Wandering Along the Path: Right Speech

I babysat my younger grandson yesterday then Facetimed with the older this morning, so I've had my grandparent hit.  In five days the granddaughter comes with my daughter, and the whole family will be mingling for our younger son's wedding.  We're cleaning like crazy today, and hoping what we fix stays nice until our guests arrive.  This is the time for me when expectation can wire me up, and then I become over sensitive and get my feelings hurt, so I'm hoping to buck that pattern and just enjoy whatever happens.  I know I'm thrilled with the couple getting married.  They are well suited for each other.  My test?  If there is more energy in the room when they are together rather than less.  They are full of plans and hopes and dreams, as they should be.  I think back to when I married my husband 43 years ago and I can still feel the exuberance.  As Margo Channing would say, it's been a bumpy ride, but I wouldn't change it for anything.  I wish the same for these two lovebirds.

Wandering Along the Path: Right Speech

My husband and I and two friends went to a presentation last night about a trip the four of us hope to take in the spring to the Galapagos.  We were pleasantly surprised by the commitment the company has to using local people and resources wherever the go, and their foundation, which puts money back into small businesses, relief and other aids to these places.  65 cents of every dollar the company receives goes back to the local economy.  The guides are local, and invite you to really learn about and meet the people who live there.  And the cost was low.  No fancy frills on these trips, but the attention to details and care they take impressed me.  So maybe we will not be tourists in the usual sense, but travelers with respect for the places we visit.  We felt excited coming home after, and like it makes sense to support this company that tries not to be invasive, but cross cultural instead.

Wandering Along the Path: Right Speech

I had my little getaway with my friend, and though it was slightly less that 23 hours, it felt like a relaxing, renewing time.  We swam, wrote, went to a bookstore and shoestore, ate a lovely lunch and dinner at the club, explored the architechture, and she played on two different grand pianos while I was her sole audience.  We really had fun.  We had two swims and she taught me some of the water aerobics she'd learned at the Y.  But mainly we reconnected, listened to each other, and enjoyed each other's company.  This retreat will stand me in good stead as the wedding festivities come up next week.  I feel reenergized.  We were careful in our speech, and it made the time together dear.  The effort and the risk was worth it.

Wandering Along the Path: Right Speech

We had to take in our elderly dog this morning.  She couldn't walk and wouldn't eat and cried out in pain.  She's there overnight tonight, and is having a pain shot and complete rest.  Each time we bring her in now we're afraid she won't come back home.  Our vet is such a compassionate and tactful doctor, and talks about the balance of her quality of life versus her pain.  He rules out surgery and invasive procedures, because she's at the end of her life.  But he makes us feel that he's giving us the truth and not sugar coating what is happening with her, so he's her advocate mainly.  We'll see if upping the dose of her pain and inflamation meds will help.  If not, it may be time to let her go.  Tough decisions, but we have a partner at our back:  our vet.

Wandering Along the Path: Right Speech

I finally finished a wedding quilt for our younger son and his fiancee, who are marrying in two weeks.  It's very imperfect, and the stitches are uneven, but it was made with love.  I remember when I was sewing my rakasu, and the sewing teacher at the zen center said it was meant to be not perfect, but rocky and uneven as the path we tread.  I had just struggled with learning about my macular degeneration, and I knew whatever I continued to do visually would be not as elegant as before.  Not that I was ever an amazing seamstress.  That was my mother.  I was a very sloppy imitator, but I inherited the love of making things with my hands.  It gives me such pleasure.  So I sew away, not oblivious to my lack of skill, but despite it.  And I believe my kids have appreciated the effort, if not the result.  A blanket made with love:  I've sewed one for each of the kids now, and they have their own families, and their own meaningful objects.  But the gift of it has been rewarding for me.

Wandering Along the Path: Right Speech

We watched the DVD of Wonder Woman last night, and I had tears in my eyes, as I did both times I saw it in the movie theater.  The truth of politics and posturing, the cost on ordinary men, women and children, the outsized egos and careless games the people with power play:  these reminded me of the fear of each of us about North Korea and how people can drag us into danger and death without any appreciation for a value of life.  Wonder Woman's faith in humans, at least some of them, and her belief in love, could not be more Buddha-like.  We see the world as it is, but we choose love and compassion, not despair and anger.  I hope some of our politicians can rise above greed and hunger for power and stand for us, like the NFL players today.  The truth is we must love our country while seeing the racial and gender inequities that affect us every day.  Stand with love and solidarity with all people and against destruction and nihilism.

Wandering Along the Path: Right Speech

We never watch the news, but last night we caught the end of the Newshour, and Shields and Brooks were discussing the possibility of Trump going to war over North Korea.  They were so depressed that fear shot up in me like a rocket.  We are in this netherland where a lot of us are waiting for something to cause Trump to resign before he triggers an apocalypse.  We petition, call our representatives, march, but yet, there seems to be nothing that stops or moderates his behavior.  I'm up to date, but I'm wondering what good it does.  The left watches its news and the right theirs, and a lot of people in between are just making up news like a children's fairy tale.  In the meantime, Trump is changing our lives in many ways:  from campus rape to health to immigrant status to a free for all on Wall Street to climate protection rollbacks.  Great damage has been done, and we will be, for the foreseeable future, repairing, not moving ahead, just like the hurricane and earthquake victims.

Wandering Along the Path: Right Speech

A few years ago our neighbor asked to move a hot tub on our side of our house and if it wrecked our camelias and other landscaping, she would pay for it.  I said I had to think it over, as that is where our sunroom is and the wall is all windows.  I could see the glass crashing in.  She was offended that I didn't say yes instantly, and she ended up having it moved on the other side of her house.  Fast forward to two days ago, and her husband comes over and needs the NEW hot tub moved to their back patio and asks if he can bring it up our steps, but then get it up his own steps to the back.  We said yes.  The first request came like a demand, and this time it was more thoughtful and reasonable and didn't involve destroying our landscaping.  Now there still could end up being damage, even in this scenario, but the tone of the asking made all the difference.  Talk about right speech.  The wife demands, the husband is friendly and low key.  I imagine he has to mediate his wife's impulsiveness fairly often.  And I don't think she has a clue how she comes off.  But we try to be reasonable, and work with them when we can.

Wandering Along the Path: Right Speech

Fiery rhetoric from our President!  He seems not to believe in calmness, moderation or accommodation.  Evidently, threats have worked for him all his life.  But who pays the price this time?  The American people.  He belongs in Game of Thrones, not in the White House.  Along with the horrors of hurricanes and earthquakes, we have a man-made storm system just so he can feel powerful and potent.  Everything he does seems to be to prove his manhood.  How deeply insecure he must feel inside.  And he's making the rest of us feel as insecure.  It's like being besieged by the Wrath of Khan!  Let me out of this scenario!

Wandering Along the Path: Right Speech

My husband has managed to twist his right knee.  He was watering outside plants.  That's all I know.  But it doesn't take much at our age to end up in pain.  I had no "event" with my right knee.  I'd simply been standing too much doing holiday cooking, and then holding my grandson on Christmas day.  But the stairs are a big factor.  If I hadn't carried him up our stairs and later down the stairs to the street when they left, I might have survived.  My husband was standing for three hours last night for his chorus rehearsal.  That'll do it!  He just said to me he didn't want his knee to feel this way.  And he guessed he hadn't been sympathetic to my knee problem for the last six months.  Well, yeah.  But the truth is it's all abstractions until you've experienced something similar.  I was gracious today.  I fetched ice and two Aleve tablets.  I DO know exactly how he feels. 

Wandering Along the Path: Right Speech

Yesterday we saw the opera "Electra", by Richard Strauss, and it was a bloody opus to the Greek myth world of unbridled passions and unchecked impulses and the craving for revenge.  It seems melodramatic, until you see that our human species has not come so very far since.  Myranmar, Isis, teen terrorists, men with guns gunning down their families:  is it outlandish or a mirror held up to us?  The music was gorgeous and the three female singers divine, and even the set lovely to look at.  This meshing of the beautiful and the violent is so very prevalent in our own culture that the opera couldn't be more timely.  Are we noticing?  How violence and our attraction to it are the center of our lives?  We wonder how someone can join Isis, yet, in a way, we have all joined the cult of destruction, including many of our politicians.  Tear it down!  I'm angry, and my life is not going the way I expected, so destroy.  I'm afraid of those people, so destroy them. 
I hope humankind evolves from this free for all, and the calmer and saner of us prevail, but we won't if we can't look in the mirror. 

Wandering Along the Path: Right Speech

We had dinner with old friends last night.  It's been a while, as we both have adult kids whom we travel to see and in their case his mother, who has Alzeimer's, and in our case, three grandchildren.  We used to get together for Thanksgiving and Christmas day, but that rarely happens any more.  Luckily, we live within walking distance, and run into each other and catch up, plus my friend and I are in a group together and also walk some mornings.  Our talk at the table turned to down sizing and adjusting to aging, and it was my husband who asked to change the subject.  He is very uncomfortable with the idea.  I want to find a smaller house on one level, and he doesn't want to move.  Of course moving is a huge upheaval, and yet, the stairs are difficult for me, and he is adverse to seeing this change.  He can't accept my problems, and yet, I can't just will them away.  What will happen?  We'll see.  I keep bringing it up, and he keeps saying he doesn't want to move.  Would I be any better if our situations were reversed?  Truly, I don't know.

Wandering Along the Path: Right Speech

The women of our family will soon be serenading our younger son and his bride at the rehearsal dinner.  I began this tradition with my older daughter, and that time I sang all by myself.  I was a wreck.  So why did I come up with the idea?  I can't reconstruct my thinking, but my heart was overflowing with love and joy, and music seemed like the way to express my feelings.  Three months later I sang to our older son and his bride, and then  came a gap of many years.  My older daughter had divorced and was remarrying, and I corralled my younger daughter, daughter-in-law, my older kids' stepmother and my young granddaughter into singing one song, and I sang the second by myself.  Then came my younger daughter's wedding, and our group sang one song and my older daughter and I sang the second.  It felt so special that the women of the family were serenading.  This time we are ALL singing two songs, and the intrepid stepmother is playing the ukelele and we have a tamborine.  We are getting to be quite a production.  But the heartfelt feelings remain the ground on which we stand.

Wandering Along the Path: Right Speech

Last night two friends and I went to dinner and to see a writer enact parts of his new book.  The idea was clever, and he was very good, but my friends missed the give and take of an author in conversation and a question and answer period.  Inacting one's own words seems formidable, and you become a character instead of a narrator.  I certainly wouldn't choose my own words to act out, when so many great writer's words are available.  Yet maybe he has a point.  Whenever you tell a story, it's removed from the actual event and dressed up and edited.  So the story is not the truth, it's the flower from the seed of something that happened to you.  We are performing for an audience, either in a blog, as is the case here, or when we tell what happened yesterday at the grocery store, or write down our memory of our father talking to us about his eminent death.  There is a translation and a performance. 
So I believe the event last night was much deeper and wiser than it first appeared, and I just bet I'm going to be thinking about it in relation to my life and how I "tell" it.

Wandering Along the Path: Right Speech

At my writing group last night we decided to only meet once a month this year.  I had a pang.  I didn't want to let go of the bimonthly schedule, but I could see I was alone in my preference.  Change.  Always surprising, and usually invigorating.  We did a writing exercise where I placed three objects on the table and we could pick one and write about it for eight minutes.  They were all my objects, yet they had lost their particularity a long time ago.  I wrote about tiny glass salt and pepper shakers and in doing so remembered where I'd gotten them and with whom.  Several other people wrote about a tiny enamel viking ship with a minute spoon and shovel for the salt.  I'd always thought it was a gondola, but I've only had it two years.  It was my brother's and I brought it back with me.  It turned out to be Scandanavian, and if you slip out the glass dish inside there is an intricate carving of a church.  In gold, no less.  I'd never noticed it before.  The lesson:  look carefully and you find tiny wonders all around.  And writing:  it's all about the tiny wonders, not the big, sweeping ideas.

Wandering Along the Path: Right Speech

My friend and I went to an antiques store today and took our time looking at many delightful things.  Then we had lunch and came back.  I realized that the things I liked were more than I wanted to pay, as did my friend.  I only bought a paperweight for my husband, who collects them.  After we got in the car I told my friend that what really attracted me were the china Beatrix Potter animals, especially Mrs. Tiggywinkle, Benjamin Bunny, Jemima Puddleduck and a few others, but I would not display them and the grandchildren would break them.  I liked them, but I didn't want them.  Not one little bit.  One of the ladies there said make an offer for what you want, but I am constitutionally unable to bargain.  I drove salespeople crazy in Egypt and Morocco.  They want to haggle.  I can't.  So I wasn't made of stern enough stuff to try for things that seemed too pricey, and I had no fire in my belly.  It was enough to gaze at them.  I didn't NEED them.  I must have grown up while I wasn't looking!  How strange!

Wandering Along the Path: Right Speech

Today I had lunch with my Buddhist swim buddy.  We don't see each other that frequently, but when we do we discover we've been thinking about similar things.  I was telling her I was missing not laughing as much as I used to and she said she and her Israeli friend had been discussing that very thing.  My friend believes at our age we are "sober".  We see clearly and that view dissolves a lot of the kind of laughter that bubbled up when we were perhaps less "awake".  We laugh, but not so often and usually only at ourselves and our expectations and predictability.  When she said that, suddenly, I no longer thought anything was wrong with me.  I'm simply on a different part of the journey.  There was nothing to fix after all.  My friend has that ability to set me straight and share experiences in a way that is soothing.  I trust her completely.  I believe that 100% of the time she has my welfare in mind and sees who I truly am.  It's a blessing.  We finish each other's thoughts, and share the loss of our brothers and the deep concern for our families.  We are on the path together.  How comforting!

Wandering Along the Path: Right Speech

My friend sent me a photo of the fire at the Columbia River.  This is near where my daughter and granddaughter live, and it is a horrifying image.  Fire haunts us here in the west.  We never feel safe from it, but especially not at this time of year.  Today is my birthday and I'm old enough to have learned to coexist with fear, but not to conquer it.  I've been evacuated at both my current house, my last house and my cabin.  You let go of everything; for in a moment it may not matter.  And people in the east right now are experiencing that fear from the wet, not the fire, with flooding and predictions and projections and maps.  Where will the storm go?  What will happen?

We all know in our bones change is just around the corner, across the street, or in the house where we live.  We shore up our families and friends as buffer against the arbitrariness of life, and random cruelty, the senseless violence, and yet we feel in our hearts nothing is secure.  Maybe our belief in surviving, whatever the cost, for some of us, but we don't really know until we're tested.  The fire next time, the flood, the earthquake, the storm.  Live now and treasure this moment.

Wandering Along the Path: Right Speech

I'm not that excited about getting a new car.  Impermanence is ever before me now.  Will my eyes hold or will I not be able to drive tomorrow, if the macular degeneration gets worse?  Will my age cause other health problems or the ultimate health problem?  Is something new exciting for someone my age?  Not really.  Things.  It's all things.  Things to disperse to my children and grandchildren.  We are going to downside our house, and I won't be so excited as the other times we moved.  Because we will get rid of most of our stuff, and it's a temporary abode for only as long as we don't need assisted care.  Not having stairs may not be enough to keep us independent.  That's not fatalistic thinking, it's seeing what is so.  I'll still enjoy the car and the house.  But excited?  No.  Nothing compares to family and friends at this stage of life. 

Wandering Along the Path: Right Speech

Yesterday we went car shopping with our younger daughter, her husband and baby, and it was interesting to see how different our car needs were.  They needed something bigger, with lots of haul space, and we were downsizing, as we now have such a big family that it's impossible to go in one car no matter what it is.  We'd like to be able to accommodate a car seat for the baby boys, but a circumstance would be rare when we'd be driving them places.  And our granddaugther is older enough she doesn't need even a booster.  So I got a glimpse of my younger self, when I was so thrilled to buy a family car, and take my children's friends to soccer and that sort of thing.  And maybe they got  a gander at themselves twenty or thirty years hence, when they will thinking a small parking spaces, not birthday parties.  It goes by fast.  But they won't believe that if I tell them.

Wandering Along the Path: Right Speech

I'm reading a mystery by Louise Penny, the Canadian writer, but it is also about the opiod epidemic.  If what she implies is true, we are about to lose many people to this vicious drug, and we have already lost so many.  Her description of the evil people who benefit from this traffic makes it seem such a problem of epic proportions that it all but seems hopeless.  I admire her for tackling the subject and daring to have a possible solution.  Speaking out, when you've got millions of people listening, is brave and important and yet seldom done outside of journalism.  Her books reach people who are tired of reading about drugs, and she freshens up the debate and the ways to grapple with this destructive global greed.  I admire her courage.

Wandering Along the Path: Right Speech

It's my husband's birthday today, and the family that is near went to a brunch and then a museum.  The two little fellows did great, but we took our cues from them.  Their wishes were our command.  Our almost two year old grandson had a huge pancake and pronounced it "tasty".  The nine month old ate like a stevadore.  It was cooler today, as if in celebration of our celebration, and the breeze was wonderful.  We didn't push things though.  We parted when naptime beckoned.  The agreement was unspoken:  we do what's best for the children.  I see a lot of parents dragging overtired kids around and pushing them past their limits.  I'm glad my family doesn't do that.  We are limited by what the littlest can manage.  And it's still way fun!

Wandering Along the Path: Right Speech

Our nine month old grandson swiftly tore the newspaper from the table while in his grandpa's arms and stuffed it in his mouth.  Eating speech is an interesting concept.  No nutrition, but a fit use of the news.  We were trying to get him to say "mama", but he prefers to growl like a baby bear.  We're not sure what to make of this, but I'd say it's a safe bet he's of the bear clan.  Yesterday was unbearably hot (excuse the terrible pun) but he managed to take his nap in our darkened bedroom, and our daughter called this morning to ask if he could take his nap here again today, as their house is so hot upstairs.  Of course we love to have him, and we're cooler here because we're surrounded by trees and in a sheltered area with the street above being way up to block us from the sun.  Normally I grumble about it, but when the weather is warm, we're a haven.  And baby bear is our haven.