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 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 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.

Not Famous

Someone I once knew 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?

Good Medicine

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.

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.

Sleep is a huge priority now.

Frequent hot baths are essential.

I do not overwork...keep life simple.

I try to get lots of C and D3.

I need to add into the receipe a bit more creative output, more service, more meditation, more intimacy, more swimming.

More sun would be ideal.



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 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 after a winter in Ireland.

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.

Thanks to email, social networking and blogs, there remains a bit connection with far away friends. Living right here in the moment includes thoughts from other times and places that bleed through like layers of colored tissue paper molded together.