Nouwen was gay? Day-um. I’m going to have to do some re-reading. That is sad.

There’s some possibility of Phoenix in the fall. MIL moving soon, probably close to Scottsdale. Will keep you in the loop.

And no, Viv’s not getting married. (Good Lord, just thinking about that makes me hyperventilate.) We just figured we should take the opportunity to make it legal before the voters have a chance to, well, make it illegal again. No hoopla (or rather, much less hoopla) this time.

It’s the balance between self-care and service that eludes me. I’m getting better at it, but I have a lot—maybe too much—catching up to do.

And as a chaplain friend pointed out to me yesterday—look where the good father ended up….in the end his own solidarity with the pain of others may well have shortened his life. And he didn’t have a family to be present for at the end of the day/week/whatever.

My girls and I are well. Gymnastics classes, swimming lessons, and probably a wedding coming up soon… Miss you too.

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Infernal editorial voice: Now, by wedding, you’d better not mean Viv’s—because then I think we really need a catch-up phonecall.

Persephone and I’ve been emailing about this little inner seesaw too—just today we were talking about looking to see when service comes from that “full” place inside, rather than when it’s coming out of the “empty” one—the place of “I have plenty and want to share” rather than “I have to say yes to every request, otherwise people won’t like me and/or I won’t be good enough, because I’m already fundamentally not.” Emotional sobriety, basically.
And I didn’t know until just recently that Nouwen’s denial/repression/renunciation/whatever you want to call it, of his being a gay man, was such an informing/decisive part of his thinking and, probably ultimately, his end. I would say this is terribly sad except that in fact it makes me angry (see emotional sobriety, above).

And now I am taking my headache (TOO much yard work in the heat) and going back to bed with a novel. Ugh. Tell H. I said she should give you a foot rub. ;o)

PS and puhleeze let me know when you’re next in Phoenix! I don’t imagine it will be ANY time soon, nor should it be….the B. and I will probably head back to Baja for Dec/Jan, frustratingly (insofar as seeing friends goes, though it is at the same time one of our greatest joys). Sorry for the comment-letter….much love.

This (perfectly apt) Fr. Nouwen quotation reminds me of Bernie Glassman’s version of the three tenets of Zen: 1) not-knowing, 2) bearing witness, and 3) healing. The idea being that the third emerges naturally out of the first two: only when we give up our fixed ideas and are present with suffering (whether our own/others’/the world’s), can healing arise.

I suspect the tenets overtly include bearing witness to our OWN suffering partly to help hold the balance between self-care and service. So that the precious heart-workers like yourself (and maybe this doctor?) don’t burn out completely. Can I bring that same gentle curiosity to my own pains, and not run screaming from them.

Miss you; and hope you and your girls are WELL.

Henri Nouwen says, “Those who do not run away from our pains but touch them with compassion bring healing and new strength. The paradox indeed is that the beginning of healing is in the solidarity with the pain. In our solution-oriented society it is more important than ever to realize that wanting to alleviate pain without sharing it is like wanting to save a child from a burning house without the risk of being hurt.”

I guess it falls more in the category of what to do about others’ suffering, and I’m not sure I agree with him as much now as I did when someone gave me the quote a few years ago. Maybe because I haven’t figured out how to keep doing this without it costing me too much. I remain impressed with the doctor who gave it to me, because so many MDs tend to be so ’solution-oriented.’ Though this is a doctor who likes social workers. Or at least a doctor who liked me.

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Editor: What he said. :o)

(Though I’ve never understood what’s supposed to be so terrible about rebirth!)

Still muddling through self-improvement and Buddhism and suffering I picked up, today, Mark Epstein’s Going to Pieces Without Falling Apart and got:

“Buddhism teaches us that happiness does not come from any kind of acquisitiveness, be it material or psychological. Happiness comes from letting go. In Buddhism, the impenetrable, separate, and individuated self is more of the problem than the solution.”

In the synchronistic way these things happen, I am now reading to my (middle school have mercy on them) older boys the section of Sophie’s World on British empiricism and so just two nights ago we had a long conversation about Hume concluding that the feeling of having an unalterable ego is a false perception. So now I am not just questioning what suffering is, but also, who exactly it is that is suffering. Or being improved. Or whatever.

In the meantime, I suppose that all of my other religious beliefs are now so heavily infused with how much sense Non-Violent Communication makes, that I know that if someone else is suffering, the correct answer is not “Oh, hey, that’s an illusion” any more than it is “It’s not that bad” or “Oh, that reminds me of this one time when I was really suffering.” It is “Yes, it’s awful, and I am here with you.” And sometimes that suffices to cut the sense of separation.

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Editor: Who is experiencing what as suffering? What is this world we are trying to save?

Mandarin had a running gag in college (when she was our dorm’s RA) about the Wrong Things to Say to people in distress. They seemed so funny, I think, mostly because we’d either said things like them ourselves, or had them said to us. And I’m sure that even now I just find fancier ways to tell people, “Um, why don’t you just get over it?”

Sudden blinding déjà vu. Perhaps I’m reminded of something a well-meaning senior student said to me once during a retreat. (The backstory is that she’d reprimanded me that afternoon for something small, something which would have been pretty minor to a non-shame-paralyzed person, but which had me hiding in my car sobbing hysterically and pounding the dashboard for about three hours, during which time I somehow managed to turn on the headlights and run down the car battery, making it impossible for me to leave the retreat as previously planned. As the Professoressa noted wryly later, “If it had been a dream you’d have known exactly what it meant.”)

Anyway, said student was trying to help me jump said car later that night so I could go to work the next day; and I was presumably apologizing all over the place, because in her thick Swiss accent, she informed me with unconcealed disgust: “You know the trouble with you? Is that you always think you are so unworthy.”

It was so right-on and so badly put that even in my mortal agnoy I was hard-pressed not to laugh aloud.

Oh, and another priceless one, from an NVC training at Chez Zen—with a bewildered woman trying to post-mortem why her interaction with a angry gas station attendant (mistakenly accusing her of stealing) had gone so badly. “But I tried to validate her! I did! I told her, ‘I understand that you have a problem….’” We all burst into laughter and the unintentionally violent communicator grew even more confused. She never really was able to hear how condescending that sentence must have sounded to the angry attendant.

Mark Epstein is fab; et aussi, I don’t think non-Buddhistic Buddhism gets much better than Stephen Batchelor. Of course I attended a four-day retreat with him and his wife Martine where they lectured on, what else? But the Gautama’s interdependent relationship with Mara.

Holy MOLY this is a long comment-comment. And for no good reason, your Eeyore/Wol-populated inner pantheon reminds me of this DSM-IV diagnosis of the Sesame Street characters.

The Sponsor defines suffering as an awareness of separation. The greater the perceived separation the greater the experience of suffering. This too is dangerous. The “solution” to the “problem” is easy, like the Buddhist said to the hot dog vendor: “Make me one with everything!”

And clearly we are not able to manage our little unity/disintegration meters. It is only for Clever People to imagine that once they understand what causes suffering, it’s easy to get rid of. The mind doesn’t even know what “separation” means (being the Great Separator itself), let alone “unity.” But, like letters in a formulaic math problem, the terms get nicely thrown about. Let separation be x. Let unity be y. The trick would be to eliminate x, solve for y, etc. But obviously since the truth is neither separation nor unity (as unity can only be postulated if separation is real, and it’s not) these mind games arise only in separation.

I’m most often left simply with surrender. I just don’t know.

Also, when the Buddha says suffering has a cause and an end, I can’t help but get teleological. Arising and passing away happen in time. The path to the end is outside time, where there is no cause nor end.

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Editor: “The trick would be to eliminate x, solve for y.” I think you’re making exactly Kosho’s point, that trying to do this is just another mind-game. What the Brujo is TRYING to say is that he agrees? (Per Mandarin/Unnarrator in-joke about sophomoric lit seminar analyses: “I think what Ezra Pound is trying to say here….”)

“If we touch the truth of suffering with our mindfulness, we will be able to recognize and identify our specific suffering, its specific causes, and the way to remove those causes and end our suffering.”

Having identified taxes as suffering, can we remove this cause and end it?

“In this world nothing is certain but death and taxes.” B. Franklin

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Editor: The cause is removed! It is finished! At least for 2007. And the economic stimulus shall be mine, all mine, nouahahaha….well, until I die, anyway.

I think Thây’s words are in harmony with Kosho/Brazier when he says, “touch the truth of suffering with our mindfulness”—using the word “touch” sounds to me like he means precisely this embracing, becoming intimate with, holding in our heart: loving our suffering selves. But the trouble for Westerners, or anyway for this Westerner, lies in the concept of “mindfulness,” which has that ridiculous syllable MIND in it. My by-now absurdly belaboured point is that we can’t do it with our MINDS. We do it (to the nonexistent extent that it, whatever it is, has anything to do with anything we do anyway) with our spine, belly, pelvis, lungs, breath? Or by thinking non-thinking.

And I do so resist this idea of a flow-chart or objectives-based strategy for attaining inner peace—this very, I keep insisting, American idea of enlightenment-by-numbers (though grasping after attainment’s been around since Bodhidharma at least) (that was a joke). By the end of the quotation, TNH himself waxes so teleological (to steal the Brujo’s word) that I feel depressed just reading it. (And in fact Thây IS a very depressed person, at least according to Herself—of course he’s also a trauma survivor who has every reason to be depressed.) The Plan for Getting Rid of Suffering starts to sound like a project again: If you just do four, you discover two, achieve three, and then don’t have to put up with one anymore. Bake in a 350º oven for 20 minutes; garnish with self-congratulation; serves everyone.

And, yay! You commented! Welcome to our freakish, faithless little e-family.