Grace

You can't see what I'm doing but I'm lifting my pelvic floor. You can't hear me but I'm humming. The hum sounds like a growl then graduates to a stutter as the vocal cords begin to get the message. I practice the vowels in my throat. I read a sentence without the consonants, then I practice the consonants in a whisper, then I add a bit of voice. When I get to conversation I am still stymied because there isn't enough air to get through more than a few words. I stop to breathe but my thoughts keep going, so I have to deal with the collision and make a choice, and then attend to the pelvic floor and make a note to remember to practice breathing, easy to avoid because it is so hard. 

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The Real Me?

"Oh, you're young!" 

She said when I revealed my age, only 61. Because when you see a bent-over spine and you hear a croaky voice, you think Old. 

Walking in the park now I know I'm in a category. My sexuality is disappeared, vigor shoved into memory, and what remains is, well, remains. 

On the other hand, my feet!

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Love and Anger, Intersections

Updated on Friday, April 30, 2021 at 9:37AM by Elena Taurke

This weekend I'm participating in a Dharma Dialog on love and anger. I'm also participating in teaching a monthly workshop on White Work on Racism. 

And I also strive to stay alive by eating and walking and washing the dishes. Why does washing the dishes come up so often in Buddhist conversations? I've written about it before, in some semi state of semi enlightenment, one of those recurrent episodes when I think I really Have It.

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What have I done?

Did I promise to die?

Last week not only did I write to you about the great benefit of dying to goals and drive but I also shared the blog with my friends on Facebook. A moment of popularity followed, most notably with my high school boyfriend posting several pictures of me with long hair, seemingly innocent, dreams not yet shattered. I was called an inspiration and a few other laudables, and people seemed to be saying goodbye. My life felt over, and I was suddenly awake to how future had changed into history, how many possibilities had vanished. 

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A Place to Turn Around

Last week I told a handful of people that I'm dying. I let go, stopped trying to conquer what can't be conquered, stopped trying to make progress, decided to respect the disease and my limits. And I wanted to talk about it. I described it to some friends as a kind of Tourettes, spitting death into the patter of polite conversation that irks me. 

Death. I'm dying. No, I'm not getting better but I'm alive and will try to keep it that way for as long as I can. Enjoy your day and I'll do the same. I feel a bit guilty when I rebuff the well-wishing but, hey, this is my protest and my medicine. 

In many of the Zen koans, a teacher is praised with the phrase: He had a place to turn around.

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death poetry

A beloved teacher at the Village Zendo has died. Robert Kaku Gunn. Kaku means Song of Emptiness. I can hear his voice now, a beautiful tenor, always on pitch, leading our chants, shepherding us toward the sweet emptiness that is ever so much closer than we think. 

Looking at his picture here I smile with him. This morning hearing the news I cried. I hadn't seen him in a while so really nothing will change for me, except that I know his journey is over. All of us will eventually accomplish death. 

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at least...

there is no good reason for this picture of me as a happy kid in flippers. still, here it is. at least you know what is going on... no I don't. This is supposedly a kind of ALS but no one knows the etiology, the mechanism or the cure for ALS. And Progressive Muscle Atrophy is even more rare, so even less studied. 

at least now you know you weren't crazy... I didn't think I was crazy. Did you?

at least now your symptoms make sense... yes, that's a little closer but, as David Byrne said, Stop Making Sense.

Diagnosis does not always confer coherence. In fact, in my experience it rarely does. It's an effort to put a boundary around things that always bleed into each other. But the intersectionality of the body does not succumb to a dose of diagnosis. 

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Do something!

Doing gets a bad rap sometimes in Zen circles. It's all about being, being in the moment, being time, no goal, just be be be. But also, while we're being we're usually doing something. Yesterday a beloved teacher asked me what my days are like, and I felt my insides blossom. My life is what I do. Now I'm writing. Before I was stretching my lungs and breathing, looking for my lats, taking a cold shower, drinking coffee, planning my priorities, folding my laundry, making more coffee, mulling things over, reading the news... 

Is reading the news doing something? How about checking email? I say yes. These are my connections to the wider world. Tomorrow I'll be co-teaching an ongoing workshop: White Work on Racism. I like to call it WWOR because when you say it you can feel the fight in it.

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Death Porn

Yes, I'll be pole dancing with the pillar of death, stripping down to my soul, dangling my scraps of life as they fall away. And you can watch.

So I looked up Pillar of Death, because, what the f*ck am I talking about? and before long I stumbled on a video of a twin meeting his twin for the first time. I cried. yes indeed. I will never have that experience and yet I felt it as if it were mine. It has nothing to do with pillars (even though there is some kind of game that features pillars of death), but emo is emo. 

Recently I saw a wonderful flick called The Forty Year Old Version, about a brilliant and under-appreciated Black playwright.

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More Dharma on Healing

In this talk I get into the details of healing, and draw a clear parallel between how I work with my body now and how we can work with the body of racism.  The talk was given online at the Village Zendo on October 25, 2020.

October 2020