On Losing Weight

I've lost about 40 pounds in the last few months. I need to lose 10 or 15 pounds more. But at this point, my clothes are mostly too big, I've got to punch more holes in my belts, I have more energy and can perform more tasks, and losing weight has proved to be quite a counter to the persistent fatigue that is a consequence of rheumatoid arthritis. 

I was at one point getting so heavy (at 240+ pounds) that I could barely get around, but sitting still or lying down was very uncomfortable too. I set a goal to lose weight, but even though I changed my diet, nothing seemed to happen for months. Then all of a sudden, weight started coming off, and I've tended to lose about a pound a week ever since -- with several plateaus along the way when nothing came off for a week or two.

I never consciously tried to lose weight in the past. In fact, for most of my life, I was darned skinny, tallish and not very well-built at all. A "rail." I didn't start gaining weight until I stopped smoking in the early '90s, but even then, I didn't weigh much above 180 or so -- which was still 40 pounds more than I'd weighed when I was smoking. Then when I developed rheumatoid arthritis about 6 years ago and was treated with large doses of prednisone, I gained weight at a remarkable clip, and even when I stopped taking prednisone, I kept gaining weight. 

It's only been about a year and a half ago that I set a goal of losing weight, at least 50 pounds, and less than a year since I actually started seeing weight loss. 

I feel better, much better. My rheumatoid arthritis is largely under control. I have not had a flare in several years, medications have been reduced, and overall, I'm well enough to accomplish much or most of what I set out to do. 

There is still so much more that needs doing. 

One of those things, of course, is this One Last Trip to California. I'm looking forward to it, and yet... there is a finality to it, a closing chapter, that I am struggling with. Ms. Ché isn't going, she has other plans (one of which involves taking a very sick cat to the vet) and she believes she is needed more here at home than on the road with me. And I think about how many times she and I made the trip between California and New Mexico on our own -- she often to attend writers' conferences, me to rest and work on the house -- and the times we came here together though we were still living in California. 

As we age, we see things differently, and reminiscence comes to the fore. As elders, we have stories to tell, and Ms. Ché has spent much of her life preparing to tell quite a story. I've been telling mine all along. But she's held back, mulling over the best way to communicate her extraordinary life. She's done it in plays and poems and creative nonfiction, but she's got so much more to add. I think that's part of what she'll be working on while I'm gone.

As for me, it's more like touching elements of the past, touching lightly, remembering positives, and doing a brief Kerouac-ian pilgrimage along Highway 1, Big Sur and Bixby Canyon and all that, just because. More than just that, though. There is a kinship that goes back a long way, and it's a form of honor. I wouldn't be back with Zen, for example, without Ti Jean's inspiration so long ago that came back in a flood. 

So. 

That's a minor update. Nothing more...

Listening to the Translator

Huh. Last evening's Dharma talk, or just talk, I'm not sure it was to be taken as Dharma, by the translator of the Vimalakirti Sutra was a hoot. 

Dude is 80 and has translated numerous Buddhist works and was ordained by the Dalai Lama and left the monastery to go teach at Columbia and who knows where else, and he has all kinds of degrees and not much of it matters because he doesn't know anything, and don't take what he says as gospel, he's just sharing what he can, you know?

He talked a mile a minute, clearly enjoying every minute of it, and informing the gathered multitude as he did, both about Vimalakirti and himself and Buddhism and whatever you want. I mean it's all the same in the end, isn't it?

I've said the sutra is one of the more enjoyable I've encountered, and after listening to Robert Thurman talk about it last evening, I think I know why. He loves it. He loves what he is able to do, and if he could, he would just keep doing it forever. But he's old, like so many of us are getting, and he won't be able to keep going forever, so why not meet in Costa Rica and have a grand old time? (He said he hoped to meet with Roshi in Costa Rica soon, or maybe somewhere else... but of course with the pandemic and the infirmities of age, it's not clear that that will ever be possible.)

So much of Zen and Buddhism is presented as something so damned serious and it's really not. Not if you scratch deep enough. There's a lot more hilarity and silliness than sometimes the abbots and roshis and senseis and such want to let on. 

And so, Robert Thurman has my admiration for making our task as students of the Sutra of Vimalakirti an enjoyable exercise, an uplifting Dharma teaching, and much less of a struggle than it might otherwise be.

🙏

Thurman's Wiki page is almost as fun as he is:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Thurman

And if you're into this sort of thing, go to his own website:

https://bobthurman.com/

Contradictions: "You're Doing It Wrong!"

 Ha.

I do find the Sutra of Vimalakirti's Teaching to be funny and serious at the same time. It is filled with contradictions -- rather like Buddhism itself -- and it is almost entirely the story of Wealthy Householder Vimalakirti (sick) telling everyone, from the lowliest to the highest gods and Buddhas, you're doing it wrong.

Householder: Vimalakirti is a layman, not ordained or having taken vows or shut up in a monastery. Oh my no. He's a rich and important man in a rich and important city, though, and thus he has stature and merit, and he is listened to by the people of the city and his is well-regarded for his wisdom and generosity.

The Sutra of Vimalakirti is said to be over 2000 years old, going back nearly as far as the Sakyamuni Buddha himself. It's very, very different than practically anything you'd find in other spiritual texts of the era, certainly different than anything in the Bible. 

I call it "magical realism" in that the sutra is filled with gods and goddesses, buddhas, demons and their hordes of attendants and myriad people, bodhisattvas, bhikkus, and ordinaries in their various qualities and multitudes listening intently to the teachings of Vimalakirti and becoming enlightened spontaneously. 

Well, sure. Of course. 

It seems perfectly natural given the context.

Contradictions abound. Dualities and nondualities. We live our lives in a hot mess of "what is." If there is a purpose to the practice of Zen and Buddhism, it is threading our way through it and helping others along the way.

As someone said very early in my study: We are already enlightened; we do not acquire enlightenment through the practice or through any effort of our own. What happens is unfolding, rather like a lotus blossom opening. We come to the realization of what we already are. 

OK.

I haven't finished the sutra. I probably won't before leaving for California, but that's OK. There should be plenty of time to read it and re-read it before the end of the practice period. 

Vimalakirti

The Teaching of Vimalakirti Sutra (211 pg pdf with commentary) is the text for this practice period. I'm part way into it, and I said to one of the teachers that I found it astonishing, not at all what I expected, and filled with wonder. "It's poetic, isn't it?" I pondered that for a moment. No, or possibly yes, or both at once. It's a work of art. I thought but didn't say. A work of transcendent art. Not meant to be taken literally, with tens of thousands of gods and goddesses arrayed around the householder Vimalakirti to hear his teaching and obtain enlightenment. It's a metaphor. Magical realism, maybe.

Constant drumbeat of contrasting dualities. This not that, not this not that, nor this either. You're doing it wrong. Teaching the Mahabodhisattvas what they're doing wrong and how to do it right. No matter how close they come, how far they are from perfection, even the Lord Buddha himself.

One of the topics and questions I brought up at the initial practice interview was that of Desire, and how should we approach Desire without becoming attached to it, or rather attached to what we desire. As the Buddha found and says, Desire -- or attachment to what we desire -- is the cause of and source of Suffering. 

And I thought the response was fascinating, not at all what I expected, and something I'm continuing to chew over: "Desire is life."

Oh so many levels in that one simple phrase. I won't go through those levels here right now, as I am by no means of the Wisdom of householder Vimalakirti, but... yes. 

And I brought up the Enso, the uncompleted circle, the pattern of my life. Of so many lives.

I confess, I'm not following the discipline of the practice period this time around. I sit when I sit for as long as I sit rather than formally sitting at set times for set lengths of time with the rest of the participants in sangha. This is not an act of deliberate separation from the sangha. Indeed, when I settle among them, which is every day, several times a day, I feel embraced and embracing. The point, however, is that the sangha is of the mind, much more so than of the body, and once embraced and embracing of the sangha, it never goes away. It is part of you, and you are part of it, no matter what you are doing or where you are. Just so with sitting zazen and other forms and rituals of Buddhism and Zen. And, too, the Dharma. 

The forms and rituals of sitting and practice are training aids.

Once you "get it" you don't have to practice in that way, but you certainly can. Once you "get it" ideally your life becomes Practice. Full time.

Which is part of what Vimalakirti is getting at in his teaching of the gods and bodhisattvas and buddhas. 

Your practice is your life. 

Fall Practice Period

Yes. I've now begun the Fall Practice Period with the Zen Center -- online, of course, via Zoom and several texts, primarily the Vimalakirti Sutra, one I'd never encountered before (oh, there are so many of those😊🙏) which I'm finding both astonishing and hilarious. This is not what I expected.

But then, what did I expect? After the Spring Practice Period, I felt refreshed and renewed and able to accomplish many of the tasks I'd set for myself, like clearing out some of the deadwood on our place and getting set for the arrival of the last of our stuff from California while growing something of a garden of corn and beans and squash and peppers and tomatoes. 

Well, the corn and beans and most of the squash has been harvested. We ate most of the beans already. The blue corn is drying and if all goes well, we'll grind it into flour for atole in a month or so. The squash is waiting for the right meal, but our crop was not abundant. Many, many squash blossoms, but not so many squashes, they say because it's hard to ensure fertilization. Especially without bees, and we've never had those around here. 

The tomatoes did reasonably well. There were a couple of hail storms that caused some damage, though, and so now that we're near the end of the season, picking the last of the tomatoes, we can see how they might have done better in a greenhouse, like our farmer friends down the road do with theirs. Our temporary greenhouse is too small to grow the tomatoes beyond starting the plants, while they have three huge hoop houses where the tomatoes can reach to the sky. 

The peppers were very flavorful and we will no doubt grow those varieties again. 

There were some failures as well. I grew spinach for the first time here (I'd grown it in California). It bolted within a couple of weeks. Will have to re-think planting and caring for the plants. They will need much more shade than I provided, and that's something I have to keep considering. We're so high in the mountains that pretty much anything we try to grow gets sunburned and at least some shade is a requirement for many plants, especially when they're young. Me too. I get sunburned easily, and so I'm usually shrouded in hats and gloves and long sleeves and sunglasses. Quite a sight. 

The corn flourished at first but then was beset by the grasshoppers, spider mites and caterpillars. We harvested a lot nevertheless, so I'm not disappointed. First time growing blue corn last year did not go well, but I learned that it had to do with where I planted it. There are several spots around our place that I think were used as trash dumps over the years, and planting does not do well on those sites. Live and learn!

There are some sites we discovered this year that are almost swampy after rains. We knew there were places where water puddled, but this was different. These were places we hadn't noticed before where water would collect underground rather than on the surface, so there weren't any puddles. Instead, it was wet enough for long enough below the surface for plants (in our case, weeds!) to flourish. And these places were right next to dust-dry areas where practically nothing will grow even with irrigation.

All this is preparation for Practice Period, and there is much more. This afternoon, I'll have an interview with one of the teachers for the month long session, a priest I've met with several times (via Zoom!) since the spring. I've told him he was the reason I got involved with this Zen center -- there are others after all -- because of his approach to the Diamond Sutra a couple of years ago. I thought he was doing it just right through indirection rather than wrestling with it directly, and I appreciated that compared to something that might have been. I told him a bit about my own life and practice. How I got to Zen in the first place (oh, those many years ago) and where I saw myself going with it. 

There has been much progress (I think) since then, but there has been plenty of backsliding too. That's part of the process, but still... I tend to think of things more directionally and I need to discuss and consider the unclosed circle (enso) concept more thoroughly. The direction is around and around, isn't it?

And so we begin. 🙏

On Planning (One Last?) Trip to California

Wow. This has turned into a strange and headache making adventure, if you want to call it an adventure given that it's becoming more like a quest or troubled desire.

You see we still have stuff in storage in California that we weren't able to bring with us when we moved (9 years ago!) and haven't had the opportunity to move out here (or get rid of) since. I know moving is a big task -- especially if you've been in the same place many years as we were in our little house in California -- and sorting stuff and getting rid of stuff you don't need can take forever. Easier just to put it in storage and deal with it "later." But then the years go by, you have other things to do, and voila! The task you set never gets done.

So the time came. The storage unit rental had reached astronomical levels (I thought, anyway) and most of the stuff we have there is stuff I didn't know about because I was busy packing up the last of the house into the van while others were taking odds and ends I never saw to the storage unit in the rental truck.  

Three years ago (or was it four?) we did a quick trip out there to work on clearing out the storage, but we didn't get very far. Ms Che found something she treasured in the storage unit, something she thought had been lost forever, something of her mother's, and that was basically it as far as doing any more work there. We took three or four pick up loads of things that shouldn't have been saved in the first place to the dump, packed the treasure and a few other items (pictures and such, an antique floor lamp with a Downton Abbey shade) into the car and drove home to New Mexico.

That's when we discovered how much oil the car uses! Oh, I didn't know. It's an older Subaru and apparently they have an oil consumption issue I hadn't heard of until the engine ran out of oil just over the New Mexico border from Arizona. Well, we eventually made it home after limping into a truck stop and buying quarts and quarts of oil to put in the engine, and the car seems to have recovered well enough. We figure it can make it to California and back one more time -- so long as we add a quart of oil or so at every gasoline fill up. Details.

So after a year of going nowhere because of the pandemic, we got a terse little note from the storage facility that the automatic monthly charge had been turned down by the bank, and oh, there would be a late charge, and oh the rent is going up again (!) and oh, would I like to take care of it by check or credit card?

Oh, I'd like to get the stuff out of there and save the nearly $300 a month for other things.

Twenty Years On

I was going through old papers, burning the ones that didn't need saving -- meaning most of them -- and one that was kind of striking was the receipt from the Executive Hotel Pacific in Seattle for a five day stay, 9/10/2001 - 9/14/2001. The total was just over $600, whatever the Government rate was (I think it was $105 in Seattle at the time). The hotel is across the street from the Central Library and my room (on the 5th floor?) faced the construction site. The old library was being demolished in preparation to construct the new gleaming one that stands on the site today. I remember waking up to the sound of what I thought was a pile driver and a wailing siren. It was just about 6am.

I washed up and kept hearing the siren and pile driver. I remember looking out the window at the construction site. Didn't see anything out of the ordinary. The morning was a little bit foggy. I turned on the teevee, and the news on every channel running news was showing the burning World Trade Center Tower, the hairdos and makeup jobs expressing puzzlement, most seeming to think it was an accident that probably involved a small private plane. And then a large, four engine jet, probably a commercial airliner, appeared out of nowhere on the screen and struck the second tower. I think the talking heads were talking with the camera on them when this happened. It may or may not have been split screen. I'm not sure now. 

But suddenly, the talking heads seemed to realize what was happening was no accident. They were still puzzled. But two planes into two towers was no coincidence. Their ear pieces were were no doubt filled with chatter from producers and floor directors and such. I watched for a while, switching channels, and just after 7:00am, I called the office to find out what the plan for the day would be. "Come in," I was told. "We'll do what we can."

What that was, who knew?

I continued watching the news until shortly after the Pentagon was hit, and then I walked to the office a few blocks away.

What we did was watch the news on the big screen and try to get direction from HQ in DC. They initially said continue with our original schedule. I was conducting training classes, so that's what I was to do for the interim. The class was a disaster. Half the students didn't show up, and those that did couldn't concentrate, so we broke up and went into the meeting room to watch the news on the big screen. Everyone was sent home early, the class told to return in the morning to pick up where we left off. 

Surprisingly, or maybe not, we were able to complete the training the following day, and I spent the next two days in Seattle strategizing ways to get home (no commercial flights, remember?) and helping out with office things when I could. Everyone was in a daze, uncomprehending really. No one that I was aware of was in a rage of bloodlust determined to go war-rampaging in the Middle East. The news was on the big screen, but we only watched occasionally. Nobody actually knew what was going on or what would happen, and HQ in DC was not at all communicative. 

Finally, I was able to rent a car from Alamo and a colleague and I loaded up and headed south. Took two days. We were practically silent the whole way, in shock. Much shaking of heads at the news on the car radio. "This will not turn out well." No, no it won't. And no it didn't. One tragic thing has led to another and to many, many others since. 

I applaud getting out of Afghanistan -- even when Trump announced it. It was the right thing to do, as I believed sincerely that going into Afghanistan on the side of myriad murderous warlords was wrong. Afghanistan was not the cause of the 9/11/2001 attacks, and it wouldn't be the cause of the Endless Wars our rulers decided to conduct. Afghanistan wasn't even a side-show to all of that and yet it bled like any other war-theatre, and hundreds of thousands of Afghans died because they were in the wrong place at the wrong time or they wore the wrong kind of clothes or the war-gamers in Florida wanted/needed a kill for the win. It was a foolish goon show that did nothing at all to lift either Afghanistan or the US or perhaps especially Nato from the mire of neo-imperialism.

It's supposedly "over". We'll see.

I left government service in 2009, fed up with the increasing insanity within. That's what I saw. A creeping but unstoppable insanity that was consuming government and those who served. It became worse, much worse, upon the election of Barack Obama, and that's when I became convinced I had to get out. I know many of my colleagues saw the same trends, and many got out before I did. Some died. 

On the internet we discuss how Bad this or that Leader is, how deeply antithetical Government is to the wants and needs of The People -- however we define that mass -- and how grotesque the Government is and has been, yada-yada, world without end. 

It's team sports. It's a game. Nothing fundamental ever changes. We may rail and argue constantly, but how many have any intent to change anything for the better or even understand there may be something better to change to? We coulda. We shoulda. We didn't.

So here we are.

Biden is providing a pause to the general insanity of Government, but the overall trend remains the same. The continuing hysterics over the withdrawal from Afghanistan shows how deeply compromised and corrupted the so-called "defense" industry and almost all the media has become -- or maybe they always were. To me, it's most stark on BBC where there appears to be a neo-imperial cult in charge, and where nothing at all is ever permitted to counter the Official Narrative that Afghanistan was Wonderful under the rule of the Imperial Powers/USA, and everything has gone to shit under the Taliban, though sotto voce, you might hear something like (shh, it's the way most Afghans want it....shhhh). 

Getting out was a matter of my own sanity. Getting as far away as I prudently could was part of that. And then one day the Madness came silently up behind me and thwacked me solidly on the head. I still have a divot in my brow-ridge where that tomahawk (come on!) hit me. That was a reminder that I'm not that far away from it at all. It can come up behind us at any time and Thwack! 

Twenty years on, everything is different, but nothing really has changed.