marrow. "But at the end there he was learning to be polite."

Read These Instead

Susurra de Luz (in her new & wonderful blog) found the documents and wrote a thoughtful commentary on the Dalai Lama's take on homosexuality.

At Via Negativa Dave has been meditating on the connections (necessary? contingent?) between violence and religion.

If you've done the literary academic thing, you might be as delighted as I by John Emerson's essay, Why I don't read Critical Theory" (not a blog, this, but a grand read.)

Challenge and Comfort

Dave wrote:

Dale, you write very persuasively and engagingly about your life in the sangha. I wonder if you have read any of Idries Shah's writings on the evils of social conditioning, and if so, how you would answer his charge that most of what people seek in religion is the opposite of true seeking: to be comforted rather than to be challenged?

No, I'm afraid I haven't read Idries Shah, but I do have a glib answer to the charge as I understand it here. I can't imagine a relationship to a church that wasn't made of both -- both the desire to be comforted and the desire to be challenged.

I would have to be a person with a vast experience of churches, rather than a person with very little, to hope to answer whether most of what people seek is comfort. And I view such quantifications with suspicion. "Most," measured how? I can make a wild guess as to the proportions in my own case -- maybe 20% comfort, 80% challenge? But I could easily be off by 40 points. And my guesses about other people in my sangha would be even wilder, and if I were to guess about people in the Pentecostal church down the street my guesses would be completely worthless. I don't have a clue.

There are a couple assumptions that may be implicit in the charge (always bear in mind here that I haven't read Idries Shah, so I'm just answering what I imagine he said, which is probably considerably less intelligent than what he actually said).

1) That the desire for comfort is usually a bad thing. It can be a bad thing, certainly. There are times when I go the sangha hoping to cash in on previous meditation and experiences of the numinous. Hoping to trade them for worldly respect and ease: to sit down and have a nice session of mutual congratulation, and hold the terrors of real introspection and real openness at bay. But there is also a desire for comfort that is humble and open. The sort of thing I imagine Jesus had in mind when he spoke of "the poor in spirit" -- the recognition of my spiritual poverty, and the recognition that I need the help of people wiser and braver than I. "Nobody can walk the path for you," is profoundly true. But it's also true that it would be absurd to rely on my ego -- which got me into this mess in the first place -- to get me out of it.

2) There may be an assumption -- certainly is in the suspicion of churches that I commonly encounter -- that the proportions of challenge and comfort are a characteristic of the institution, rather than of the individual's relationship with the institution. I have no doubt that some institutions are more skillful than others in challenging people. There may be some (though frankly I doubt it) that have no interest at all in challenging people to real introspection, and real openness to spiritual experience. And I think my own sangha is especially skillful this way. We never have a "service" that doesn't include some fifty minutes of silent meditation. It's pretty damn hard to sit silently for fifty minutes without some challenge coming along, no matter how hell-bent on comfort (in the bad sense) I may be.

But really what matters is what I bring -- my own motivation, my own daily practice. It helps to have a skillful tradition and a skillful teacher. It helps a lot. But it's my own motivation that determines whether what I'm doing at the sangha is practice, or the avoidance of it.

Finally, the question is not simply, "do I find more spiritual challenge or more avoidance of it at my sangha?" The important question is, "will I find more spiritual challenge at my sangha than I would have found staying home tonight?" Milarepa was quite right to stay in his cave rather than going to practice at a monastery. He wasn't going to spend the evening rereading Patrick O'Brian and eating ice cream. For me, however, the answer's usually not far to seek. There's going to be more challenge at the sangha.

So happy, so grateful. Thank you.

New stars are burning in my sky. No prayers are crossing now. This beautiful, beautiful silver snow, and drops trembling at the ends of icicles. "Costing not less than everything." And cheap at the price.

Good night.

Tonio remarked on the word "unchurched":

"unchurched" sounds like such a derogatory term. Where did it come from, such a strange word? The implication of making this particular noun into an intransitive verb, back into a noun, as though "church" were something that happened to a person. Like having a large and ornate cathedral drop on you in the middle of the street one day. Mind you, perhaps it is. Would explain ALL of my religious doubts. I just haven't been "churched" yet.

Dave (welcome, by the way!) explained:

I read Christian Century magazine regularly and they use the term a lot. It's meant to be neutral, not derogatory - that's why liberals like it.

But I don't believe I've ever used it before, and it struck me as odd as I used it. If I knew that liberals used it, I didn't know it consciously. Really I did intend it -- as I recognize belatedly -- in a sort of pejorative way. "Unsexed" is probably the model here. It does imply -- and was meant to imply -- that belonging to a church is normal, and that to not belong to a church is to be lacking something. To be bereft.

I guess I allow myself the latitude to be pejorative because I was born and raised unchurched. I have only been churched for... what? Seven years, maybe? It was much like having a cathedral dropped on me -- utterly unexpected and unwelcome and disorienting at first. I have always hated being associated with people -- the few organizations I belong to I usually regard with distaste. When I was first going to KCC I was belligerantly unconformist. Damned if I was going to bow to the altar. I stalked past the people making their three prostrations and sat down in the shrine room defiantly, waiting (oh, just waiting!) for someone to tell me I should do them. (No one ever did. No one, I eventually realized, gave a hoot whether I did the prostrations or not: that was my business). I argued with Lama Michael: if there's really no self, then what the hell transmigrates, and why does it matter? How does your karma know your address? What reason to we have to believe anyone ever achieves enlightenment?

It is, precisely, something that happened to me. Now I do my three prostrations happily -- I love the motions, I love the moment of my forehead touching the cool floor: it savors not of abasement but of a touchstone, of making contact with my foundations. And now I belong to committees. I "omze," lighting the candles, filling the offering-bowls, ringing the bell to begin and end the meditations. I am thoroughly churched.

It means that I am associated with some people that I don't like at all. There are stupid people, pompous people, hypocritical people there. There are people whose mindless devotion to Michael drives me up a wall. But there are also people there I've come to love dearly, and admire deeply, whom I would never have even noticed in my unchurched days, when all my associations were by preference. The farmer with a game leg, an ex-alcoholic, who has the most open face and beatific smile I have ever seen, the most utterly unpretending person I have ever met. The inarticulate, completely unintellectual young woman who gave me a bundle of incense on the day I took refuge -- we've hugged more often than we've ever spoken. The middle-aged dental technician whose bulldog determination to understand dharma texts and get the practices right puts me repeatedly to shame.

We're not a sociable sangha. I almost never see these people, apart from Sunday nights. But I wonder now how I lived without them. Without a community of people who share the aspiration to "quickly realize Mahamudra, and establish all beings without exception in this state."

I did not know I was so empty, that I could be so full.

So let me back up. I don't think I really was using "unchurched" as a pejorative. But certainly as a negative. To be unchurched seems to me, now, to be a calamity. One that can be completely undeserved. Michael could die tonight, to be replaced by some bigot, and I'd be unchurched in a twinkling. But historically it's weird to be unchurched, for good or ill. (For good and ill, I should say.) Most people, most of the time, have held their spiritual aspirations in a community.

Someone in comments over at Cassandra referred to the Dalai Lama condemning homosexuality. I followed the link, but found (as so often on the net) no reference, but only a repetition of the assertion. So I don't know exactly what the Dalai Lama said, in what context.

People may wonder why this doesn't particularly disturb me. Gay rights concern me closely. Many of the people dearest to me are gay or lesbian. I drive around with a rainbow sticker on my car. So what am I doing with a "pope" who "condemns homosexuality"? (Not just any "pope," but one I intensely admire.) Am I a hypocrite?

I hope not. Anyway I want to take this apart a little bit, and it will take awhile, because there's a fair amount to unpack.

1) The unchurched often have extravagant ideas about the uniformity of opinion in churches, and the authority that the heads of churches carry. Probably I simply disagree with the Dalai Lama on this one. Part of belonging to a communion is being willing to be associated with people who disagree with you. A communion that harbored no disagreement would be a pretty scary thing. Less like a communion than like a totalitarian state. The corollary to me having to belong to communion that contains people who are intolerant of homosexuality is that *they* have to belong to a communion that contains me. Which seems, to me, all to the good.

2) There are distinctions here that are going to be invisible to the outsider. Chief among them in this case is, were we talking a monastic context? The Dalai Lama, after all, is a monk, and the head of a monastic order. A monastery is supposed to insulate people from sensual indulgence, for a variety of reasons. You can insulate people from heterosexual attachments just by separating the sexes. Homosexual attachments are more difficult to prevent. I can picture the Dalai Lama "condemning" homosexuality in this context, and having it mean nothing more than -- monastic vows are monastic vows: we're commited to renouncing these attachments.

3) The Dalai Lama grew up in the context of unscientific Tibetan medicine. I don't dismiss Tibetan medicine altogether, but some of it looks clearly bogus to me, and none of it has stood experimental test. Traditional Tibetan lore says that some kinds of sex mess up the various "winds" of the body in ways I don't understand. I view this in exactly the same way I view Chaucer's "humors." It's obsolete science, the best they knew at the time. There may be something to it, and there may not be. I don't expect people from other cultures to drop them wholesale as soon as they come into contact with my own, any more than I drop mine.

4) There's the meaning of "condemn." I strongly suspect that the Dalai Lama didn't "condemn" this behavior at all. When the Pope "condemns" something, he means that it's displeasing to God. When the Dalai Lama "condemns" something, he means it's a bad idea. Or possibly that it won't fit with a monastic life. The difference is immense. (Here again is where I wish I had the actual words to work with). Ethics in Buddhism are fundamentally different from ethics in revealed religions: Buddhist ethics are essentially advice, accumulated over centuries, about how best to lead a life that's calm enough so that a person can cultivate mindfulness. In revealed religions ethics are the pronunciamentos of God, and following them is *in itself* a way of approaching God. (And breaking them is *in itself* a way of turning away from Him.)

--(New post below this one)--

Swollen eyes, streaming nose, temples pulsing, racked with so many explosive sneezes that a series of muscles I didn't even know I had, somewhere around my lower ribs, are desperately sore. So grateful that I have a job I can call in sick to. All over the world there are people sicker than I am doing dangerous difficult work. Not a chance of calling into work and whining about their colds and the state of the roads. You want the job, you go to work. I have been so uncannily fortunate, all my life. It makes me uneasy, from time to time. I think: I must have been awfully good in my last lives, to accumulate so much good karma, and I don't think I can be keeping up the pace in this one.

The snow Tonio sent down here from Canada is iced over and dusted with another coat of powder. (Nothing like having a nasty cold to make a snowy landscape look uninviting.) If I were one of the photoblooggers I'd have taken a picture of our back porch: the stark skeleton of last year's clematis making a black net against the white snow, and the old dark iron of a shovel half-covered by a drift. We almost never get snow here. Not like this. Once every seven years, maybe.

... I am that way going to temptation
Where prayers cross.

Time to get up, go for a walk, despite the cold, and gather my wits. What a muddle I'm in.