Tonglen

Mother's Day, Pico Blvd., Los Angeles 2011

Breathe in for all of us and breathe out for all of us.

I had tea yesterday with a dear friend who shares many of the same problems that I have -- balancing a life of one's own with a family, a husband, financial difficulties, a child with special needs and the siblings of that child. We also share a similar sense of humor. We joked about the circus aspect of our lives, about our roles as ringmasters, about how impossible it all is and seems and how relentless. We even joked about gassing ourselves, pantomiming the method. At one point in our conversation, she looked at me and asked Do you ever wonder why it's so hard for us? I know she meant why our lives are so much harder than many of those we know -- many of our friends and most of our families -- and I don't have an answer other than a deep, abiding knowing that life is hard. It's hard, anyway. 


Breathe in for all of us and breathe out for all of us.


Those words are the great Pema Chodron's, a Buddhist teacher whose essay about Tonglen, the Tibetan word for giving and taking, a meditation practice, sustains me when I'm feeling down or overwhelmed, when life's suffering threatens to muffle its joy. 


Tonglen is a practice where one works with our tendency to avoid suffering and resist pain, a habit that also causes us to armor ourselves, separate ourselves from both interior experiences and those of others. It is a practice of compassion where you use your own suffering to alleviate the sufferings of others. Instead of resisting your feelings of anger, fear, despair, grief, pain, etc., you acknowledge them with your breath -- you even embrace them with your breath. And then you breathe out. When you breathe in again, you might acknowledge all the suffering of all the people you know and embrace that, too. And then you breathe out. When I am near to despair over Sophie's seizures I practice tonglen by breathing in the sufferings of all the mothers I know who have children that seize and all the mothers I don't know who have children that seize. And then I breathe out. I breathe out love and compassion and health and happiness for all those mothers and all those children.

I believe that embracing suffering, meeting it, accepting it and even embracing it might lead to understanding it, and that understanding connects me, deeply, to others.

Tonglen reverses the usual logic of avoiding suffering and seeking pleasure and, in the process, we become liberated from a very ancient prison of selfishness. We begin to feel love both for ourselves and others and also we begin to take care of ourselves and others. It awakens our compassion and it also introduces us to a far larger view of reality. It introduces us to the unlimited spaciousness that Buddhists call shunyata. By doing the practice, we begin to connect with the open dimension of our being. At first we experience this as things not being such a big deal or so solid as they seemed before. 
--Pema Chodron

Postcards from Paradise

Me, my mother and my sister Melissa (sister Jennifer wasn't born!)
Florida, 1966 

Happy Mother's Day, Mom!

See other Postcards from Paradise at rebecca's. 

There'll probably be at least a million of these posted, but

when I first read this poem in The New Yorker, I loved it completely.

Here you go, and

Happy Mother's Day!

The Lanyard

The other day I was ricocheting slowly
off the blue walls of this room,
moving as if underwater from typewriter to piano,
from bookshelf to an envelope lying on the floor,
when I found myself in the L section of the dictionary
where my eyes fell upon the word lanyard.

No cookie nibbled by a French novelist
could send one into the past more suddenly—
a past where I sat at a workbench at a camp
by a deep Adirondack lake
learning how to braid long thin plastic strips
into a lanyard, a gift for my mother.

I had never seen anyone use a lanyard
or wear one, if that’s what you did with them,
but that did not keep me from crossing
strand over strand again and again
until I had made a boxy
red and white lanyard for my mother.

She gave me life and milk from her breasts,
and I gave her a lanyard.
She nursed me in many a sick room,
lifted spoons of medicine to my lips,
laid cold face-cloths on my forehead,
and then led me out into the airy light

and taught me to walk and swim,
and I, in turn, presented her with a lanyard.
Here are thousands of meals, she said,
and here is clothing and a good education.
And here is your lanyard, I replied,
which I made with a little help from a counselor.

Here is a breathing body and a beating heart,
strong legs, bones and teeth,
and two clear eyes to read the world, she whispered,
and here, I said, is the lanyard I made at camp.
And here, I wish to say to her now,
is a smaller gift—not the worn truth

that you can never repay your mother,
but the rueful admission that when she took
the two-tone lanyard from my hand,
I was as sure as a boy could be
that this useless, worthless thing I wove
out of boredom would be enough to make us even.


--Billy Collins

Listen to him read it here.

Cupcakes and Sophie

I'm busy baking today -- birthday parties and wedding showers -- grateful for the business and feeling wackadoodle. 

Vanilla Cupcakes with Pale Violet Frosting
Red Velvet Cupcakes with Cream Cheese Frosting

This is one of Sophie's favorite poses -- she's folded herself up like an origami swan since she was a tiny girl. We used to joke that the caption for that pose should be my life is shit and leave me alone. (Even in the early days, a sense of humor prevailed!)

The Day Before Mother's Day

Arise then...women of this day!
Arise, all women who have hearts!
Whether your baptism be of water or of tears!
Say firmly:
"We will not have questions answered by irrelevant agencies,
Our husbands will not come to us, reeking with carnage,
For caresses and applause.
Our sons shall not be taken from us to unlearn
All that we have been able to teach them of charity, mercy and patience.
We, the women of one country,
Will be too tender of those of another country
To allow our sons to be trained to injure theirs."

From the bosum of a devastated Earth a voice goes up with
Our own. It says: "Disarm! Disarm!
The sword of murder is not the balance of justice."
Blood does not wipe our dishonor,
Nor violence indicate possession.
As men have often forsaken the plough and the anvil at the summons of war,
Let women now leave all that may be left of home
For a great and earnest day of counsel.
Let them meet first, as women, to bewail and commemorate the dead.
Let them solemnly take counsel with each other as to the means
Whereby the great human family can live in peace...
Each bearing after his own time the sacred impress, not of Caesar,
But of God -
In the name of womanhood and humanity, I earnestly ask
That a general congress of women without limit of nationality,
May be appointed and held at someplace deemed most convenient
And the earliest period consistent with its objects,
To promote the alliance of the different nationalities,
The amicable settlement of international questions,
The great and general interests of peace.

-- Julia Ward Howe's original Mother's Day Proclamation - 1870

Women and Art and Music

via T. Clear

Cakes

Chocolate Cake with Chocolate Buttercream Filling
Espresso Buttercream Frosting
Bittersweet Chocolate Curls

Girl Who Loves Trees

Long before I learned that something was wrong with my baby, I walked the streets of New York City with her, bundled in my arms or in a Snugli. Her gaze nearly always moved upward toward the few trees that peppered our block. City trees, at least those on the streets, are generally ginkgos -- hardy to the onslaught of pollution and pee. When we learned that Sophie had a debilitating form of epilepsy, we continued to take her out and about the city, but it was Central Park that she loved the best, turning her little face up and toward the many beautiful trees that graced its paths.

I said then that if she were a Native American, her name would be Girl Who Loves Trees. 


Today, Sophie lives to go outside, to walk down the street and always, always, she moves her head and eyes up and toward the branches of trees, conversing with them, I'm sure.

On Being a Peasant

My grandmother (standing) with her sister  at home, Mendicino, Italy

A while back I went to the doctor for the first time in three years. Not the OB-GYN kind but the regular kind although my doctor isn't all that regular as she works in what's called a center for integrative medicine. It's the kind of place where tabletop fountains make a beautiful noise and the receptionist asks you whether you'd like a cup of green tea as you sit on the little sofa in the waiting room and leaf through yoga magazines. Santa Monica breezes waft through the room, It would be nauseatingly politically correct if it weren't so damn peaceful, and while I have to submit paperwork to my insurance company because the center doesn't deal with insurance companies (a plus, in my book, actually!), it's worth the extra hassle and money.

It turns out that I'm perfectly healthy -- my "numbers," the blood work, all that jazz, are well within normal range and for that, I'm very grateful.

Except that I need to lose weight. I knew that already.

Sigh.

A while back I wrote an essay on the tyranny of exercise, how much I hate it, how much I hate that it's so good for you. I think I tied it up with the tyranny of Roman Catholicism, too, but that's another story. But speaking of Roman Catholicism, my Italian grandmother, a devout Catholic, was an incredibly strong woman. It's said that she could carry many bags of groceries blocks and blocks in New York City and then up many flights of stairs. She had worn, leathery arms, one of them covered by a large scar that was the result of stirring tomato sauce that spattered when she was a child. She was quite stout and not particularly cheerful, but she was a good grandmother, tucking dollar bills into our hands for the ice-cream man and urging us to eat more and more of her astoundingly good food.

I doubt my Noni ever worried about her weight and probably took her physical strength for granted. She became quite demented in her old age but died at nearly ninety years of age.

When the doctor laid out the results of my blood work and cheerfully told me that everything looked fine, except for my actual weight, I felt a tinge of annoyance. I'll admit to the insane thought I had that it would almost be easier if there was a life or death reason to lose weight. It seems like I have the constitution of a southern Italian peasant but the desire for a Sophia Loren body.

Today is the second day of a doctor-directed 21-day Cleanse. I'm eliminating sugar, caffeine, dairy, wheat, beef and pork from my diet for 21 days in the hopes that I'll kickstart my metabolism and perhaps take some weight off. I'm going to try to appease the exercise tyrant as well.

The Best of It


However carved up
or pared down we get,
we keep on making
the best of it as though
it doesn't matter that
our acre's down to
a square foot. As
though our garden
could be one bean
and we'd rejoice if
it flourishes, as
though one bean
could nourish us.


Kay Ryan

My Father's Garden

Bluebird's nest

Sophie's Rose, in bloom

William Blake, Proverbs of Hell

Do not gloat when your enemy falls; when they stumble, do not let 

your heart rejoice.

Proverbs 24:17

I take no pleasure in the death of anyone, says the Lord

Ezekiel 18:32

I take no pleasure in the death of the wicked.

Ezekiel 33:11




 Returning hate for


 hate multiplies hate, adding deeper darkness to a night already


 devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can


 do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.




Martin Luther King, Jr.

What's Going On Here?

He was looking at the front page of the paper, a photo of very angry men in some middle eastern country, their mouths wide open, shouting. One man held another in his arms, his legs dangling, his head bloody.
Oliver scans the front page of the paper nearly every day and always asks What's going on here? Despite being in fourth grade, he hates to read and rarely finds out for himself by reading the captions under the photos, so I generally answer him as simply as possible.

There's a lot of trouble in that country, Oliver. Fighting, desperation. They're angry here because this person died in the fighting.


I've written a lot on this blog about Oliver's love of soldiers, armies, as he's always called them, whether single or many and much to the disgust and chagrin of his older brother Henry. They're called soldiers, not armies, Henry corrects him, pushing the papers aside for the sports section, his sole interest. Henry is perhaps more like his father and I -- pacifists, for the most part, disdainful of authority, particularly the military kind. I lean and keen toward non-violence and am conflicted when it comes to honoring the military, even soldiers sometimes. I find it even more difficult to speak to my children about my beliefs when nearly everything in our culture glorifies violence or at the very least, justifies it for some greater good.

Recently, Oliver created a pretty incredible tableau of toy soldiers and a bound plastic action figure. The action figure was actually Houdini, and he sat in a plastic chair, bound by a straight jacket, his mouth gagged. Oliver had placed tiny soldiers around the chair, their guns drawn and one standing with a knife at the prisoner's throat. The entire scene was filmed by Oliver on his iPod Touch, where he carefully explained that the bad man Gaddafi, from that country, I think Afghanistan, (it's Libya, Henry corrected, his eyes rolling), is getting ready to be killed by the good soldiers. I told Oliver that I admired the creativity, but the scene was disturbing to me because I don't like killing, no matter what.

This morning, I felt revulsion when I read about the death of the son of Libya's Qaddafi and his three grandchildren. I put the paper away before Oliver could see it and ask me, What's going on here? 

Because really, how does one explain that the good guys have killed the children -- the grandchildren -- of the bad guys?

Claire over at Life with a severely disabled child recently posted this clip from the great movie Witness. I'd forgotten about the movie and this scene.



The old man's answer is mine, I think. What is yours?

This makes me laugh

and remember when I drove a woman to a school meeting and she asked me why I had a handicapped placard in my car. I told her that my daughter was disabled due to severe epilepsy and the woman said, They give you a placard for that? Whether it was a testament to ignorance about the more severe forms of epilepsy or just gauche, I, being the weirdo that I am, wasn't insulted and exulted rather in the beauty of the anecdote. Because that's how people like me cope and, if we're lucky, fuel ourselves to write.

I saw this particular poster over at Maggie World and asked Maggie's mother where I could find it.

I think I'm going to order one.