Psychology + Zen = Philosophy and methods to relieve suffering and reveal happiness.
Psychology: We project onto others what we reject in ourselves. Some call it a Shadow. Healing comes from making the unconscious conscious, taking responsibility for our projections, integrating what is split off as our own thing.
Zen: There is no separate self. When we can be at one with every aspect, then we belong everywhere and we reject no one.
We heal the world by becoming intimate with our whole selves.
Today I am not crying. Even though I slept only an hour last night, I am not crying. Even though my new home health aide cannot really understand me, I am not crying. Actually, I am shouting, but no one seems to hear or understand what I'm trying to convey.
Maybe it's the sun and the warmth. And maybe, today, it was a little bit fun to propel my chair with my feet.
photo by Leor MillerToday I am crying. My sky is crying on my tree as I sit inside watching it. I cannot go outside today because I don't have help. I did not know that I would not have help, and so I didn't ask around. I did not know that I would lose the ability to balance and walk. I did not know that I would lose the ability to talk and breathe. I did not know that I would know that I am dying.
That's a lot of 'e's, eh? When you make the sound, do you feel it in your throat? your tongue? How about your teeth? Do you feel the resonance in your cheekbones?
There is a big difference, isn't there, between seeing it on the page and feeling it? I thought of this difference the other day on my first wheelchair ride. I had convinced my daughter to leave me outside for a bit so I could feel the breeze. Sitting under a sprawling tree bending in the soon-to-be-stormy wind, watching leaves shimmer a little hysterically, I felt bliss. I was the tree and the wind and the sun. My pores shouted Oneness with All, and I listened. Alas, we were pressed for time; the bit was over too soon, and then I was inside again.
Inside I can see a tree (I'm lucky, I know), but I cannot feel it. Or so says my limited mind.
pic by Leor MillerThis is how I swim now. With the full support of my daughter I can kick like a toddler learning to swim. Except of course I fucking know how to swim. I fucking used to pass the fucking alpha males with their gear and their struts and I was fucking proud!
Pride comes before a
whoops.
I fell the other day as I
Somewhere in my documents is a pronouncement that I'll be ready to die when I can no longer express myself. When I wrote it the line between expression and not seemed more clear to me than it does now. What is expression? What is myself? Zen koans are often simple at the absolute level but entangled at the level of detail.
Sure, I am expressing myself now, but
human armchairs, loving familySensible sentences can't convey how it was to be trapped in a house of stairs with no railings, on the beach impossible to access without help, ocean waves subsumed by human construction.
And yet, with help, an experience sublime.
So, a poem.
getting helpThis morning my being did back flips when I read this account by a woman with MS of what it is like to be fed. She remembered back when she was a young mother how she escaped her husband and child to shop, then tucked herself into her car and tucked into a big bag of chips and a soda. A happy private binge is not a possibility now, and she must endure humiliation or anger or whatever when people forget to feed her, or produce such a big bite she has to let it fall out of her mouth, or maybe just reveal impatience or awkwardness or reluctance.
What do you see when you see me now, head drooping, carefully stepping, barely balanced on sticks held by arthritic hands? "Bless you," I've heard, or "good job," or some just smile to show I'm included in this beautiful day. I am accorded that kindness reserved for heroic cripples who might have given up but instead still struggle, still battle, and maybe even overcome obstacles. Thank you.
Imagining my death last week I felt a little thrill, which interested me very much. It wasn't just the possibility of relief, it was a curve of curiosity. Dying might be super cool, alive as I am, dissolving into the One.
Curious about the thrill, I pursued it, gently lest I scare it away. I let it ring a little as I investigated hospice care and funeral homes, then heard it ringing as I felt the breeze, finally a little cooler in NYC, and as I relaxed in my abode, eyes dancing with the flow of forms I've created or, rather, felt into being. Language has always seemed treacherous to me
My right hand is giving out, so I'm practicing parsimony.
Problems I don't have:
Look, this is not trivial. Countless pages in my lifelong diaries are filled with efforts to shape my body into something lovable.
sometime in the 80s
Problems I don't have:
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