Memorial Day

It's a sunny Memorial Day and I thought about driving to the cemetary where Dad is buried. He was a veteran of the WWII Navy. His parents are also buried there, as well as my sister Jayne who died at the young age of two and my father's brother's wife. The family plots were acquired at the time of Jayne's untimely death. We visited often when I was a child. The visual image of my sister dead in the earth marked me. It is said that we must pay our respects to the dead. I think of them all the time. No need to actually go there.

I called Mom this morning and asked if she would like to drive over to the cemetary before going to my sister's for a barbeque. "Oh, I wasn't planning on it." I knew she would say that. Spontaneity is not Mom's style. She only visits there on the rare occasions when I suggest it. I bring a bouquet of flowers and we leave a few by each marker. "You know I visited there faithfully for twenty-five years" she reminds me. She's not sure about going and mentions needing to go to the store. "I have let things run out again. I guess that's a sign." I tell her I can stop at the store for her on my way over to her apartment.

She is considering a move into an assisted living home where meals are provided. A couple years ago, her television went dead one afternoon. Within an hour she had driven to Best Buy, purchased a new one and arranged to have delivered the next day. She likes to eat, yet she is not as motivated to get the food shopping done. "I should have gotten one of those carts. I see the ladies out in the parking lot wheeling their bags of groceries with no trouble."

I feel a bit guilty, as she has mentioned this cart idea numerous times. I did look at one or two at the store, but the carts seemed heavy and cumbersome. I suspected that would add another layer of problem to her shopping dilemma. A few years ago my sister gave her a large canvas bag with a handle and wheels. Mom never used it. I told her I'd buy her a cart today. She laughed. "Now...not now when I may only need it a few weeks!"

I ask her to make a list and call me after The View.

At eighty-one, she is at the place where independence takes a great effort. Her peers are all resisting the nursing home. Mom has not mentioned to them her thoughts about moving into Blocher Homes. She knows they will chastise her a bit for thinking that way. She has three adult children in the area. Quite fortunate, in my opinion. Eating icecream after taking a tour of the assisted living home, my sister commented that she and her husband will never be able to afford living in such a facility. I laughingly added that I will probably end up homeless.

Her children are good to her and quite willing to be supportive, but unless she is incapacitated we are not going to overdo it. Her health is pretty good. She drives. Her parents spent the last twelve years of their lives at Beechwood and Mom sees herself there someday soon. They made it to ninety-two and died within five months of one another.

She calls back in twenty minutes with her list. "I had to turn off The View. More and more, she does not like their topics of conversation and especially dislikes Joy Behar's liberal view. She used to enjoy American Idol when it first aired and our local boy, John Stevens, sang his Sinatra-esque tunes. Now that the show is geared towards the younger set, it doesn't interest her as much. There are plenty of channels to turn to, though. Television has become her companion.

Much of what goes on these days is not to her liking. Too much sexuality. Everyone is too busy. The world moves too fast. The lives of her children and grandchildren are complex and unfathomable.

This afternoon I will bring her a bag of groceries and we will drive to the cemetary fluttering with flags, stand under the lush tree and look over the gravesites. I will bring supermarket flowers to scatter about. Pay my mother the attention she craves.

Cheerful Birthday

I began practicing weekly with the Shambhala Meditation Group of Buffalo during the fall of 2007 after living back in Buffalo a year and a half. I first became involved with Shambhala meditation seventeen years ago during a transition year upon turning forty.

I was drawn to the big questions my entire life. My young sister Jane died suddenly when I was six, an event that linked me to a need to ask.

When I was 23, I bought a copy of Be Here Now at a bookstore on Sixteenth Street in SanFrancisco. I had studied the zen tradition of raku pottery, read more books by Ram Dass and Alan Watts, as well as female adventurers Anais Nin, Gertrude Stein, Simone DeBeauvoir.

Art had been my religion, but by the late eighties, I found myself browsing bookstore shelves for inspiration and discovered an exploding universe of ideas as the new age settled in. I read Yogananda, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, practiced yoga before it was YOGA, received instruction in Transcendental Meditation. I also stumbled upon books by Chogyam Trungpa and found myself going back for more.

Kerry told me about a class she had taken in Marin called Shambhala Training. I soon discovered Shambhala: The Sacred Path of the Warrior, by my new favorite author, Chogyam Trungpa. I also discovered that he had founded a college in Boulder thatThis joining of art and meaning was just right for me. The school featured a famous writing program that honored the work of the beat poets. It first opened back in the fall of 1974 around the same time I passed through Boulder on route to San Francscio. I had just finished reading Jack Kerouac's On The Road and was full of curiousity about the dharma bums. Still, at that time, I knew nothing of what was going on in the Trungpa Naropa world. No internet, no facebook, no twitter. Even if I had read or heard something about the school or Trungpa, it likely would not have caught my interest at that time.

The seeds had been planted, but it would be another seventeen years or so before the promise of art and meaning would lure me to graduate school at Naropa Institute. Before heading west, I attended Level One of Shambhala Training in New York City during the spring of 1992. The next three years were an immersion in learning, self-discovery and meditation that delivered me into a new career in healthcare. I remained soulfully connected to the Shambhala sangha, practiced meditation and attended certain events, but I was always a bit outside the community.

I have never been a joiner. I sometimes push myself into endeavors hoping to become consumed by an artform, job, cause, greater purpose. How wonderful it would be to maintain a solid commitment and sense of this is it. Of course, I have felt that way many times, but the sentiment changes. Fruitless to even go there. Chogyam Trungpa once addressed a group of EST students attending one of Werner Erhardt's infamous weekend sessions: "Ladies and gentlemen, I must inform you...it is not IT."

So after nearly dying and losing all sense of ground, I found myself living back in Buffalo. During my early months here, I found a postcard designed by a local artist (http://www.newbuffalographics.com/products/city-of-no-illusions-1) that confirmed the rightness of being here...Buffalo--City of No Illusions.

I never expected to connect with a meditation community here. I was okay knowing the practice was within me despite my surroundings, but I was pleasantly surprised to discover others to sit with each Tuesday night. Curiously, several of us have Aries birthdays. Last year, Trudy introduced The Elixir of Life birthday practice (http://www.samadhicushions.com/product_p/s-4244.htm) and again this year, we took time to contemplate (and celebrate) impermanence, death, cause & effect, suffering with these solumn words...

I entered this world.

I age day by day.

Hanging onto the past, I squeeze all the life out of my existence in an attempt to overcome the process of aging.

I should realize that all beings suffer this plight.

Let me be a warrior and celebrate this truth without hiding in the shadows of denial and discursiveness.

All the logic in the world will not save me from the simple trth that I age.

Sickness is my companion; it follows me everywhere.

I try to avoid the truth, but the painful conversation with sickness never ends.

Death is my friend, the truest of friends, a true friend that never abandons me.

Death is always waiting for me.


Cheerful Birthday to me. What's up with cheer? It is a Shambhala thing. The word happiness implies an end state, the result of causes and conditions over which we may have little control.
Cheerfulness is volitional, a deliberate decision to be good-spirited. We may act intentionally to rouse good cheer.

I'm fifty-seven now. The fact that I have made it this far is worth a bit of cheer. More and more, I am discovering the anthropology of myself in the world as I trace the tangled trails of my existence. The twisting and broken threads do make sense. Patterns emerge. Things sort of add up...despite appearances.

Beauty

I requested Man On Wire from Netflix and was pleasantly surprised. I vaguely recall his twin towers stunt back in August 1974. I was finishing up a summer school course (Social Psychology) at Buffalo State College to complete my graduation from SUNY Oswego.

I had been waitressing all summer to save money for my journey to San Francisco. Nixon was about to be impeached. I was reading Ken Kesey's Electric CoolAid Acid Test. New York City was on the horizon of my thoughts, as my college room mate, Darcy, had moved there after graduation. I had been there once on a college art fieldtrip. I knew The World Trade Center had become the world's tallest buildings.

They were actually just being completed when Philippe Petit and his crew managed to make their way to the top with a crate of tools and 450 pounds of steel wire to produce the event that had been planned for six years. The new documentary about the adventure is full of fantasic film footage of the construction of the twin towers and Petit rehearsing in the fields near his home in France.

A poet and skywriter, the artistry of Phillipe Petit shows us beauty and passion that is rare today. Man On Wire is likely to win an Oscar in the Best Decumentary category. I will be rooting for them!

Our World As It Is

"There is a mysterious cycle in human events. To some generations, much is given. Of other generations, much is expected. This Generation has a rendezvous with destiny." Franklin Roosevelt – 1936


BOOMERS – YOUR CRISIS HAS ARRIVED, the title of an interesting article by James Quinn...

http://www.financialsense.com/editorials/quinn/2009/0210.html

He writes of the babyboomer generation as a Prophet/Idealist type, born during a High period in the culture. This geneneration spent its rising adult years during an Awakening. The midlife years are spent during an Unraveling. Old age will be spent during Crisis.

This analogy rings true for me. Something is certainly unraveling these days.

I remember feeling a few small earthquakes...a couple in San Francisco and one in New York City. For a moment, you notice something different...a ripple, a queasiness, unfamiliar ground...then it stops. Life goes on as usual. Other times those small moments of break into the big quake, tsunami, hurricane, flood.

More and more, I do feel that slight rumbling beneath my feet in the form of new words...drone pilot, zombie bank, war porn, riskless war, shovel-ready, lemon socialism, authoritarian capitalism, violent radicalization, terrorist prevention, man-made disaster, integral activism, globalism versus globalization.

Most of the time, I prefer to put a hopeful spin on my reality. I'm a warrior...a survivor. Practicing meditation tunes one into the subtlties, the quiet guidance pulsing through life. And there is quite a bit stirring around us.

People here in western New York hold on to the notion that we are somehow protected. We are a stable, cautious tribe who are not subject to the consequences of more reckless folks. We are fine.
We are fine...and...we live in a world of trouble.

George Orwell wrote in 1984...
If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping a human face forever.

Science Fiction.

I wonder about four things...

1) The new administration has the power to get out of Iraq and Afghanistan totally and completely, but they choose not to.

2) The new administration could nationalize the banks and put a stop to the outrageous blackmailing that has been going on, but they choose not to.

3) The new administration could address the hunger problem here in America, but they choose not to.

4) At what point does anger turn into uprising?

Motherhood, Hi-Tech Fertility, Carbon Footprint

Okay, I must write just a little about this recent newsworthy fiasco. Some would call it a blessing, an act of GOD, a woman's right. Others would call this medical malpractice, an unreasonable request, an act of greed.

Nadya’s parents are probably about my age (late 50s) and she was an only child, a trend that has gained popularity in the post-feminist years. They chose not to have a brood of children in order to give ittle Nadya an attentive good life. Now she is here to punish them for that by recruiting them into her misguided life plan.

Feminism taught me that a woman can choose when and how to best approach motherhood (or not) in a responsible manner. This story has triggered so much angst in me.

Nadya is clearly a user…using her parents and using her children to further her own postition in the world. She has dollar signs in her eyes and trouble in her heart. Star-obsessed, perhaps? When I see her face and hear her speak, I can’t help notice the striking resemblance to Angelina Jolie…perhaps with the help of a little cosmetic surgery??

The medical professionals who took the money for an unethical procedure are the real villains here. Three implants is more typical of this sort of procedure...remember, the goal is one healthy baby. Besides, aren't six lovely children way way way more than enough???

I hope the media will take a stand against greed for once and NOT provide her the opportunity to capitalize on this sad scenario. Hopefully, these babies will thrive despite a challenging life right from the start. They will be lucky to receive a few minutes of attention from their grad student mom and reluctant grandparents.

Greed times eight...this is not woman's liberation.

We never talk about over-population in America, but we should. Think about the carbon footprint....fourteen kids and three adults!!

Not Famous

I have been inspired by Wave's writing. She once wrote a paper called The Psychology of Fame. I find myself pondering a similar question. What do they have that I don't? Most people live out their lives with no remarkable encounters with anything resembling fame, fortune or notoriety, but the more one travels and lives in cities, the greater is the chance of seeing or encountering the world of well-known others.

Moving around, I have noticed that over time I have been close to, near by, or hovering in similar circles as a variety of people we would call famous or in the vicinity of fame....close encounters. I heard a personal development study that tells us that we are likely to be only as successful as the three people who surround us most frequently.

A few close encounters that occur to me now...

President Johnson waved at me when I was twelve.

Met Jerry Garcia briefly...backstage at The Berkeley Theater in 1975 in the days before heavy security always blocked the door.

Billy Baldwin (my favorite Baldwin) stood next to me at a film preview party at The Wollman Rink in Central Park.

Saw Woody Allen and Mia Farrow walking hand-in-hand down Madison Avenue during the 80s.

Helped Caroline Kennedy locate a photo file while working in the photo library at The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Dated the first drummer for Sonic Youth who later became a character actor after starring in the indie film Stranger Than Paradise.

Sat on stage with the sound guy during a Wash DC Patti LaBelle concert during her crazy spiky hair days.

Shared Thanksgiving dinner with the B52s at Kate's NYC apartment.

Invited to dinner at apartment of Jay Dee Doherty, drummer of Patti Smith Band.

Went to party at loft of Jim Jarmusch in NYC.

Was interviewed for a job at Tibet House by Richard Gere.

Met David Byrne at Paul Simon show in Tribeca.

Had lunch with Annie Lennox.

My friend Kathleen was commisioned by Arnold Schwartzenager to paint Maria Schriver's portrait and was also commisioned to paint a large rose painting for the designer, Valentino.

My friend, Larry, received a grammy for writing and performing Don't Bogart That Joint, anthem from movie Easy Rider.

I feel a bit like Forest Gump. These are all interesting little moments, but it doesn't quite add up. The Emily Dickinson words come to mind.......I'm nobody, who are you? An underachiever living in Buffalo, I must ask...was this a dream?

Perhaps I have simply failed to capitalize on the multitude of opportunities that came my way?

Perhaps I am simply living out my karma?

I Want To Hold Your Hand

Paul McCartney and his band of young musicians performed I Want To Hold Your Hand at The Grammies. Forty-something years after the original...he rocks. I love that he is still out there looking fantastic and singing with all his heart. The guys who had the chance to be up there playing with him were beaming. I was squealing girl all over again. Okay, enough nostalgia.

Just The Right Medicine

My Aunt Elizabeth has had cancer for six or seven years...two incidents of breast cancer that were successfully treated. Now the disease is spread throughout her body, along with a brain tumor that doctors want to treat with daily radiation for a period of time. She is seventy-five and willing to go forward with the recommendations of the medical professionals. I want to say "No, don't do it...call Gary Null's office for a protocol."

We each have our own path to follow. A faithful listener to Gary Null's radio show, I take in his nutritional advice and practice as much as I can. The trouble is I'm not ready to go all the way....can't really afford all the supplements he would recommend. I'm not ready to give up coffee or wine. I eat some meat and some junk. I tend to be moderate, but his view is you have to go all the way to a clean diet.

Kris Carr is also an inspiration. Creator of the documentary film Crazy Sexy Cancer, she has also developed a wonderful online cancer community for women who embrace alternatives. They sell a t-shirt that says Make Juice Not War....
http://vimeo.com/3006463

I take no pharmaceuticals for cancer treatment. I tell myself, if the myeloma returns I will do the nutrional approach all the way. I know this thinking is stupid....by then it's too late. The idea is prevention. While in the grip of disease and survival was questionable, I would tell myself "If I get better, I'll eat only the best diet." Trouble is once strength and good feeling returned, I wanted the stuff I always liked. My diet was not especially bad before I got sick. I've never been an extremist, though. Living with a macrombiotic for two years twenty years ago was a challenge.

Before I got sick, my sleep cycle was messed up from working too many overnight hours in a hospital...taking in too much of the pain of other people.

Now, sleep is a top priority. Frequent hot baths are essential. I do not overwork...keep life simple. Lots of C and D3. Right now I need to add into the receipe a bit more creative output, more service, more meditation, more intimacy, more swimming. More sun would be a dream.

Somebody way back in time (Hippocrates?) said that each of us has our own unique illness that requires our own unique cure. Finding the right dose of all the important ingredients is my ongoing process... subject to change just like any other medicine.

Nostalgia

I guess nostalgia is the mark of a someone with a history to reflect upon. I think this recent river of looking back began flowing when I signed onto FaceBook and began looking up names from the past and discovered ten or twenty people with the same name, many without photos. Soon enough, though, new connections with friends from the past began to show up in my FB page....instant connection with a past that was thought to be gone.

Then I went to see the movie, Milk. Seeing my old neighborhood on the big screen prompted a lot of conversations and flashbacks to the 1970s in San Francisco. I notice this nostalgia turning up in other people's blogs. Jane shared her memories of 33 Linda Street, a building that I lived in when Harvey Milk was shot.

I arrived in SF October 1974 and moved into the flat at Dolores and 17th with four room mates. Lauren became my friend. She introduced me to the diaries of Anais Nin...took me to poetry readings. Then her best friend, Kerry, arrived in town. The next summer I met Toby and Sharon at Ruby O'Burke Pottery in Noe Valley. I introduced Toby to Lauren. When I went to live with James in Longbeach, Long Island during the winter of 1976-77, they moved into the top apartments in the Linda Street building.

James and I returned to SF the following spring and lived at Valencia and 17th for a few months until we broke up. He moved out and a few weeks later, the lower apartment #33 opened up. The lady who had lived there actually died and Toby wasted no time calling me with the landlord's phone number. When I moved out in June 1979 to head to New York, Jane moved in.

Each one of us read Jane's blog entry last week, inspiring a little cross communication about all that richness. I could keep going with all the connections. I met Mona that spring of 1977 that I returned to SF. She had moved to SF because her friend, Stanley, lived there. James and Stanley were best friends from SUNY Oswego, where I had also met them both. Mona moved to Brooklyn the year after I went to NYC....still lives in the same apartment there.

After SF and NYC, I lived in Boulder and Denver. Now I live in Buffalo. Now we have social networking and blogs. Very weird. I try to live right here in the moment , but the chapters from other times and places bleed through like layers of colored tissue paper molded together.

I'm Back

Parallel Drift...

Moving here and there...not necessarily ascending, gaining, improving. My attention drawn toward blogging on the election, enjoying the warmth of the summer, a month in Vermont, packing and relocating to a new home.

Beyond all that now. Winter solstice is approaching. The last full moon of 2008 has ripened. The aluminum sky of Buffalo winter has arrived. A string of tiny blue lights drape across a window. White lights circle a doorway. My tribute to the holiday season amazingly uplifting.