Love the one you're with

That's a tough statement for me to make. I sit here alone, except for me. Love me? Well, yes. I know how to use that statement now. Stephen Stills had something else in mind, but if you've been through what I've been through (and many of you have), "Love the one you're with" will have special meanings.

I was alone, especially in a crowd. I was at a loss for what to do, what to do with conflicts, with failures, even with successes. I couldn't say "no", I had to take care of you to take care of me. I felt anger when you said no. Then conflict was turmoil, and turmoil was failure. I was afraid you would point out my worth, so I took every opportunity to rescue, to save, to fix, to make myself indispensable. I doubted me. I failed, over and over, and successes were merely favors from others or dumb luck. So I failed, I damaged, I resented. I ignored. I was at your mercy and I was neglected. I was helpless. I was forgettable, invisible. Worst, perhaps, I was manageable.

Right now inside I feel a beating heart. Breath comes in, these lungs fill with ease, slight stretch of muscles, diaphragm pushes down. So familiar, so self-sufficient. Lacking in story, breathe in, breathe out. And I know this, I am in it, and I don't have to make it succeed or hold it up from failure. I do not have contact with it, the breathing is me. Calm. Steady. Not greedy, not lacking. I was alone, now have I comfort.

I come to you, all of you who know and have lived to share your experience. You may not understand me or even like me. You do not tell me what to do, you tell me what you know and where you've been and where you're heading, and by whose grace you go. Now I see my next step, with gratitude.

I saw that your strength came from faith, whether you fell or not. I found confidence inside me as I said "yes" and "no" and I was not destroyed. The truth happened instead of my fear, and in that space I found strength.

There, I held onto anger like holding a burning coal, fueled by fear of conflict, as if my very being depended on that grip. Here I have always been unshakable, unmovable, and always ever other than that. Just this. Here, becoming is a vast place of peace.

The burden I saw on your back has vanished. My worth is my own. And although I cannot see into tomorrow I believe it will be there. This moment is blessed with hope.

I have felt these truths, I know what they feel like. Their shapes and colors, sandpaper and silk. They find me indispensable. My doubt has turned to devotion.

I have bruised myself, I have twisted and broken my last bit of chance. I did not know, I could not see, I was afraid and little and my patience so thin. No more yelling at me, no more of my snide swipes. I am forgiven.

I was strong and didn't feel it. I was smart and didn't see it. I was caring and tenderly dressed wounds in the dark. I lived another day, I made amends and was mended. I am a survivor in this world.

The mess is clearing, and it is not a mess at all. It is my life as I've known it, this place where all of my life has happened. It is what I've been and what I am and what I will be, and it is always ever other than that. I remember it. I see it. It is beyond me as well as mine. Held, like my mother's touch. Dust was in my eyes.

Love the one you're with.

"Any feelings of love or hate for anything, those will be your aides and partners in developing paramita, or transcendant virtue. The Buddha's Dhamma is not in going forward, nor in going back, nor in standing still. This, venerable Sumedho, is your place of nonabiding." --Ajahn Chah

So, a woman brought a very limp duck to a veterinary surgeon. As she laid her pet on the table, the vet pulled out his stethoscope and listened to the bird's chest.

After a moment or two, the vet shook his head sadly and said, "I'm sorry, your duck, Cuddles, has passed away."

The distressed woman wailed, "Are you sure?"

"Yes, I am sure. The duck is dead," replied the vet.

"How can you be so sure?" she protested. "I mean you haven't done any testing on him or anything. He might just be in a coma or something."

The vet rolled his eyes, turned around and left the room.

He returned a few minutes later with a black Labrador Retriever. As the duck's owner looked on in amazement, the dog stood on his hind legs, put his front paws on the examination table and sniffed the duck from top to bottom. He then looked up at the vet with sad eyes and shook his head.

The vet patted the dog on the head and took it out of the room.

A few minutes later he returned with a cat. The cat jumped on the table and also delicately sniffed the bird from head to foot. The cat sat back on its haunches, shook its head, meowed softly and strolled out of the room.

The vet looked at the woman and said, "I'm sorry, but as I said, this is most definitely, 100% certifiably, a dead duck."

The vet turned to his computer terminal, hit a few keys and produced a bill, which he handed to the woman. The duck's owner, still in shock, took the bill. "$150!" she cried, "$150 just to tell me my duck is dead!"

The vet shrugged, "I'm sorry. If you had just taken my word for it, the bill would have been $20, but with the Lab Report and the Cat Scan, it's now $150.

Nothing that a break can't fix

I had some of the usual unexpected work trials and tribulations this morning. Worked through them by the patience and grace of my boss; still I felt perturbed. The time was 10am, I stepped away for my morning break (no more than 2 hours without getting up from PC) and walked out of the front of the building. Coming into the building was a long-time acquaintance from work, with a big friendly smile saying 'Hello' and then, studying me, asked 'Everything OK, man?'. I replied without thinking about the words, 'Nothing a break can't fix'. He looked puzzled, then smiled and said, 'Oh, yeah, alright, man!'. Got this phrase stuck in my head now.

I did feel better.

So, a woman went up to the bar in a quiet pub...

She gestured alluringly to the bartender who approached her immediately. She seductively signaled that he should bring his face closer to hers. As he did, she gently caressed his full beard.

"Are you the manager?" she asked, softly stroking his face with both hands.

"Actually, no," he replied.

"Can you get him for me? I need to speak to him," she said, running her hands beyond his beard and into his hair.

"I'm afraid I can't," breathed the bartender. "Is there anything I can do?"

"Yes... I need for you to give him a message," she continued, running her forefinger across the bartender's lip and slyly popping a couple of her fingers into his mouth and allowing him to suck them gently.

"What should I tell him?" the bartender managed to say.

"Tell him," she whispered, "there's no toilet paper, hand soap, or paper towels in the ladies room."

The subtle art of expressing love

Won't you let me see your smile?

The young tourists came to San Francisco for the memorial service and scattering of remains, and for many other reasons. They stood under Sutro Tower, having their picture taken, freshly kicked out from the closed bakery -- damn French bakers! Enough time had passed that perspective granted some choice, yet the pain will never leave, will always bend the surface convex, the paths traject oblique.

This sweet touch, passing and forever, what is a moment and what is it not? I touch the cool glass with my fingers and rest my elbow on the sill in the train. I cannot tell you how I think of you often, dear Kim, to share the mundane of your absence. What you're missing, endless details about your absence. The irony is lost on me, too. The familiar landscape passes that we knew together, it goes by again passing this window. Did it really happen, were we once together, hand squeezing hand?

Marbles scattered, let's greet the brand new day. We'll look around round round. Look arouunnnnnouunnnoouunnnound.

Courage to change the things we can.

It's useful to make a balance sheet at night. It can be just in the mind, but it can also be in writing if you are inclined that way. Make a balance sheet: "How often have I felt lovingness toward another person today?" On the other side of the sheet put: "How often have I felt anger, hurt, resentment, rejection, fear, anxiety today, when confronting other people?" Then total it up and if the balance is on the debit side, make a resolution to change it. Every good shopkeeper makes a balance sheet at the end of the day, and if this merchandise doesn't have good customer acceptance, obviously he will change it.

It's a skill. It's not an inbred character fault or ability. It's a skill to change oneself again and again until all impurities have been cleansed. It's not because other people are so lovable. They're not. If they were they'd be roaming around in the god realms....

There is a lot to learn in this realm and that is its purpose. It is a continual adult education class; that is what this whole human realm is designed for. Not for the purpose of finding some comfort, not in order to have riches, wealth, possessions. Not to become famous or to change the world. People have many ideas. Life is strictly an adult education class, and this is the most important lesson, namely to cultivate and make the heart grow. There is no lesson more important....

Most people are looking for someone to love them. Some people find a few people to love them and then maybe love back. But some people are unfortunate and cannot find anyone. They become bitter and resentful. Yet really it works exactly the other way around. If we ourselves are loving, then we find innumerable loving people around, because everybody wants to be loved. That someone loves us doesn't mean that we are loving. The other person is feeling the love. We don't feel a thing. All we feel is gratification that somebody has found us lovable. That is another ego support, to make the ego bigger. But loving others goes in the direction of making the ego smaller.

The more love we can extend, the more people we can include in that love, and the more love we have. What we can generate, that much we have within us. It is a very simple equation but few people see it that way. Everybody is looking for more people to love them. It doesn't work. It's absurd, but we have so many absurdities in our lives.

...from "Being Nobody, Going Nowhere" by Ayya Khema

Won't you come out to play?

The sun is up, the sky is blue,
it's beautiful, and so are you.

E: peaceful, pleasant dreams.

News for you all: the drummer was Paul.

We must be mad

Foreign Accents

Hiroshima Nagasaki
Nagasaki Hiroshima
arigato Vanunu
ko n nichiwa Mossadegh
arigato Mordechai
ko n nichiwa Mohammad
Hiroshima Nagasaki

Hiroshima Nagasaki
ko n nichiwa arigato
Nagasaki Hiroshima
Nagasaki Hiroshima
arigato Vanunu
ko n nichiwa Mordechai
ko n nichiwa Mohammad
Hiroshima Nagasaki
ko n nichiwa arigato

- Robert Wyatt -

There's always the problem of describing your life in a plausible way.

Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin* landed and walked on the moon, the first people to do so, on my fifteenth birthday. I was born to Dorothy and Frank at St. Joseph's Hospital, across the street from Disney Studios, in Burbank, California, 55 years ago today. My sister wanted to name me 'Barbara'.

Which was the hoax?

*Could you have had a better nickname coming out of the '60s?

Grant me strength, as I go out from here...

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.
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.

Checking for conjunctivitis

I am concerned tonight that I might be coming down again with conjunctivitis. I had my first case of "pink eye" last March. An antibiotic took care of it in a few days. Thought I ought to try to capture its image if true, but doesn't appear in these photos.

Look closely.


Note: I was dive-bombed today by an orange dragonfly.

The landscape of saṃsāra

from my transcription of "Freedom to Choose",
a talk given by venerable Ajahn Sucitto
at Cittaviveka monastery, 2004,
which includes these recollections on his pilgrimage to Tibet.

...One of the most marvelous pieces is the third day when you have to go over the high pass, Dromala pass, which is 5800 meters, I think. So you have to climb 700 meters, which is an over 2000 foot climb, and you're already at 4800 meters, so you're already at a gasping zone and now you have to climb 2000 feet up a pass. And it's one of those things where you just don't know if you're going to make it or not.

You just don't know if your body's going to make it or not. Real kind of: moment at a time. And then... lifting... choosing... yeah you can do one more step, yeah you can do one more step, yeah you can do one more step. Yeah, just doing that for 5 or 6 hours. And then stopping, it's time to stop now. You can do another step, another step, another step. And it's very cleaning for the mind because there's not time to wonder if and what and anything like that.

When you come up to the top there's a kind of tremendous celebration. The top of the Dromala pass is like a, I like to think it's a special place on the planet, because it's so remote and desolate and takes so much endeavor to get there. And this place, the site itself, surrounded by these crags and glaciers and rocks, but the pass itself is like a garden of prayer flags. Fluttering. Just huge poles and ropes and banners, which is just about prayer. Nothing else, they don't do anything: they're just prayers. Maybe hundreds of thousands of these.


So you come to the top and you feel like you've actually arrived at a place that's completely dedicated to blessing and prayer, and has come about through everyone that has been there and made this special effort, commitment to devotion, to the spirit of it. To taking a step at a time, to moving against an edge, deliberately lifting and carrying one's self onwards. There's a tremendous exhilaration when you get to the top. What comes after is, after you've come to the top, is you start to recognize you've got another 5-1/2 hours walk to get to the place where the yaks have gone with the tent -- the yaks go on [ahead] -- and then it's, "This is a very, very, very long walk."

When I came down that pass, the first was a sense of exhilaration and accomplishment. And after about 2 or 3 hours of walking, the energy was so low the feeling was like now you can plod or you can really give it everything you've got. We actually finished the day's walk very briskly, 2 or 3 hours of walking very briskly. It was like complete, just giving one's self away to the walk. It was a, again, a very exhilarating experience.

More than just patience as endurance but patience as a complete willingness to be with whatever, until the willingness itself becomes the thing that you feel. You don't really take in so much the discomforts or even the fatigue, you're just taking in the willingness. And that is when the blessing comes back. Because that is when the pilgrimage starts to bless your own heart. You feel tremendous resource and joy and willingness, and heartfulness.

And I sense that is what has really made that country [Tibet], given it the strength it has. Because life is so hard. In a way it almost asks that you either give up and die or just be miserable, or you're going to lift up and enter it with willingness. And the results are rather educational, something that we can really look at ourselves. Sometimes when in a western situation where there's a lot more... things are not really pushing you physically to the edge, we can create tremendous trials and torments for ourselves just over... the mind is not being fully held. It's being left to ramble and dither and speculate and project. And you're not really holding it and giving it something, fully giving it something to be with. So it, we experience the distress of mental habits of leaving the mind unguarded, unprotected and unchanneled. And see how miserable people can be.

Quite an eye-opener. I never saw anybody in Lhasa that was as miserable as people in London. You know, in the kind of shut-down, frantic, agitated states. People always had some cheerfulness, some openness to the present moment. When we take it into meditation it's that training to pick up the theme, the body theme, the theme of the heart, whatever one's theme of practice is, and recognize it's going to take you through some tough territory, some painful territory. But that's the landscape of saṃsāra. This is the territory we live in. It can be a place of blessing if we train ourselves, we feel the willingness and the joyfulness and the one-pointedness. Then the most desolate territory can be a place with beauty and prayer in it.

These beautiful photos "borrowed" from
Ray Kreisel's "A Journey to Lhasa and Mt. Kailash, Tibet, 2006" web journal.

Sky Day

Saturday, July 11, 2009.
I am looking for meaning in the sky today.

Marion, Eugene, and Me

My friend Eugene invited me to join him, his wife Keani, and their neighbor Marion, on Friday, June 26, for an excursion to San Francisco to visit some interesting sites and see some of his professional work. What a good idea! Just about any reason to go to San Francisco is good for me and I looked forward to a guided tour of some unusual locations. And we'd be traveling in Eugene's '69 Ford convertible! Cool.

Unfortunately Keani was not feeling well, but Marion, Eugene, and I headed out at 8:00 am, with sweaters and jackets and hoodies. Eugene and Marion first directed us through Marion's home neighborhoods through Caesar Chavez and Church streets, then we headed up to Laguna Honda hospital to see some of Eugene's copper metal work. I had not been to these locations before, and to have a guided, personal tour was special. Did you know that Bing Crosby used to come to Laguna Honda to entertain the patients?

Next we traveled to Golden Gate Heights' mosaic staircase, near Moraga and 17th Ave., to see some handiwork of one of Eugene's comrads. We just happened to arrive when one of the members of the neighborhood committee responsible for the project was visiting, and she gave us quite a bit of the history and stories about the work. If you click on the picture you'll get an enlarged version showing a lot of the detail on the steps, which illustrate a view from the ocean bottom up through land to the moon and sun.

Eugene and I made it to the top of the stairs, where there is a great view of the avenues and the ocean beyond. I was winded, but what caught me by surprise was the ache in my calf muscles the next day!


Bidding farewell to our new acquaintance we headed for Golden Gate Park and the Police Stables. Eugene's crew had recently worked on making some fencing more horse-friendly, and he asked if he could come by and bring some friends to visit. The two people taking care of the horses were very friendly and generous with carrots which we fed to the police horses.

Ofc. Horse

After feeding the horses some treats we visited the tack room and museum. Some photographs were taken in the 1880s and 1890s.


Heading out of the park we traveled east toward North Point and Embarcadero, cutting through Pacific Heights with its great view of the Marina, Alcatraz and the beautiful water and beyond. We visited the city Soil Test Lab at the old water treatment plant, where Eugene had some crafty metal work of his to show. But first we took a slight detour toward stairs that lead up to Coit Tower, where Eugene explained to me the fine points of bending metal piping.

At the Soil Test Lab we had the good fortune to run into Darren, Chief Enchilada and friendly "from-here" SF native, who had no end to his praise for Eugene's fine craftsmanship. Darren and Marion compared notes on all the hang-outs and landmarks that only locals growing up in San Francisco would recognize. Getting such rich information about the flavor of living in San Francisco was quite a treat for me on this day.

And here is some complicated, creative craftwork by Eugene. The blue devices are for testing soil samples and the workspace required something to help the technicians breath while the soil testers blow up a dust storm. All the sheet metal (non-blue) work is Eugene's creative design and handiwork, including the aluminum siding. He listens to the technicians' needs, looks at the work and the equipment, and pulls the necessary design out of his magic hat (i.e., much experience and skill and saavy)!

Last stop on our visit was lunch! Marion treated us to one of her favorite restaurants on Fisherman's Wharf: Scoma's. It is tucked away off the main tourist streets, out on the wharf -- we would have missed it if Marion had not been our guide. I had delicious pasta pomodoro with grilled prawns, very yum. Marion insisted that Eugene and I split her desert: a flourless chocolate cake with whipped cream, rasberry sauce and mint leaves. And the view of the San Francisco skyline was delicious too. What a great morning in San Francisco, home of warm and friendly people. Thank you!

Eugene's Wheels. Nice ride, rides nice.