Home Again, Home Again

jiggity-jig.

And I don't know where to start. What to write. How to pick up after a week away.

I'm feeling overwhelmed, post-vacation melancholy.

Hopefully, it'll pass and I'll be back.

Oublier -- To Forget

I was lying on the beach today, lazily watching my kids play with their cousins in the placid Atlantic sea water, thinking about some kind of meditation quote or thought that I'd recently read in a meditation book. It was about remembering and forgetting and living in the moment. And in that moment I remembered that I was a French major in college (did I ever tell you that?) and that the word for to forget is oublier and then I started conjugating the word oublier -- j'oublie, etc. and then I remembered that I was a pastry chef, too, and this reverie of remembering and forgetting was all somehow wrapped up in the lazy, hot day and the pull of the water and fingerprint mark on my left shoulder where I'd forgotten to put sunscreen, a silhouette of forgotten skin. It occured to me then, or was it when I actually read the quote in the meditation book that I realized I actually have the instincts of a great meditator, one who lives in the moment but that I forget that. Each and every moment.



J'oublie.



I've forgotten.

how to remember.

Vacation

I haven't posted in a day or so in real-time because we left for Hilton Head Island, SC. Every year, around this time, my scattered family and all of our offspring meet for one week on this beautiful, boiling, muggy, alligator-infested island. It's usually pretty fun -- after the usual spats and make-ups and pointed daggers and retreats, it's a week spent catching up and watching the kids, the cousins, play with each other as if they were all best friends, not separated by miles and years.

This year is different because I'm alone with the boys. The Husband is back in LA, manning the Larchmont Larder, and we left Sophie behind for the first time. The week is always a nightmare for her and the lowest rung of Dante's Hell for me. She hates change and travel and heat. She's generally up all night, in the same bed with us. During the day she is largely confined to her stroller when we're not on the beach as the house here has no accomodations for her. Although I tell people that the principle of leaving one of your children home out of necessity is a tragedy, the reality is that it's better for everyone.

One of those impossible decisions we make that is more like a concession.

And while I hate that her cousins won't see her at all this year, I concede.

And when I climb into the bed at night by myself and go to sleep it feels good in an exhausting sort of way.

Good Thoughts

more wonderful words from Daily Dharma:

Rest in Natural Great Peace

When I meditate, I am always inspired by this poem by Nyoshul Khenpo:

Rest in natural great peace
This exhausted mind
Beaten helpless by karma and neurotic thought,
Like the relentless fury of the pounding waves
In the infinite ocean of samsara.

Rest in natural great peace.

Above all, be at ease, be as natural and spacious as possible. Slip quietly out of the noose of your habitual anxious self, release all grasping, and relax into your true nature. Think of your ordinary emotional, thought-ridden self as a block of ice or a slab of butter left out in the sun. If you are feeling hard and cold, let this aggression melt away in the sunlight of your meditation. Let peace work on you and enable you to gather your scattered mind into the mindfulness of Calm Abiding, and awaken in you the awareness and insight of Clear Seeing. And you will find all your negativity disarmed, your aggression dissolved, and your confusion evaporating slowly like mist into the vast and stainless sky of your absolute nature.

–Sogyal Rinpoche, The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying (HarperSanFrancisco)

Love of My Life

Henry

Born July 25, 1998

My sweet, happy boy who has brought nothing but joy to me and all those who know him.

Happy Birthday, Henry!

Lucky

It's summer and the living IS easy. At least for these two. Despite having nothing to do, they managed to build a very cool fort.

Without my help.

Today, the Chinese Doctor consoled me when I rather morosely spoke to her. Why can't I feel relieved or completely happy when Sophie is finally doing much better? I asked. Why has my stress about finances and everything else taken over?

You worry too much, she replied, you need stop worrying and tell yourself you can't help it.

I feel ridiculous. I said. And ungrateful.

You feel stress too long, she added, you so strong and now it hit you. Crisis over and now you have to relax.

I closed my eyes and let her put the needles in, everywhere, even my hands where it hurts. While she was doing this she reminded me of the boys.

How LUCKY I am.

I closed my eyes when she turned on the Chinese music and left the room. And then I lay there, buzzing, and thought of all the people I know and all the world's everything and I felt drowsy and soft and new.

She sent me home with a bag of tiny reddish apples from her garden that smelled exactly like apples.

Buddhist Platitudes

(our dog, Valentine)


Don't know why, but Buddhist platitudes resonate with me these days. Here's one from Tricycle Magazine's Daily Dharma:

Meet Life Where It Is

You can face anything properly, elegantly, when you meet life where it is, in the moment. When conditions are fresh and joyous, we can delight in that changing image. When the karma and goodness sustaining life is exhausted, we can look death right in its face. We live life wisely and compassionately in the beginning, middle, and end.

–Ajahn Sumano Bhikkhu, from Meeting the Monkey Halfway (Weiser)

Superstition

I think I've told you a bit about my long-dead Italian grandmother. Noni was a stereotypical southern Italian peasant who knew how to cook anything but who couldn't read or write. She believed fervently in Mussolini and the Pope and the sanctity of her sons (she had three and two daughters, but they didn't count as much). She was superstitious, insanely so and rarely acknowledged when anything good happened -- in case the good was jinxed by the bad. Her genes must run thick through me because I feel terrified to acknowledge the good, especially when it pertains to something really, really BIG. Like Sophie.

The photo above is from the front page of the Los Angeles Times newspaper, probably over a year ago or so. It's a picture of the ladies of a village whose name I've forgotten -- a village famous for its mafioso. There's been a sting and many of these guys have been killed and the women are watching, I think, as their coffins are carried down the street. Maybe I've mixed up the details, but the picture speaks to me. I see myself in these women and though separated by thousands of miles and a generation, as well as education and a culture vastly different, their placid anxiety and stoicism are echoed in me. Without backsliding into irony or sarcasm, I'm only a step away from wearing black every Tuesday (the day Sophie was diagnosed) and tightening my lips into an ever-thinner line.

Sophie's seizures have decreased dramatically with the homeopathic remedy -- and I mean DRAMATIC.

Now, go knock on wood three times and pretend you didn't hear it.

Dry, Dry, Dry

I'm dry as a bone with nothing to say.

But I promised to submit something each month on the 21st over at Hopeful Parents, a wonderful website.

So that's where I am today, with a little something from my book. Let me know what you think here or there.

And other than that, I'm dry.


**and the picture above is from a really weird website that I found online about Ezekiel and the valley of the dry bones and all that wild, crazy Biblical stuff. You can read it here.

Mare Tranquillitatis

Today is the 40th anniversary of the first moon landing. The age of the Sea of Tranquillity, though, is 3.57 to 3.88 billion years.

On July 20, 1969 I was just shy of my sixth birthday, living on Long Island with my family. I remember sitting, crouched, in front of the television watching the grainy black and white images. I'm not sure whether my parents woke me up or not and I'm not sure whether my memory is accurate or blurry like the images we watched enraptured.

How beautiful are the words Moon and Mare Tranquillitatis, and Sea of Serenity, as beautiful as the thing itself, however cold and distant and lifeless, it remains tethered to us on Earth.

If one can conceive of such things, do they not exist?

Just as energy can be used for many different purposes, so can pure existence be experienced in relation to any phase of life—anger, hatred, or jealousy as well as love and beauty. Every human action must be carried on through the ego, which plays a role comparable to that of a pipe or channel through which energy is conducted for different uses. We usually think of the ego as a kind of constant, unchanging entity. In fact, however, it is simply a succession of physical and mental events or pressures that appear momentarily and as quickly pass away.

–Katsuki Sekida, from A Guide to Zen (New World Library

instead of a whole lot of bourgeois complaining

I'm just going to say what my youngest, Oliver, used to say when he was about two and a half years old:

I HATE EVERYBODY!!!!!

(and everything).

Two Conversations

I.

Me (driving and looking up into the rearview mirror): Oliver, stop sucking your thumb.

Oliver (aged eight and quite fierce despite the thumb-sucking): AWWWW. It feels so good, Mom. While I'm thinking about GI Joe.

II.

Me (pulling a very wet boy's Swiss watch out of the washing machine): HENRY, you left your watch in your shorts and it went in the washing machine! What is up with you and your stuff?

Henry (ever good-natured): What? I did? Let me see! Look, Mom it's still working even though it's wet. Can you put it in the dryer? (and he wasn't joking around)

Happy

I took the boys and my niece to Universal Studios today. We went on the late side and stayed until closing. I had to pay about a million dollars for three six-month passes for the boys and me, and that cost less than a one-day ticket for my niece. And another million dollars for some really gross food. And about half a million dollars for three waters and a blue Powerade. And about fifty dollars for one churro.

Despite this hemorrhaging I actually had FUN!!!

And my favorite ride was The Simpsons. Really. It was exhilarating. And I laughed like an idiot. Like I had no cares in the world.


I even spent a couple of thousand dollars to document my giddiness after the ride (you should know this about me: I HATE amusement parks. Honestly, I'd generally rather stick needles in my eyeballs than go. I hate the people, the lines, the crap, the sensory overload). Here's the evidence, though of happiness:


That's me in the back row, next to the boys, and I'm cracking up. They snap the picture right at the end of the ride, so everyone is completely gasping or shocked or laughing, like me.

On the way out, the boys were incredulous when I bought them bags of candy. Swedish fish, gummy coke bottles, licorice.

It was the greatest day ever, they said.