N O P A

At the moment of commitment,
the universe conspires to assist you.

-- Goethe --

I had a lovely time Sunday night. I got dressed up and took myself out for dinner in San Francisco. I have been curious about a restaurant on Divisidero that I heard about on Check, Please! called Nopa. When I was walking Saturday afternoon I realized I was standing in front of it at Hayes and Divisidero, but too early (4pm) come in. I made a plan to return in less casual attire (sweatshirt and jeans and sneakers) the next night and take myself out for a treat.

I couldn't have asked anyone (that I currently know) to come along as my plan was to use public transportation all the way, and that's hard to do with anyone not as enthusiastic as me about BART and MUNI. Not just hard to find someone willing to ride a bus at night but also hard to make and accept quick decisions with another person when your 21 bus just leaves before you know what you'll do instead. And that's just what happened as I came up from Civic Center BART. I had planned to take the 21 bus, which runs straight up and down Hayes, but on Sunday night I was surprised to find they run about an hour apart. I had watched it drive away from the stop thinking I'll catch the next one in a few minutes. Eeep. I headed back down stairs to the MUNI station and took the N-Judah to Duboce and Noe, then walked up Duboce to Castro (which turns into Divisidero) and caught the 24 to Hayes.

It was 8pm by then. Nopa was packed, but I'd come all that way and, more importantly, had my attitude of Easy Does It with me, so I strolled in and asked the hostest how long a wait? "About an hour, but it's first-come-first-served at the community table." Ok. Restroom. Less than 5 minutes later I was sitting at the community table next to a pleasant young couple who also just sat down. Within a minute Michelle, of the couple Michelle & Frank of Castro, started a conversation that would last the next 2 hours... with breaks for feasting on our orders.

I had the grilled country pork chop with collard greens and garbanzo beans. Very delicious, although the waiter, Ben, warned me it would take longer to cook than other menu items. Seasoned just right, cooked to perfection -- done, crusty, and tender -- and huge, really big. And I finished everything. Can hardly wait to try some of the other menu items.

The atmosphere was wonderful, just what I was hoping for. Very open space with high ceiling, the building must have been a local bank. The four distinct seating areas make for four distinct restaurants sharing the same space: booth & table; bar; balcony; and, community table. The variety of people, the variety of seating, the delicious food, and feeling Easy Does It, all led to a very satisfying experience. I shall return.

Leaving, I came out to the 21 bus stop to head back via Hayes. The little display indicated I had just missed the bus, again, and the next would arrive in 45 minutes. Not to worry, I didn't have to stand there until a quarter to 11pm, I just used my Easy Does It and back-tracked. Caught the exact same 24 bus going the other way on Divisidero -- I mean it was the same driver and one of the same riders that I had talked to when I was going to the restaurant 2 hours earlier. At first I felt a little nervous waiting late at night by Duboce park for the N-Judah train, but then a young women arrived very at ease on her cellphone and I relaxed. More young people showed up and chit-chatted.

I was home about 11:30pm and very pleased at my adventure, and very happy about the food and the experience. Committing to go, everything seemed to conspire to support that decision. More Nopa and more exploration is called for.

The bottom of it

I have laid back on this couch and looked up out that window for nearly 20 years. Kim's stain-glass flower brings her same still presence to grace the room. My eye follows the trees, which are very tall, some being several houses away, as the tops sway in the late afternoon breezes. I think often about Shirley, our next door neighbor and original owner of her 1951 house. Some of the trees I see through this window are in her backyard.

Now in her early nineties, Shirley's children persuaded her to move to an assisted-care facility not too far away, and an adult grandson lives in the house for now. I looked at the trees and thought of Shirley and a question would come to mind: Having lived next door since my house had been built, did she recall if anyone had ever died here before we moved in? I never have asked her. She does not know that Kim has passed away in this house.

My question was about ghosts. Much stuff in the house is just as Kim left it, even cigarette butts in the ashtray, ephemera written or in the interrupted process of things being moved about. Museum-like. I do not sense Kim's soul in the house. I could be wrong about her soul or some spiritual awareness being here, but if so it is not focused on influencing me, it must be looking at a landscape I cannot see that does not contain me.

My belief is that she is elsewhere now and back in this world, with all of her memories lost -- without exception -- in the bardo of becoming. She has actually moved on and all that remains is her karma, fluxing anew. For me this is like being cast off on a wayside planet, certain knowledge of no contact again, out of her shipping lanes, yet full of my memories and achingly present with these new ones. The light through the window brings the world to the dark of my soul in descent.


As I began my drop into this darkness, others came to me immediately and expressed compassion. Compassion is the signpost that signals a turn to the open air and the ground above. The furious waving and jumping of those on the beach to the drowning one might turn his despair to hope, and energy appears from nowhere to strain again for the breath. But the power of this fall has its own force to propel my soaking debris on down, and I will lean into the drift for the frightening gift of this downward delivery or to sink unsure and alone.

In spiritual matters, and especially in the 12-Step programs, we speak of hitting bottom. In the programs we share our experience of the descent and the landings from which our arms and legs no longer work and fractured face cannot see to go on. When the bottom is reached I have nothing. What I came to see in my life as what I am, it cannot arrive at the lower depths with its forms intact because its materials shift out of phase, flop out like coins slipped from a pocket. Lost connections at the molecular level, the stuff of me turns to mists that mingle with other materials as they fall away. I am less than dead, not food for anything but the incidental weeds. At the bottom I am lost of my conceit, prime stuff lost of will. This is surrender to the Great Power.

Here, at the bottom it is quiet but for the ringing of blood in my ears. I have only to listen in the quiet as I sort the seeds into separate piles. These are memories of the joys, the sadnesses, the faces, the loves, the reality of the pains rutted into my soul. Is this work the right work, is the gift of the descent in this burden?

I still see the trees through the window, blowing in the breezes.

Inventory of email signature lines

I Voted for John Kerry for President

In the garden of gentle sanity,
may you be bombarded by coconuts of wakefulness.

In theory, freedom may be held in high regard; in practice it is experienced as a dizzying loss of meaning and direction.

Never neglect even the slightest positive deed. Just do it.
- Dudjom Rinpoche

Lighten up, or else!

Self-referential meta-talk is the disease of our time.

Do you have a favorite day of the week?

Why do streets have names?

Write a song about yourself!

With its freedoms and advantages, human life is like a treasure island; People of Tingri, do not come back an empty-handed failure.
-Phadampa Sangye

An unprejudiced, intelligent and interested listener is called a vessel.
--Aryadeva, 400 Stanzas (Catusataka)

A point of seeing: if we are unable to establish the criteria of the next level, we will not reach it.
- Robert Fripp

Past performance is not a guarantee of future results.

Breakdown and breakthrough may happen simultaneously.

The Foreboding

by Robert Graves, Poems, 1951

Looking by chance in at the open window
I saw my own self seated in his chair
With gaze abstracted, furrowed forehead,
Unkempt hair.

I thought that I had suddenly come to die,
That to a cold corpse this was my farewell,
Until the pen moved slowly upon paper
And tears fell.

He had written a name, yours, in printed letters:
One word on which bemusedly to pore
No protest, no desire, your naked name,
Nothing more.

Would it be tomorrow, would it be next year?
But the vision was not false, this much I knew;
And I turned angrily from the open window
| agahst at you.

Why never a warning, either by speech or look,
That the love you cruelly gave me could not last?
Already it was too late: the bait swallowed,
The hook fast.

I see your eyes light up like fire, it's medicine to me

Man in ape suit sought for trying to steal bananas

By Associated Press
Posted: May. 21, 2009

Fond du Lac, WI - Fond du Lac police continue a fruitless search for a man wearing an ape costume who has attempted to steal foam banana displays from inside local gas stations.

Capt. Steve Klein says Thursday someone donning an ape costume entered two gas stations Wednesday trying to steal the displays and police have received several calls about the suspect hanging around town.

While Klein acknowledges that the action may seem funny, they want to talk to the person behind the ape suit because they aren't sure what the suspect's motives are.

http://www.jsonline.com/news/wisconsin/45780822.html

Stumbling tumble

In the pit of deepest night, the figure of the pieta bides with us. This maternal endurance and reverie denies time, death, and the obvious truth that life is broken; it appears through the women bathing and perfuming the dead Jesus, through the women in a trailer home, massaging the body of a dead boy so they can bend the limbs, and clean and dress him. Nothing is being made there, but love is being maintained and that is enough; it will have to be enough. From this compassion out of the bottom of hell, everything else will be born.

-Roshi John Tarrant, from "The Light Inside The Dark"

Not desperate nor confident, down to the lower platform to wait with the westerly travelers. I go off on an half empty train at evening rush. Not knowing where I'll stop, not sure how it matters where that will be.

A slow stumble without a sprawl, I stop at the line which leaves me a spot. Tumbling, the memories fall through the door behind me. Old tiles the size of silver dollars, black paint and absinthe. The lines of heads and the bunches too. Spectre-like, a ghostly half presence as they come and go through the door into the isles, silhouettes against the windows onto the busy streets; I see them from my stool on the inside line. Young and purposeful about everything and nothing at all and everything again. "Innocence, consciously or not, longs for experience, longs to be different from itself." It goes so we might know it.

Down, am I still going down in this dark place? Must we go all the way before we can rise? Drifting, sideways moves. That's how it must seem from the outside: like I'm waiting to die, feeling alone. Yes, but no. There is a bent to this dark drift, at the end of the cone an opening up and out into a familiar place.

Not desperate nor confident, down to the toxic platform to wait with the easterly travelers. I go off on an evening rush half empty. Not knowing where I'll arrive, not sure how it matters where that will be.

Decency is the absence of strategy

If you are a warrior, decency means that you are not cheating anybody at all. You are not even about to cheat anybody. There is a sense of straightforwardness and simplicity. With setting-sun vision, or vision based on cowardice, straightforwardness is always a problem. If people have some story or news to tell somebody else, first of all they are either excited or disappointed. Then they begin to figure out how to tell their news. They develop a plan, which leads them completely away from simply telling it. By the time a person hears the news, it is not news at all, but opinion. It becomes a message of some kind, rather than fresh, straightforward news. Decency is the absence of strategy. It is of utmost importance to realize that the warrior's approach should be simple-minded sometimes, very simple and straightforward. That makes it very beautiful: you having nothing up your sleeve; therefore a sense of genuineness comes through. That is decency.

Teaching by Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche
From "Perkiness," a talk given to the Directors of Shambhala Training, July 1978.
Ocean of Dharma Quotes of the Week, May 21, 2009

The Last Day

As a Buddhadhamma practitioner I've reviewed some of the different schools' views on reincarnation and the passage from one life to the next. The Tibetan schools generally follow the ideas presented in the great work, Liberation through Hearing in the Intermediate State, known in the West as "The Tibetan Book of the Dead". The work is a guide the passage between the six intermediate states, called "bardos". It is believed that passage through these intermediate bardo states endures until the inner-breath commences in the new transmigrating form determined by the 'karmic seeds' within the storehouse consciousness. This takes place generally by 7 cycles of 7 days. Today is the 49th day since Kimberly Ann Smith's passing.


Nammo Buddhaya
Nammo Buddhaya
Nammo Buddhaya

Araham
Araham
Araham

Buddham saranam gacchami
Buddham saranam gacchami
Buddham saranam gacchami

My mind is temporarily pure, free from all impurities; free from lust, hatred and ignorance; free from all evil thoughts.

My mind is pure and clean. Like a polished mirror is my stainless mind.

As a clean and empty vessel is filled with pure water I now fill my clean heart and pure mind with peaceful and sublime thoughts of boundless loving-kindness, over-flowing compassion, sympathetic joy and perfect equanimity.

I have now washed my mind and heart of anger, ill will, cruelty, violence, jealousy, envy, passion and aversion.

May you be well and happy!
May you be free from suffering, disease, grief, worry and anger!
May you be strong, self-confident, healthy and peaceful!

Now I charge every particle of my system, from head to foot, with thoughts of boundless loving-kindness and compassion. I am the embodiment of loving-kindness and compassion. My whole body is saturated with loving-kindness and compassion. I am a stronghold, a fortress of loving-kindness and compassion. I am nothing but loving-kindness and compassion. I have sublimated myself, elevated myself, ennobled myself.

May you be well and happy!
May you be free from suffering, disease, grief, worry and anger!
May you be strong, self-confident, healthy and peaceful!

Mentally I create an aura of loving-kindness around me. By means of this aura, I cut off all negative thoughts, hostilities. I am not affected by the evil of others. I return good for evil, loving-kindness for anger, compassion for cruelty, sympathetic joy for jealously. I am peaceful and well-balanced in mind. Now I am a fortress of loving-kindness, a stronghold of morality.

All this I have gained I now give to Kimberly, to her family and friends, and to all living beings.

Kimberly Ann, now a life forgotten by you, as you pass from the bardo of becoming to another life,

May you find happiness and the root of happiness.
May you be free of suffering and the root of suffering.
May you never be separated from the great joy of appreciation, devoid of suffering.
May you dwell in the great equanimity, free from passion, aggression, and prejudice.

Goodbye my love.

It is finished.
[7 x 7 days]

Bom apetite!

I found this photograph (from today's NYTimes.com article "In São Paulo, Brazilian Cuisine Is Back on the Table") too intriguing to pass over. The dish is "a gel with green tomatoes, coriander seeds, Peruvian corn and Amazonian aromatic herbs." Fascinating! My first thought on seeing the NYTimes.com cover thumbnail of this photo was that this was something from a Disney background. Here is the gist of the article:

...the idea that Brazilian cuisine can hold its own is slowly taking hold in São Paulo, thanks to a new generation of chefs looking outward for technique but inward for ingredients and tradition. Attuned to the necessities of presentation by their (mostly) European training and conscious that the heaviness of traditional Brazilian dishes will never pass muster with the gym-going elite, they have created a movement that has given their own nation a new sense of pride in its culinary heritage.

Which is a gist that I like. As you'll see in the body of the article there are a variety of restaurants serving more than just what will "pass muster with the gym-going elite", more traditional and local in form "at about eight times the price and a hundred times the quality".

I've been to enough California small town restaurants to know that there is a local cuisine in almost every place at least garnishing the plate. Recognizing that pattern was a contributor to my fantasy-plan to travel every California road with a town on it and eat where the locals eat. Of course there would be more than eating in the project, but there is more than food to eating where the locals eat, don'cha you know? Ummm, up the Delta for fried egg with homemade salsa on focaccia and mixed garden greens with orchard pear and walnut garlic dressing.

Slipping still

This sensation of falling now feels like drifting. Lost on the sidewalks of breezy days, I slip by. The signs speak to me, the tree leaves speak to me, the weather speaks to me, describing you in the inbetween. We're moving together in two parallel train cars, you with your last half stare to the left and me seeing your image fade behind the glass glare. My body is dizzy as the cars stand still and the scenery slides past.

Drifting, I cannot tell if I'm moving down or slipping some other way. Behind latitude, past longitude? One velocity is no velocity at all. No inertia, no gravity, we're moving through time, I can't see the change but I feel it with my mind. Wiggle or writhe as the nerves strike, it doesn't matter if I'm fired, my phosphorus gone. It doesn't care that I have no choice, I slip still, I have no grip. Frictionless and quiet.

"Not moving, evolving", as you would say. Yes. This slipping drift has no meaning, it is meaning.

It is 8:58 pm. The gathered faithful meditate metta to us all as we slip away. Feel it surround us, holding us even in the inbetween and beyond.

Rough day

I wasted yesterday, I suppose.

Today I listened to recordings of people speaking of their experience, strength and hope when their lives were most difficult. I made some notes.

I spoke with sister June. When to come and what to wear.

I ate my cereal, to which I added flaxseed meal, wheat bran, psyllium seed husks, lecithin, Splenda, cinnamon, dried blueberries, and unsweetened soymilk.

I met with a friend who I talk with Sunday afternoons. We spoke about powerlessness and unmanageability.

I visited the future memorial site, checked on the tables, the effect of scattering dust from various points along the shoreline.

I walked on the river bottom.

I asked for a sign and a huge ship passed by. I was not convinced of my sign-reading ability.

I looked across the river for the presence of a lost friend. Gone, busy. Maybe.

I had a cheese burger and four or five limp french fries. I left a tip and no goodbye.

I bought spinach and almonds and 6 eggs. And Krazy Glue, but it didn't fix my sunglass-clip-on. I bought gas and washed her car.

I drove by the Dollar Tree and by Mayhew and by the last place we went on a Saturday night, and drove by her old shop remembering the times I had dropped her off and picked her up.

I read a letter from sister Kelly. A little sanity and a touch.

I again tried to cancel her eBay seller account on-line but they're still full of obstacles to account cancellation. I'll have to call tomorrow. She had 100% positive ratings.

I watered the plants she planted just before she died. It was hot today.

I sat on the porch and watched the dogs and dog walkers go by. I pondered her gardening shoes and gloves and tools, right where she left them on the porch.

I walked to the end of the street, to where she used to walk Gray to school, to that little path between the houses that has the little bridge over the little stream, under the big oak and hickory trees, that comes out on the back of the baseball field of the elementary school, and then I walked back again, past the yellow house where that nice old man used to live who walked briskly around the block every evening with a big smile, and I thought about Shirley our next door neighbor whose kids moved her out to an assisted living place. She sent a nice thank you note to Kim after we visited her there. Kim kept it in the kitchen card holder where you can see it.

I held her ashes and wished I had my arm around her instead. My mind gets it but not my heart. They've all been without exception rough days. Now I know what missing someone really means. Yes I do.

Tell me what you know

I've been writing here, posting photos, sharing my days and my inner weirdness and so on. I've put a lot of personal information up here, thoughts and feelings of sincerity and candor, while I've been vulnerable. This is the most difficult experience of my life, which amounts to nothing compared to Kim's difficulty. This is all a shattering, real story.

I've talked to many people, before and afterward, and you people have a great deal of personal information about me. But what do I know about you*? What have you kept to yourself, protected yourself about? Maybe this is not as difficult for me as it has been for you, I don't know. I'm certainly aware that I'm not the only person influenced here. Have you been affected by all this? How, and why? Maybe you have a completely different take, one I'd never guess. Time for you to stop lurking. Tell me what you know or leave a comment. And keep it personal, please.

So, what's this about Memphis Minnie's corn muffins? And who's that conscience sticking on the sole of my shoe?


*There are two who have been very open and personal with me, and I thank them for their sanity. I respect your privacy here. You are a constant source of experience, strength and hope for me.

Purple People Eater

For absent friends

Sunday at six when they close both the gates
a widowed pair,
still sitting there,
Wonder if they're late for church
and it's cold, so they fasten their coats
and cross the grass, they're always last.

Passing by the padlocked swings,
the roundabout still turning,
ahead they see a small girl
on her way home with a pram.

Inside the archway,
the priest greets them with a courteous nod.
He's close to God.
Looking back at days of four instead of two.
Years seem so few (four instead of two).
Heads bent in prayer
for friends not there.

Leaving twopence on the plate,
they hurry down the path and through the gate
and wait to board the bus
that ambles down the street.

from Nursery Cryme by Genesis, oh so long ago.

Dedicated to you but you weren't listening.

[6 x 7 days]

reflection: understanding

When you pass I am a heliotrope. Your health, your goodness, your answers; I crave it. Your center is the vast atmosphere from which my breath comes in and to which it goes out again. Everything I thought important drops away when I understand you.

When I understand you I plunge into the source and saturate with its water. When you speak from the center I am compelled to your mode: present and everlasting. When I understand you I am full of color, vibrant. My doubts soften, constrictions weaken. When I understand you I am transparent, surprised again at the clarity of the center. We are home again, no longer alone.

When I understand you I do not produce this spirit by my attention, it is uncovered in me by its link with you. This takes me past my deepest pain.

Through understanding you are real, heroic, and enormously seductive. You are revealed, I am revealed. The wilderness becomes our garden. Just there, unexamined; just this, actually.

reflection: appreciation

Here in this world where we live everything has substance, texture. I am in the place where the event happens, contact is made, wind exchanged. I came to from a vast emptiness, a womb of no dimension and no boundary, eyes shocked by the light and lungs gulping. This is where everything I know became possible. This is where you are, so what choice did I have but to come here?

I have lived well, attending to the details of being attended to. I expand and contract. My feet have thick, old calluses. My face and back and chest are pitted. My vital organs have aged and mastered their relationships. This is mine and I know it. I am of the nature to decay. I have not got beyond decay. I am of the nature to be diseased. I have not got beyond disease. I am of the nature to die. I have not got beyond death. All that is mine, beloved and pleasing, will change and vanish. In this way, every day, I appreciate.

I don't need to understand because that is just one thing of many. In the way a child calls "Mother", I am made less lonely. When I was young I dug in the dirt with my fingers. Holes and paths, caves and forts; black strips on my finger tips where the nails filled with earth. I can smell the sun on the ground under the bushes where the plastic army men fought and regrouped and bivouacked. The knees tore and the laces broke. Mom fretted at the grass stains. Laying on the lawn we looked at the blue and the clouds and talked about the things they meant. Then she kissed me, and I brushed her cheek and neck with my soft hand. This is the lower part of me, and through it we connect.

This is what I offer back to understanding's highest emptiness, so it can be touched. I am the owner of my kamma, heir to my kamma, born of my kamma, related to my kamma, abide supported by my kamma. Whatever kamma I shall do, whether good or evil, of that I shall be the heir. This is life. This is my contribution, my offering, my appreciation.

I know what I want

Anthony Grand asked for a dollar

Had a long talk with Paula today. I was glad to see her; her health appears to have improved lately, and I so hope that is true. We didn't talk about her health. She has a new index of possibilities: she is smart, content, and even happy, despite chosing to live with the danger. Her choice is to live with her love in full awareness of the risks. It is an informed decision, we agreed, that manifests her faith. We were afraid, in hindsight, that newbies who heard her story might misconstrue her choice as naïve or as validating their uninformed choices to live with danger, as if we had power over it. Paula is a beautiful person, strong despite her health, full of willingness and faith. I wish her all the best, and I look forward to talking again.

Lauri is happy. Lauri wants Brian to be happy. Brian wants to be happy. I want Lauri to be happy, and Brian too. I was happy again. It will all happen, give it time, a little love; things go like this. Is the devil in the paint of my red guitar?

The neighbors are having their daily sex right now. She's rather loud about it, theatrical even. My goodness gracious! They're young carnivores, bless their hearts.

Ripping David Sylvian's Alchemy - An Index of Possibilities. The genre is listed as "unclassifiable".

The Grand Lake was flat tonight, although the movie was thrilling and entertaining. Spock and Uhura are hot. The organ bellowed against hollow walls and the back of heads. Row mates were happy to have me take the isle seat, even shook my hand. It was dark. I cried every 10 minutes just for 10 seconds. I was alone, no one else was there. A big empty room full of people. Spock and Uhura, young carnivores.

I ate too much junk today. High quality junk, but junk. The latke with salsa, the bagel, the chocolate pavé, the pizza. Ugh my skin is too tight.


Anthony Grand asked for a dollar tonight. My question is What do I want?

Transformation underway

Yesterday at twilight I was walking in Concord down Grant Street, between the hospital and the high school, and I heard an unusual bird call. Stopping and looking up and around and in back of me, I saw where the sound was coming from as the bird flew across the street and landed on a telephone wire. A small hawk being harassed by a hummingbird.

[5 x 7 days]

Sitting shivah: healing through the dark emotions

A number of friends and acquaintances have mentioned recently to me that they are both reading my blog and experiencing effects of losing someone close. I am greatly supported by the sympathy and compassion, as well as by the interest in my doings here, and I want to give a little back.

A couple of years ago I picked up a copy of this Shambhala book, "Healing through the Dark Emotions", by Miriam Greenspan. I read the book cover to cover from the perspective of someone who is straining through changes in my marriage relationship that require mourning from what is no longer to be in the relationship. I found it quite helpful -- exercise 31 introduced me to prayer in a way that I continue to practice today -- but also I found it affecting and poetic, full of insight from her personal experiences and from her therapy cases, and also liberal with quotes from the great sages of all wisdom traditions.

The most compelling reason for me to look at this book for personal help is stated in her preface: "This book will argue that our emotional illiteracy as a species has less to do with our inability to subdue negative emotions than it does with our inability to authentically and mindfully feel them. What looks like a problem with emotional control actually has its source in a widespread ignorance about how to tolerate painful emotional energies and use these energies for emotional, spiritual, and social transformation."

I've picked the book off my shelf again in just the last week. The reading has new messages for me because my perspective has changed to the dramatic experience of losing Kim, my companion of 30 years. Now I have the finality that was unknown to me in the changes of our relationship when I first read the book. Then, in my approach the subject matter, there was always an unspoken possibility of changes in the relationship with Kim; now that is only historical.

I'd like to quote more than a couple of paragraphs from the chapter "From Grief to Gratitude"...

Grief is a psychospiritual process. As the conventional ego begins to give way, the spirit can do griefwork. Griefwork is not a return to the pre-loss status quo. People do not get "back to normal" after a child dies, or after any profound loss. Grief is an opportunity not for "resolution," as in the popular parlance, but for transformation: a wholly new awareness of reality, self, beloved, and world.

Death unseats the dominance of the conventional self that psychologists call the ego. The ego falls apart, awash in feelings of sorrow, anguish, despair. These painful states alternate with periods of emptiness, numbness, lifelessness, paralysis. Everything seems an effort. A stack of dishes in the sink can be utterly defeating. At the same time, there is a perceived discrepancy between the ego's pain and the seeming indifference of the universe. The ego screams its "NO!" in to the void.

Many in mourning ask: How is it that the world can go on turning, just as it did before, that people go about their business in precisely the same way, that the mail comes and sun shines, and everyone looks pretty much the same, when in fact life, as it has been lived, has been destroyed?

This question is asked from the strikingly narcissistic point of view of the conventional self, based on its "normal" distortion of reality: the illusion of being the center of the universe. The world turns as it did before precisely because the conventional ego is not at the center of it! Loss, particularly sudden or unexpected death, shatters the ego's normal grandiosity, its center-stage illusion of control.

This subversion of the normal ego creates on opening for a transformed sense of self to emerge. In the alchemy of grief, the shattered ego's surrender to the inescapable reality of death ushers in a wider perspective--a larger self that can accept death, not as punishment, but as part of the circle of life. While the ego suffers, in T.S. Eliot's words, "like a patient etherized upon a table," this larger self grows, and with it, an awe before the mysteries that lie at the heart of existence, an ability to live fully in the present moment, and a gratitude for all things that are born and die.

Excess of sorrow laughs. Excess of joy weeps.
Joys impregnate. Sorrows bring forth.
--William Blake, Proverbs of Hell

Author Mirian Greenspan has a website with quotes from the book. I don't think the site gets much tending, it has not changed over the years I've seen it. There are excerpts from almost all the chapters, and other information. It seems unlikely you could walk into a book store and find this book, although it is still in print and available on-line. If you have looked at other books on this topic because of a strong personal need, I highly recommend that you give this volume a review too.

May we never be separated from the Great Joy of Appreciation devoid of suffering.

Un pie en Oakland en el Cinco de Mayo

La superación de la ausencia de los testigos ...


Y los guardianes de las tierras altas ...


Introducción de los barrios de la familia y los fantasmas* ...


Vadeando el poderoso flujo de ...


Ascendente alterar la ...


Néctares abundan ...


El logro de un plano más elevado ...


Una abundancia espiritual espera a los fieles ...


VIVA! Cinco de Mayo

*En realidad no me estoy refiriendo a la nieve el hombre en la puerta, pero el fantasmal puntos blancos volando hacia arriba en el primer plano de la imagen. Ellos no aparecen en la fotografía anterior o siguiente, sólo delante de esta vieja casa.

Street Spirit

This is a good acquaintance of mine, Elaine. I've been speaking with Elaine for the last 3 years. Over the last 10 years, of three Oakland people living on the streets that I've come to know and speak with regularly, she is the only one still around. She has a very hard life, and she is very tough. I always give her some money, for my own good (stingy bastard), but she is more interested in telling me what is going on in her life and in hearing what is going on in mine. She is much more disappointed if I don't stop and talk than if I don't leave her with some change. She was kind enough to let me photographer her today ("May I exploit you?", "Sure, I'm always up for that!"), but I feel obliged to leave her personal details for her to tell you someday if you get to meet her (send me a note). We've been through life and death together, so to speak. And she is a very good artist, too.

I have met few people who so clearly care about what happens to me and what I think, and who ask for so little and yet so much in return. Thank you, Elaine, for letting me have your portrait today. Bless you.

Philip in twelve parts

A couple of weeks ago I came home late and, uncharacteristically, turn on the TV. KQED channel 9 was somewhere in the middle of airing "Glass: a portrait of Philip in twelve parts". I had not seen it before and was instantly fascinated, sent a text message to "put it on" to a friend who has the philosophy dealing with such notions as the beautiful, the ugly, the sublime, etc., to appreciate the subject, and got myself very excited as the interesting presentation unfolded. Afterward I checked the KQED web site to see when it would be on again so I could see the part I'd missed; it was a special episode of American Experience and would not be aired again... but, this was a prerelease viewing of an upcoming DVD, available April 21. Checked out the DVD web site and bought myself a copy right then and there.

My friend who I sent the text message to was interested but the TV was not available. I had on my mind, because the show was outstandingly good, that I would loan her the DVD to watch at her leisure. So now I have the DVD to loan.

I watched the DVD this last Saturday evening. Disc 1, which is the main theatrical production, was fabulous. I had only seen the second half of the show on TV. Philip Glass, his family, friends, mentors, and followers, and the performances of his works, are all fascinating. I highly recommend this show, unless you don't care anything about Philip Glass, in which case it would probably not be good place to invest your money or time. That's OK with Philip, by the way.

Every day is a little different

Hand-tinted photo of an old Kim boyfriend (me)

Such a difficult morning. I made a foray through a very old box of Kim photos, a box she kept that were her memories, to be separate from our family photos. I bumped into the box years ago, tucked away in a cabinet in the garage, when we were on a hunt for some missing thing or other. I glanced at the photos in the box and recognized this was not really my business and put it back. I have avoided the box over the years because of the photographic presence of some old boyfriends and adventures before Kim and I were a couple. I had actually forgotten the box until today when I was in the garage doing laundry, it just popped into my mind.

Some very endearing Kim photos appear in the previous blog entry from today (below). There is nothing unhuman or uniquely original about what I am experiencing, but there is no way that I can relate this to you that would give you knowledge of what I experience. The emotions come out just crazy like a knocked over fire hydrant. And I confess I shredded photos of one of the ex-boyfriends, a friend of mine who turned enemy and still evokes much pain.

One very unexpected influence of looking at these photos of young Kim was that it put me emotionally back to the time when I met her, when I didn't have 30 years of marriage as a perspective on our relations, when I had the strong attraction to her but it seemed very unlikely that she would ever "pick me" over the handsome, attractive guys she was with. It felt like impossible gambling, so precious and right and so unlikely; there was that edge evoked today that was so prevalent for me during those early years. There were a lot of obstacles for us when we met and in the several years after.

The picture of her on the beach evokes for me the feel of the hot sand and the smell of the ocean and the sound of the waves from the many times we snuck off to a little hidden spot in Malibu. These photos put me back there and put me in touch with the very young and attractive girl who swept me away for the rest of my life.

...And the parts of the days, too, are different. The morning went one way, the afternoon went another. I met with some old and new friends in the afternoon together for talking about how we are doing and how our lives are going, and got a chance to speak one-on-one with one of those friends later over coffee. I feel much better after getting together with good people who care about each other and know, as well as understand, what is going on in each others' lives. One friend had just spent the morning with a good friend while she passed away; she shared some helpful experience and strength and some useful grief counseling flyers. (Thank you, see you soon.) Now I'm off for dinner with another good friend. The weather is fine, she suggested we go somewhere we can eat outside.

I was pleased to see John and Melanie today, friends who moved to Oakland. They look marvelous!

Finality is crashing like cannons today.

Madness.
Not even the slightest chance,
another moment, another word,
another glance.
How can she be so distant
and so close?
We die every moment, forever.
Nowhere to run, ever.
Refuge in nonattachment, only.
How can she be so distant
and so close?
This is madness.

I i'VE AbbAG...wha?

This was in the restroom of the frenchish bakery in Cole Valley today. What do you suppose they were trying to say? And to whom?






And in other news today, I made it over to Cafe Trieste in Berkeley at last. A friend highly recommended it, I wrote a poem about it, and now I've been there. The coffee was good. Nice wood.