Happy Gratitude Day

Eat, Drink & Be

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It's Canada Day.  Should I have painted something red?  Perhaps a maple leaf or two?  Perhaps I should have painted them on myself and taken a picture?  Nah, I'm not into Nationalism although in an understated slightly Canadian way I might say this is a pretty nice place to live.  My friend the monk often says "we live in a diva realm" (not specific to this country), meaning that those of us living here in comfortable circumstances are very fortunate; no wars, no famine, no natural disaster, no political unrest and persecution.  It isn't that way for many people in this human realm.  We have the good fortune she says to have the means and the time and the interest to study the Dharma and that is truly good fortune.  But we tend to forget that and take it all for granted.  We breeze right over it and get down to the serious business of what's wrong with life, what's bugging us.  Maybe we should have a Gratitude Day instead of a Canada Day?  Or as well as?  (Holidays are good.)

Today we had the particular good fortune to take part in a Canada Day celebration.  It was impromptu and a surprise.  It's funny because I think I somehow saw the seed of it this morning as I stood in the grocery store line-up.  I was buying boring things like carrots and onions and nuts and as I snooped on the order behind me I saw a fancy cake with fruit and a little Canada flag and some cheese buns, a bag of chips, some pop and some twinkle lights with Canada flags on them.  Party food I thought, things I wouldn't buy and I felt the tug of nostalgia.

Later we stopped by my mother's to have a short visit  before heading out of town tomorrow for a few days.  It turned out there was a Canada Day barbecue happening a little earlier than the usual dinner hour.  As we sat and visited on the patio, dinner preparations began.  And when the young woman server came to find out what everyone wanted she cajoled us into staying for dinner (even though we didn't have the required dinner tickets for guests).  So we sat outside in the lovely breezeless afternoon (that's a good thing in here in this cooler part of the world) and ate party food.  Veggie burgers for us vegetarians and potato salad and little bags of potato chips and Canada Day cake and cherries.  There was this lovely summer picnic feel to it.  Staff had brought their families and the usually empty patio was filled with life and Beatles music.  The two cooks manned the outdoor grill and other staff delivered drinks and burgers.  We even sang "Oh Canada" and I have to say it's been so long that we were stumbling over the changes that have been made since we sang it in grade school (we also used to sing God Save The Queen!  eek!) 

I think it was fun because it was unexpected and so different from anything we would ever plan to do, but in this strange way it was really heart warming and lovely.  It seemed so quintessentially summer and so strangely celebratory.  There was the lovely feeling of just sitting and being; enjoying the sun and the company and people watching.  We sat with several of my mother's friends and maybe it was a truly Canadian conversation because we talked about the noisy crows checking out the meal and then the conversation turned to some raccoons that have been visiting our backyard and then stories of otters and bears told by one of our table mates.  Someone even mentioned Tim Horton's!

So it can be very interesting where we find those small bits of delight and joy, wedged snugly between the custard in a Canada Day cake or wafting along the draughts of barbecue smoke, or just sitting under the oak trees in the company of the over 80 set.  No one"s in a hurry, no one feels the need to impress or make idle chit chat.  It reminds me of a book title which I love,  "The Unbearable Lightness of Being"  I think I know what he means now.  Happy Gratitude Day!  (It's got to start somewhere.)

Buddha's Bible Stories

Words of the Buddha

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I was completely thrown off my game (whatever game it was I was playing) by my mother today.  So instead of speaking to the little Buddha picture I have here I will share the Dharma and Karma in my evening conversation with my mother.  And of course the Buddha is never far away.  My mother who is 94 is nearing the end of her life.  And not quite quick enough for her.  We have made our peace my mother and I.  And this really has all come about as a result of a lot of difficult spiritual work I have done around our relationship and her willingness to talk openly about her impending death.

Now tonight my mother drops a little bit of burning coal on the evening phone chat.  A number of years ago she gave her mother's bible to a family member who was supposedly marrying into a Jewish family.  That marriage didn't happen and my mother said to me tonight that there is only one thing she needs to do before she dies.... And that is get her mother's bible back and give it to me or my daughter.

Now perhaps this sounds simple.  And perhaps it is.  But there are layers of implication in it.  And my mother is asking for my opinion,  probably even my approval...  And yet I realize the need to tread carefully here.  I need to be honest.  I need to say that I see the potential for hard feelings.  I see the potential for this small action to explode in a spray of shrapnel that will leave me picking sharp bits out of my flesh for a long time to come.  I need to acknowledge how much I don't know and can never know about how people will react.  I acknowledge that it could all be projection and imagining on my part. 

 And I need to say that everyone must decide what they have to do from a place deep inside them.  Who am I to tell someone what to do?  And yet I feel it is appropriate to remind my mother to look deep inside for the answer, to make sure no retaliation is involved.  We chat about all these things several times and how sometimes we humans can trick ourselves and have a hard time looking at our own unflattering motivation sometime.  An action taken from a place of spite is always a mistake.  I feel the need to say this loud and clear.  I am not good with "well mom if that's what you need to do, go for it."  I also know it is not up to me to discourage her from doing the thing that she says will allow her to die in peace.

I also can share the wise counsel I have received from my friend the Buddhist monk on other occasions; that we need to decide what to do from our heart of hearts and don't base it on results.  We can't know what will be the outcome, nor should we base our decisions on imagined outcomes.  Our heart leads the way.  And after that it is out of our hands.  We do the best we can, as carefully as we can.  I remind her that choices that come from the heart may not always seem logical and that reason might not explain what our heart decides.

All that being said I worry that her choice will put me in an awkward position and create hard feelings toward me by the person loosing the bible.  I am not particularly sentimental about things and am surprised (but understand in a strange way) my mother's seemingly sudden pang of sentimentality over this bible, one of the few things she had that belonged to her mother who died when she was just 3 years old.

There is a strangely, weirdly awkward karmic flavour to it all.  I have resented my mother for a lot of my life for putting me in awkward positions, for creating drama and conflict  and here she is doing something with this potential  as her dying wish.  And there is a feeling through recent conversations we have had that there is a deep karmic connection between my mother and I and that somehow my mother wants to honour this by giving me the bible.  At some level I sense this.  I know there is a karmic lesson here for me to negotiate all this with kindness and without anger and resentment, and perhaps with a little grace.  Wish me luck.

Hanging Out With The Pink Buddha

Pink Buddha

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I was wondering what to say about this little pink Buddha.  First I thought I might talk about the colour "pink" so I looked through my favourite book about colour (all about colour, by Janice Lindsay).   I toyed with regaling you with facts about pink.  Perhaps telling you that pink is calming and jail cells are often painted pink for this reason, weightlifters cannot do as many bench presses in a pink room as in a red one.  "And before WW ll pink was for boys because it was considered red's little brother".  But I decided against any of that.

I think I painted this little pink Buddha because the Buddha is always with me in some way, riding around on my shoulder or in my pocket, peeking out at me, patiently observing my human bumbling.  Some days I easily get caught and confused but today I somehow managed to slide along the surface of the day, without creating or getting drawn into any drama or stories.  I talked to a realtor, several friends, had to pay our taxes, organize passport documents, and my neighbour who teaches me many things offered an opportunity for me to watch my anger rise like a little brush fire and then left unattended it sputtered out.  

Today was a study in impermanence and faith.  The scenery and conversations were like passing clouds.   Can't give me a ride (a little internal grumble) and then it's okay.  Not the news I wanted to hear regarding real estate (a little internal grumble) and then a sense that I could have faith that everything would work out in the end, even if I didn't quite know how.  Unhooked and seemingly unattached to outcomes I skimmed lightly along like one of those little air hockey pucks.  I could acknowledge that the universe doesn't exist to please me and I could sense the confusion in those who seemed unthoughtful.  

It was fun to watch.  And I have no answer as to why some days I can be put off my game without much provocation and then there are days like to day  where I can somehow feel unattached to outcomes.  When I make comments like this to my kind teacher, she will often say, "it is the fruits of your training," but at some level it feels like a bit of a synergistic mystery to me.

So it is a day that I feel thankful for because it felt harmonious and peaceful and yet I know that sometimes the days I learn the most are the difficult days, fraught with challenge and dark feelings.  They are all good in the grand scheme of things.  But today the Buddha was pink and calming and for that respite I am truly grateful.

The Biodiversity of Being

Where The Wild Things Live

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This little textured acrylic makes me think of an outing I had last week to a place called "Quick's Bottom".  Don't you love that name?  Sounds very British and boggy, don't you think?  (Sorry, no cheap bum jokes here.) It was a fabulous sunny day and the marsh was giddy with life; hummingbirds, wrens, swallows, ducks, geese.  And the grass so tall we hardly recognized the place from our last visit in the winter.  A hawthorn was growing up to slightly obscure the view from the bird blind that we climbed.

As I stood and greedily soaked in the sun and the breeze and the wildness of it all, it dawned on me that what was hospitable terrain for me was at odds with what was hospitable to the wild things.  Their space was wet and goopy and probably filled with bugs, teeming with things unknown and unseen, squirmy, wiggly, slimy things.  The grasses and reeds were too thick and tall to make passage easy and the ground shoe sucking wet.  And it struck me how this opposition of needs between the tame and the wild is true on a wider basis in this world.  We humans go around paving, and mowing and  gentrifying the landscape in ways that we find necessary and pleasing.  And all the while we push the wild into a slimmer corridor, narrowing and eliminating the places where they can survive. 

We do this, not because we are cruel or malicious, but mostly because we are ignorant and don't pay much attention to the needs of wild things.  It is the ultimate act of collective ego, don't you think?  We humans, we are the centre of our world.  We are kind of like big dumb giants, trodding on everything in our path, unaware of the possible implications.   Our collective awareness barely registers on the richter scale and our willingness to share this planet with other life forms squares up about the same.

 And the people that make the decisions that drain wetlands and turn grasslands into malls probably don't have the time to come and stand out in the  marsh and get up close and personal with the wild things.  What a pity.  I suspect if they could slow down enough to hear the breeze sifting through the grasses or see a humming bird hold a drop of nectar on the tip of it's beak they just might make some different choices.

And does the act of simply witnessing the wild things make a difference?  I think so; in many and varied ways, just as surely as the marsh is teeming with unseen life, so the simple act of witnessing radiates out into to the world in ways we can not possibly know and understand.  It is just another form of biodiversity; the biodiversity of just being.  It doesn't stand against "doing".  We can still write our letters and go to meetings and chain ourselves to fences if we choose. And as with all aspects of the Dharma we do what seems good to do and don't measure it's "rightness" by the results we get.  And if you choose to chain yourself to some structure, remember the final line from the movie "I heart Huckabees" where one character, referring to a protest meeting, reminds the other to bring his own chains.  And the final retort is, "We always do." 

Enter & Be Nourished

Enter And Be Nourished

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The chopsticks in this little mixed media piece are talking to you.  Never had a conversation with a pair of chopsticks, before?  These ones are particularly wise.  Here's what they have to say, listen up:  "By expecting nothing we gain everything."  Sounds like a bit of Zen wisdom, wouldn't you say.  And here we are talking about expectations again. 
The other stick bears the title of the piece, "Enter and be nourished."

So let's talk about nourishment?  What nourishes you?  Are there different kinds of nourishment?  The other day a friend suggested we might do something together.  He is a raw food chef.  Dinner and art he suggested.  And these words came to me in the shower.  (I think the shower is a nourishing place for me; I get some of my best ideas there!):  Food to nourish the body and art to nourish the spirit.  Then it felt like we needed one more thing (to create that magical threesome).  Meditation to nourish the mind.

And can we really separate the 3 or is the separation artificial?  Is this just the western preponderance to chop things up and put them in a can before serving?  Are we bloated on a diet of concepts?  When I feed my body things which are truly nourishing I suspect I am also nourishing my  mind and my spirit.  I am creating an environment in which all aspects of myself are nourished, an environment where each imaginary limb supports each other.

And if I nourish my mind, perhaps I build discipline and awareness that assist me in making mindful food choices and eating more mindfully.  If my monkey mind is tamed even slightly, I suspect it aids things like digestion and in subtle mysterious ways nourishes my physical health.  The whole quote on the chopstick is: "Enter & be nourished by traditional Zen training,"  which seems to speak to both mind and spirit.

And my spirit?  How does it fit in to the nourishment buffet?  I suspect when it is nourished and uplifted by some inspiring or meaningful activity or by human connection it too, supports the other forms of nourishment.  The physical body responds to a joyful, peaceful spirit with health and vigour .  The mind is deeply connected with the spirit;  feelings of joy and peace produce more positive, grateful thoughts.  

And in the grand scheme of things we can't be carved up, reduced or boiled down.  At least not if we are to continue our little human life here.  We are a complex whole swimming in a cosmic soup, always connected in ways so subtle and overriding that we can barely understand.  Scientists talk about psychoneuroimmunology.  We can talk about the unity and mystery and deep intuitive knowing of our true selves.  How at some level we are in touch with what nourishes us on every level.  We know in every cell of our body if only we will trust and have faith in our deepest knowing.

So here it is.  A bowl of something to nourish us, some talking chopsticks to offer wise counsel.   Summer has arrived.  Let's spread out the table cloth, break out the lemonade and throw a few nourishing thoughts on the barbie. ( I hope  Ken won't feel left out.)

Are You Surprised By Your Expectations?

Oh!

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Oh makes me think of surprise, especially a big black O on a magenta pink background.  And what makes us feel surprised?  Expectations?  When something turns out differently than we expected we are surprised, sometimes pleasantly, sometimes not so pleasantly.  I was talking to a friend today and we mentioned a mutual friend.  I commented that there is a thing this person does that "pushes my buttons".  Her comment was that it might push hers too if she had expectations.  And that is it, isn't it?  We often have unspoken expectations, ones we're not even aware of .... until things don't go as expected.  These expectations float just below the surface until something dislodges them and they bubble up.

 I might say I have no expectations about some new situation I'm going into.  But as things progress I find that in fact I do.  A friend gave a talk to a small group, thinking she had no expectations.  But at the end of the evening she found a whole little constellation of expectations twinkling around her.  She expected she would like her host, that she would feel some rapport with him.  She expected she would be treated in a certain way by him, a way that denoted respect to her.  She felt disappointed and slightly agitated when these expectations weren't met.  Sometimes when we think we have no expectations what we really mean "I don't know what is going to happen."  And during or after the fact we can see that we often have subtle and unconscious expectations.

The situation where we feel most free is where we have no expectations.  It's okay whatever happens.  We know that the universe does not exist to please us.  The next best thing is to be aware when expectations arise.  We can feel their tug but it's a bit like the monster in a nightmare.  When we turn around to look at him, he looses a lot of his power.  So just to see, helps loosen the reigns of expectation.

And now I am going to stumble off in the direction of bedtime without saying anything amusing or foolish.  What did you expect?

Where Is Perfection?

A Perfect Ten

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That phrase popped into my mind when I saw the "10" appear in this mixed media piece..... "A perfect 10".  I'm not much on popular culture but if my mind serves me well it comes from some rating system of the opposite sex that seemed everywhere for a while.  Was it in the '90's?  Did it apply to women only?  I don't really remember but it shows the strange bits of flotsam and jetsam the mind holds.  Give it a little poke and out fly the strangest things.

But it makes me think.  What is perfection?  In this context it appears to be a  value judgement.  My daughter who works in a Vegan Restaurant told a very funny story about a numerical rating system. The dishwasher who has limited English knows that "number 1" is very good so when someone does something he doesn't appreciate he tells them they are number zero.   We like, we don't like, we assign some rating and ranking system.  It might have numbers, it might not.  We do this in subtle (and not so subtle) ways all day long, judging, preferring, attaching, craving.  

But there must be another dimension to perfection.   Philip Toshio Sudo, in his book, "Zen Guitar" says: "The point of training is to strive for perfection.... Being human, mistakes are unavoidable.... Many mistakes arise from self-consciousness -from too much focus on what the body is actually doing.  The only way to overcome self-consciousness is through practice.... Our skill becomes natural - part of what zen masters call our ordinary mind... With practice our muscles no longer rely on the mind."  Ah, a movement toward perfection involves not relying on the mind.  Perfection is greater than this little conscious mind, deeper than my little self.

So is there really perfection in this human realm?  Is it really perfection that we find in something we see or hear or taste, or experience; the perceived pleasure in some "thing" or "action"; the perfect meal, the perfect gift, the perfect day.  Or is it just a turn of phrase?  Perfect today, imperfect tomorrow.  And then there is Toshio Sudo's "striving for perfection", the act of trying to do your best.  Perhaps this is as close as we get to perfection in this human realm, moving toward perfection.  And being okay with that.  And this seems like a perfect point to make my exit and hope that you don't shout number zero at me as I leave.