Hero

Saw the film Hero recently. I found it very beautiful but I was a bit troubled by it, without really allowing myself to pursue it since I have been so busy with work.

I was distracting myself tonight reading some blogs and found a link to this review: Fascinating Fascism: Hero at the vernacular body.

I think this is what was bothering me just put into words. Many, pleasing to read words.

Gratitude, guilt and more questions

Hello everyone! I am feeling more myself, or the self I like better. I am embarrassed by my previous post. I sounded like a spoiled child. I would have deleted it by now but for the gentle, heartfelt comments that are attached. It makes me consider how I censor myself, how I categorize parts of me into bad and good, things to keep, things to remove, and things to improve. If I had not written that post in my moment of frustration and complete dissatisfaction with myself and my life, I wouldn't have received those wonderful comments. I would have missed hearing those voices and I am grateful I did not. But immediately I feel guilt. Why is that? I feel that I don't deserve those comments, I don't deserve that concern or consideration. What have I done for Siona or Dale or Mahala that they should offer me such a gift, that they should--can I say it?--love me? It brings a strange juxtaposition of emotions in me and I am quite sure I won't end this message with a pithy statement that shows I integrated this message into my life. Quite sure of that one.

So where does this leave me? I am still a bit sick but also a bit better. I still have the huge, horrendous, nearly impossible to finish proposal, but it is several pages closer to completion, I still feel grouchy and speak to my family in short clipped sentences when they dare to come into my presence. But there is a little feeling, a little voice that is saying that it is ok, that some imperfection is acceptable, that there is some benefit, some use for this jumble of 'negative' emotions. These are the demons that I face. This is the mess that is the inner workings of my mind. Much to my chagrin, it is not peace and logic inside me. Warner is right. Will it ever be so?

How do we deal with these non-niceties? I try to pretend that I am something and I fight moment by moment to be that way. To demonstrate it, to live it ... but it's not true. What is the answer? Control? Suppression? Organization? Compartmentalization? People say things like 'deep down she is a good person.' What am I 'deep down?' It seems the deeper I go with my inner work and meditation the more slime, decay and putrefication I find. What if I find deep down I am not even recognizable? What if deep down there is nothing, an empty hole?

Oscar the grouch

I wasn't gonna post today. I am too out of sorts, out of time. I didn't even write much to my friends on CSM. I try to be the supportive one, the helpful one and today I just don't feel up to it. And I have to confess, I started another blog. A secret blog where I can write all the mean stuff that I won't say and I won't write here and I won't even write to my sister. So there! I'm cheating. There is another me! But that still leaves something for me to write here. I thought about looking up an uplifting quote to put here. Honestly, I can't do it. I don't know that I would even know an uplifting quote if I read one. Just about everything is bothering me today. Should I list my complaints -- an ungratitude list? I am still sick, my throat still hurts, I still have too much work to do. I guess tomorrow or the next day or certainly by next week (when this @#*& proposal has been mailed) I will feel better. I know this but it doesn't help right now because I am in a mood that doesn't want help, I spit on help.

One view of zazen

I've been sick for a few days with a bad head cold and have a big deadline at work, so rather than not post at all, I thought I would just post a paragraph from Hardcore Zen. I chose this one because of Dale's comment, my struggles with zazen on Sunday and because I thought it was humorous.

For everyone -- everyone -- who first takes it up, zazen is tedious and awful. Your brain is in constant motion like there's a hive of angry wasps in your head. There are moments when you're certain you're going to have to leap right off your cushion and run around the room singing the chorus of Hello Dolly! just to keep from going utterly bananas. Anybody who doesn't feel that way about it, at least sometimes, is not doing the practice very sincerely. Zazen isn't about blissing out or going into an alpha brainwave trance. It's about facing who and what you really are, in every single goddamn moment. And you aren't bliss, I'll tell you that right now. You're a mess. We all are. --Brad Warner Hardcore Zen

Sunday Zen

I went to the zendo today. I didn't go last week and I almost didn't go today. Why is it so hard? My mediations was mostly sitting and thinking about stuff. I had a few moments of actually doing the work but that was it. I definitely felt more focused during the nitensoji (short cleaning period during formal practice), sweeping the brick path, than I had during zazen. Maybe I need more activity and less sitting in front of this computer? I had a slight headache the whole morning and I began to contemplate the pain and how it kept me in my body and mind. Perhaps that's why we hold on to pain? To stay with the ego self? The discussion with our teacher was wonderful as usual. He was reading one of Roshi's teishos and in was a line about being one with everyone, and everyone being no other than myself. Therefore when I injure someone, I am injuring myself. For some reason, this made me cry. It wasn't a very strong cry, since I was with the group and supposed to be listening and participating in the discussion, but it was good because some of the debris of the last two weeks was washed away, some of the tightness was loosened, and some of the agitation was released. A small bit of peace could seep into me. And that felt very good indeed.

6 months

This question came up for me today: What would you do if you only had 6 months to live?
Here is what I think this day, at this time.

If I only had 6 months to live. That is a tough one and I am not sure I can honestly answer it. I don't feel that I can really move into that space in my imagination. I suppose I would repair and/or strengthen relationships with my extended family and with my husband. Why am I thinking about that, I wonder. I guess I don't want to leave any loose ends I don't want people to feel too much regret when I go. Why aren't I thinking about myself, I wonder, what I want to do? Why wouldn't I want to do all the things I have planned now? Read more books, meditate, yoga, take classes, travel? I certainly wouldn't go on a diet. Why not do things I have never done? I don't know. I guess am jumping ahead, like 6 months is nothing, fast forwarding the the ultimate 'goal'. I suppose I do this all the time, like reading the last page of a book before even starting Chapter 1. I am amazed at my lack of an answer to this one. And I have thought about it before. One of my officemates has cancer, serious cancer. The Dr. told her the prognosis was not good. And yet she is still working, for two reasons, one, she doesn't believe the prognosis, and two she needs the health insurance. Would I do this? No, I am pretty sure about that. I would not go to work. I am reminded of a movie I saw on Lifetime with Farrah Fawcett, called The Substitute Wife. When a woman was told that she was dying she found a new wife/mother for her family. It was set during the pioneer days. Anyway, I guess I would try to make my passing easier on my loved ones. And I don't know if this is good or bad. Does this mean I don't have any idea what my Self even is, that I only see my Self as it exists as a part of other people's lives? This definately requires further contemplation.

So what!

From Barefoot Doctor's Guide to the Tao : A Spiritual Handbook for the Urban Warrior
by Stephen Russell

Letting Go
You sit there alone in a state of mild agitation, the primordial monster of encroaching insanity threatening to escape through the cracks in the plasterboard of the reality you constructed so neatly and to engulf you in its slimy, entropic discharge. Your plans seem to have gone awry and you're racked with doubts about the choices you made that got you into this position in the first place. Who did you think you were anyway, thinking you could take destiny into your own hands like that?

So you're disappointed. So what! Disappointment's only disappointment. It will be transmuted into its opposite by the immutable law of yin and yang anyway.

So, so what! May sound impolite or downright compassionless, but really, so what.

The thing about "so what" is that it's got an edge, a small portion of anger released every time you say it. That's its advantage over "never mind," which is also good and valid, but only when you truly don't mind. Most of the time, though, especially when the disappointment's just recently dropped, you do mind. So with that faint hint of churlish delinquency, stand up, release that irritation and boldly proclaim, "So what!"

Red bush tea

I am drinking red bush tea tonight. I first tried it after reading Alexander McCall Smith's second "No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency novel, Tears of the Giraffe. The heroine of the series, the No. 1 Lady herself, Precious Ramotswe, drinks bush tea all the time and making and drinking the tea is such a pleasing ritual to read about. I wanted to try it myself, to see if by drinking it, I could drink in a little of the unprentiousness that Mma Ramotswe displays. In an interview with the author he says that her character was inspired by a woman he saw chasing chickens around her yard. Later in the interview he says "There is something of Botswana in the books. The whole ethos, the whole feel of the books, is to do with that particular country." The books are a joy to read and leave me feeling calm and peaceful inside, as if there is goodness in this world after all. The feeling doesn't last forever but as long as McCall Smith is writing (he says there will be 8 books in all), I'll be reading... and sipping tea.

---

Gratitude Journal

After some thought about the benefits of keeping a gratitude journal and comments from Siona and Kat I decided to make a new blog just for that. I will try to post daily. I made it a separate blog so as not to clutter this one since many of the things I am grateful to will undoubtedly be interesting only to me and will be repetitive. So if you are so inclined, check out A Grateful Heart.

Peace

From The Power of Intention by Wayne Dyer

Be the peace you're seeking from others. If peace is missing in your relationships with your family, it means that you have a place within you that's occupied by non-peace. It may be filled with anxiety, fear, anger, depression, guilt, or any low-energy emotions. Rather than attempting to rid yourself of these feelings all at once, treat them the same as you do your relatives. Say a friendly Hello to the non-peace, and let it be. You're sending a peaceful feeling to the non-peace feeling.

I have also been trying something similar with my negative self-talk statements. I just acknowledge the statement neutrally (Thank you for sharing). It feels better to do this than to be upset with myself for thinking negatively. And it deflates or disempowers the statement. I don't understand why this works but surprisingly it does.

Why did I chose to write about peace tonight? I guess because I had so much conflict with my stepson this evening and I feel that I didn't handle it peacefully. I lost my temper and was dragged into an argument about nothing. This is a recurring event and I don't know how to prevent it. In this case, I didn't initiate it. It seemed to me that he sought me out to fight with.

Tough day to live in NY

I feel sad today. Why? It started when I woke up. Why? Is it because of the day? Because so many people around here are sad today?

Ok, so I am sad. I guess I can be sad. I can just let it be. I don't have to change it or push it away. Sadness is not something to fear, something to resist, something to cure. I will just let it fill me. I will feel it. I am sad because there is suffering, there is unhappiness, there is striving that leads to nowhere, there is effort that falls down in vain.

Crying in Starbucks
I imagine someone asking me
"Why are you so sad. Did you lose someone in 9/11?"
No, I didn't lose anyone
And yes, I lost everyone
Everyone who died, I lost
Not even knowing I had them

My mother's portrait

Today I feel like
how I remember my mother
Sitting drinking
cup after cup of coffee
black
Smoking, elbow on the table
smoke drifting up
reluctant to depart
Her eyes
focused on a point infinitely far
Some place in the past
or the future
or, perhaps
nowhere at all
All alone

Gratitude leads to happiness

People who wrote a list of things they were grateful for were happier overall than people who wrote lists of upsetting or neutral events.

I came across this idea in the Oct. issue of shape last night while biking to nowhere at the gym. Being a total science geek with University library access, I looked up the original article in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.

Basically they asked people to journal either weekly or daily about A-things they were grateful for B-things that annoyed them or C-just things that happened. The participants also rated how they felt about themselves, the world and the future. The groups that wrote gratitude journals had a more positive outlook, exercised more, and rated themselves more energetic, joyful, and enthusiastic than the other groups did.

I would like to try to put this idea to my own test but I haven't quite decided how to do it. Should I write my gratitude list here? Will that be too boring for people? Maybe I should just write it in a paper journal? I'll think about it and let you know.

I guess it is just human nature or our modern training that encourages us to focus on the negative rather than the positive, on complaining rather than being grateful. How many times did people hold a door for me today? How many times did they smile? 4 or 5 at the least. And yet, if one person had been rude, I would have thought about it, I would have told all my friends, I may even have written about here or someplace else. But about the many positive experiences I had with members of the human race - nada. But if you don't stop to appreciate the good things people do, you forget, they pass right through you and don't affect you, they don't change you, they don't impress themselves in you. You don't make them yours, add them to your heart, and tenderize it. Rather, we tend to take the hurtful things and cast them in bronze to wear around our necks. To harden our heart, to encase it in brittle bitterness. How many people were loving to me today? I can't even begin to count. My husband patted my head when we were stopped at a stoplight on the way home from work, a loving, joyful caress of love. Many people smiled at me at work starting with Max, our custodian who takes such pride in his work that I feel I should thank him everyday. I had a wonderful lunch with my dear friend C. She told me so many uplifting stories about her cousins. I thought about how wonderful it is that I have had to chance to know her, how much she has enriched my life. I could write for much longer and still would not describe all the gifts that today, a completely ordinary day, brought me. But without these few minutes of thought, without writing some words, I would have missed it all. It would have evaporated into nothingness while the other events, mundane or negative remained, like the a dirty bathtub ring after a perfectly pleasant and soothing bath. I wonder if it is because these events and feelings are higher and lighter that they tend to float away if we don't make an effort to grab them and really experience them and acknowledge them.

More

A few days after my 40th birthday, I got an invitation to try More magazine, the magazine for women over 40. Well, that didn't take long. I was pretty upset about it actually. I wasn't ready to think of myself as an over 40 woman. I was ready to throw the envelope into the trash, uninspected but I couldn't. Curiosity caught me. What does a magazine for women over 40 look like, what kind of articles do they have? Maybe the will be more intelligent than the drivel in Cosmo or Glamour? I looked through it, like the overly curious girl that I am and they had 2 pictures of Jamie Lee Curtis (full article). One with her looking fabulous, like she always does, and one with her in underwear, no makeup, and flat hair. I looked at her and thought, wow she looks like me. I don't mean she looks like me really but she looks about as good as I look, give or take. She has some flab, she has some cellulite. She looks like a normal person. And she's smiling. I would hardly be able to keep from grimacing in her position. What a cool woman! I wanna buy that magazine. And I did. I know it's not good to read women's magazines, but I figured one that actually made me feel good about my body, might be ok.

I received the Sept. issue. I like the fall fashions. They look like I could wear them. There is an ok article about Stepmothers, nothing I didn't already know. And there is an article called Meditate or Medicate? Can the spritual approach really help those suffering from depression? Although it advocates meditation, the article cautions that a combination of medicine and meditation may be required. My personal experience is that when I meditate more regularly, I feel better emotionally. Another reason to stop avoiding the cushion.

Sometimes I hear my voice

I found this Natalie Goldberg quote on Whiskey River.

I write because I kept my mouth shut all my life. I write because I am alone and move through the world alone. No one will know what has passed through me, and even more amazing, I don't know.

- Natalie Goldberg
Writing Down The Bones

I copy it here because it is so true for me. I have always been afraid to speak, afraid of the sound of my own voice. In class, I was terrified to be called on, even though I knew the answer. I would sound stupid. To ask a question (as I knew a good student should (this is in college!) I would screw up my courage for minutes, rehearsing in my head, a nervous wreck the whole time and then still chicken out. When I first started to learn about chakras I had the feeling that my throat chakra was blocked (and still is). Lately, after a lot of personal work, I feel more comfortable speaking. There is still more work to do for me to become casual about speaking to more than one person. I still challenge myself. I am volunteering to teach (med students no less eek!) and as I have said before, I want to take acting lessons. It has always been easier for me to write than to speak. But still, showing what I write to the world, that hasn't been easy either. I think each one helps the other. The more I write here and find some kind of acceptance, the easier it is to speak up during meetings at work. The better conversations with strangers at parties turn out, the more my writing flows from my true heart. As Tori Amos sings:

"sometimes I hear my voice and it's been HERE silent all these years"

Dusk

This is a poem I wrote more than 20 years ago. I think it relates to the feelings of uncertainty and loneliness that I described in yesterday's post.


I.

Far away a dim light glows
Then the light rays bend
Now, more quickly, the small light goes
Never to be seen again

II.

Why is it that when it's dusk
The world is so hard to see?
It seems that when the vision matters most
The light looks so dim to me

III.

At an earlier age the time was bright
And the roses looked very different from the thorns
But now all the world is night
The dark air is damp from rain
And I often wonder if I am touching a flower
Or, are my fingers too numb to feel the pain?

Searching for truth

From Hardcore Zen: Punk Rock, Monster Movies & the Truth About Reality

But if you really thoroughly question everything, if you pursue your questions long enough and honestly enough, there will come a time when truth will wallop you upside the head and you will know.

Not knowing is what brought me to the spiritual path. As a child in church, I tried very hard to believe, like a good girl should (as I thought she should). I tried and tried and I never felt the knowing, the security, that I had read about others feeling. I was unsure, alone and scared. So then I turned to science. I thought if I could learn everything in the books, if I could become a real scientist, I would know things. But as all scientists learn, what you really find in science are more questions. And what you know, you don't really know because you have to be ready to change your hypothesis to fit any new data that may come along. You can't afford to be sure about anything. We talk to each other using terms like suggest and implicate not know and not certainty. We learn to couch our statements in may and might, to sprinkle words of caution between the statements of fact. Or maybe that's just me. Maybe I am not ready for knowing. The idea of knowing reminds me of my childhood fantasy of some man on a white horse saving me. At first, it was my father, his strong arms comforting me during scary movies and roller coaster rides. Later I hoped for a prince. But those ideas were fantasy. In reality, my father didn't save me, he got drunk and terrorized us. I learned to hope for a savior but at the same time, to save myself, always wishing I could relax, let go and be caught in someone's arms, and at the same time, sadly aware that there were no arms to catch me. I was on my own. I guess that's not too bad but it never seemed enough. Not secure enough, not safe enough. With me alone, there was no absolute, no independent measure. Am I kidding myself, deceiveing myself? How could I know? It was this nagging question that prodded me on this path and it is still pushing. And I am still walking, seeking, searching, and crawling. I hope Warner is right. I hope someday I will know, just simply know. Right now, I can't imagine anything better than that.

What color is your world?

Found this quiz at angel's place. Curiously, she was the same color.

you are turquoise #40E0D0

Your dominant hues are green and blue. You're smart and you know it, and want to use your power to help people and relate to others. Even though you tend to battle with yourself, you solve other people's conflicts well. Your saturation level is higher than average - You know what you want, but sometimes know not to tell everyone. You value accomplishments and know you can get the job done, so don't be afraid to run out and make things happen. Your outlook on life is bright. You see good things in situations where others may not be able to, and it frustrates you to see them get down on everything.

the spacefem.com html color quiz

Some thoughts for Siona

Dear Siona:

You touched my heart with your comment. Although I haven't taken much time lately to blog, I am pretty active in a web forum I believe strongly in, the Childless Stepmom Forum. I am recycling something I wrote there since it gives a view of my mental ruminations of late. I am posting this for you Siona. I am very glad I met you.

Today on the Childless Stepmom Forum the founder posted a meditation that made me consider, for at least the thousandth time, how I can balance the two, seemingly opposed ideologies, which make me feel like I live on a seesaw. One set of philosophies I read and believe in emphasizes dissolving the ego, giving yourself, becoming self-less. I read these and about the lives of people who have done this, Mother Teresa, Gandhi. Who can criticize this? Then I read about another set of philosophies about taking care of yourself, 'good selfishness', etc. I feel in my heart that somewhere these two ideas must meet. I mean, it is kind of selfish to sit all day and meditate, isn't it? That person could be cleaning up trash, taking care of an orphan, campaigning for her choice in the presidential election, protesting poverty. But honestly, I still haven't 'got it'. I haven't come either to a place of balance and harmony with these two seemingly opposing ideas or grasped how they are one and the same. I feel in my heart that something is there for me to grasp, that there is some understanding that is just out of reach but no matter how hard I squint my brain, I don't 'see' it. This feeling is unpleasant and busyness is a great distractor. When I get this feeling, I just let my mind drift to all my unfinished work and poof, the uneasiness disappears.

Busy... too busy

Lot's to do at work and at home so my blogging is on hiatus. Sorry. I may not be back until middle of October :(