The Dharma Is Waving At You

I have been hijacked by the real world and become a faint shadow to the blog-osphere.  This implies that somehow the world in which we are commun-icating here is something less than real?  Which leads to the next question, what is reality anyway?  Oh, oh, I'm not going down that rabbit hole, Alice.

But I think you get my gist.  I have been preoccupied with the Bricks and Mortar, flesh & bones world of creating art, finishing work, organizing work, etc, meeting other artists and folks interested in art.  And sometimes I have been composing blog entries in my head but my fingers have not quite gotten to the keyboard.

We went to the Opera for the first time on Saturday and as always there was the Dharma, standing right in the middle of it all, waving at me.  Wherever you go, there it is!  It was the Magic Flute  and so many times during the wonderful pre Opera talk that we attended and during the show I wished I'd had a pen to jot down "that's Dharma".   So I forget many of the specific references but unbeknowningly Mozart was definitely speaking the Dharma which reminded me that all enduring art speaks some kind of truth and of course what else is the Dharma but an expression of eternal truth.  How could they not coincide?!

You could see how some of the characters in the story were simply aspects of the self, our poisons (greed, hate, delusion) our confusions and delusions.  And really what else is the search for love, which is the main tale in the Magic Flute, but our search for wholeness and happiness and harmony, uniting aspects of the self.  There was the symbol of 3 which apparently was supposed to represent the Free Masons, but is an archetypal symbol in both Christian and Buddhist religions.  There was so much more but I won't bore you with details.  It was a great evening of  story and music and  people watching, that reminded me of how delicious people are to watch in their wonderful variety and quirkiness, the delight of people dressed in their varied finery.  I could have been happy just to watch the Opera goers all evening.

And in two days of Open Studio I got to watch myself and as a young Dharma friend expressed so well "move back and forth between hope and fear".    I might not necessarily call it fear but I could see all the expectations of how it "should go" and the disappointment when these expectations were not meant.  Mornings were quiet, afternoons busier.  I had some wonderful Dharma chats with friends.  One friend who has been doing some very hard spiritual work talked about how painful it was.  And then we could talk about "the suffering that leads to the end of suffering" which is the hard stuff but you are doing your work and and then there's the suffering that leads to more suffering when we're just falling in the hole.  Another friend I hadn't seen in a long time and struggles with addiction issues talked about how strong the draw is to these things and how hard it is to get unstuck.  She has done some hard work lately too and said she could see her own "willfulness" more clearly now.

I met some delightful fellow artists and one particular treat was to find a woman whose work I love and have admired visiting my studio.  So while the weekend was perhaps quieter than I'd hoped for it was rich with Dharma and connections.  And as my friend the monk always reminds me "we can never really please the little self".  I reminded myself that we never really see the big picture, that our expectations are formed out of a pretty limited world view.  And in the evening as I read my bedtime bits of the Dhammapada I was reminded of this in Easwaran's commentary," ... to make progress we become eager for opportunities to go against self-will, especially in personal relationships. There is no other way to gain detachment from the self-centred conditioning that burdens every human being.  The Buddha calls this "swimming against the current", the concerted, deliberate effort to dissolve self interest in the desire to serve a larger whole, when eons of conditioning has programmed us to serve ourselves first."  I am sure these opportunities await us all today out in the world somewhere.  May you find them, rise to them and savour them!

Writing Our Own Soap Opera

 I am going to write about my mother again.  Oh, oh, I hope this is isn't starting to sound like a soap opera.  I guess if you don't like the program, you can always change the channel.  And if it were a soap opera, what would we call it?  We could have some fun here.  When I was in high school and my father sold real estate, we would both come home and eat lunch together and watch 2 fifteen minute soap operas.  One was called Guiding Light the other was called As the World Turns.  My father called the second one "As the Worm Turns"

If he was away on business for a couple of weeks he would ask about the characters in the soap opera when he returned.  It used to annoy my mother.  Over dinner we would talk about these characters like they were friends.  How's Sam he would ask (that's the only name I can still remember).  And amusingly nothing much would change as weeks and months went by, you could always pick up where you left off.  Time did seem to move as slowly as a worm.  And in a strange way life is like that.  We're like those characters.  We might get a new shirt or a new haircut but somehow years later we're often stuck in the same habitual patterns we've been acting out forever.  What's that old cliche "Life imitates art", not that I would presume to assume that soap operas are art, but that's another story.

Back to my mother, my father bless his very funny soul, has been gone a good seven years.  And in a way the memory of how he died is partly what is motivating my mother to try to influence her own death.  We had a really nice (if you can call it that) chat tonight.  Nice because we had heart to heart communication, no one got mad, no one grumbled at the other person, we accepted each other and listened and heard the other.  There was lots of Dharma in the chat.  

First she started by telling me how she had talked to my brother and that  she tried to tell him what she was planning to do but that he wouldn't listen to her and told her she was fine.  It was interesting to hear the other side of the story.  I heard my brother's the other night.  It reminded me of the old tale where someone asks 2 people what an elephant is like.  One person who is standing up front, describes the trunk, long and narrow and bending and the person bringing up the rear describes the huge, roundness of it all.  Well that kind of sums up the two descriptions of the same conversation.  It was so clear to me, that these two people who care about each other, did not  hear what the other person said nor were they able to put themselves in the other's shoes.  How much of our lives do we live like this?  In this unsatisfying way, never really hearing or communicating clearly with each other, never touching each other very deeply.  I am guilty of this on a daily basis in a zillion small ways, through hurry, through business, through pushing away what I think I don't want.

But eek I haven't even started the story of my evening chat with my mother which is where I found a very big chunk of Dharma.  We talked about the withdrawal of her meds but not in the way she usually accuses me of,  thinking I know everything.  I  could say, "I'm sure you've thought long and hard about this.  This isn't a decision a person makes without a lot of thought."  And she admitted she had thought a lot about it.  We talked about me coming over when the doctor visits this week, so we can discuss the med withdrawal.  I told her he probably wouldn't want to withdraw anything that might make her uncomfortable (heart meds?) but that I didn't know their exact effect.  And then we talked about what her blood thinner does.  And I shared with her my thoughts that (and this is a major belief in Buddhism)  we can never know the exact circumstances of our death.  I asked her about how she saw things unfolding and said she'd probably considered that things might not go that way, that sometimes when we think x is going to cause y, z happens.  (Pretty good for someone who barely passed math, eh?)  

She asked if I understood her position and if I agreed with it.  I said if she found every day a burden and that living was just too much trouble then I could understand it.  Turns out (and I guess in a way I knew this), that her big fear is that her mind is declining (at 94 she is just beginning to be forgetful) and that she will turn into some sort of babbling idiot.  This thought scares her enough that she wants to take matters into her own hands.  I reminded her that she can't know she will turn into a babbling idiot (I speak from the experience of already being one, as evidenced by this long rambling!).  We talked about how this could happen even with the withdrawal  of the meds.  And so there it was.  Our fear of the unknown, our trying to exert control over our environment, make things come out the way we would like, the grasping after what seems desirable and the pushing away of what terrifies us.  So I think it will be an interesting chat with the doctor, where we can entertain some of these questions.  

For me I think what has been uncomfortable about my mother's choice, is the seeming anger and depression and negativity that surrounds it.  And the biggest fact, that somehow she thinks she can make things turn out easier, the way she wants, that she can avoid what she fears most, losing her mind is really not possible to ensure.  I think her choice is motivated by wrong understanding.  And what about karma, my little mind wonders, how does all that fit together.  And ultimately I wish for my mother to have some kind of closure, some peace, to have dealt with some of this life's karma, perhaps.  But I know that is not up to me.  I can only offer what I can and bow to the rest.