A Thousand Stars in the Night Sky

Stars.

Oh, yeah, I went to this Buddhist retreat, and there was a lot of meditating and a lot of Noble Silence, and it was a great time all the way around, but what I remember most are the stars.

I live in Dallas.  It's a fine place to live, but there's so much light here. It's humid and light bounces off the water in the air and at nine at night it can look like twilight.  If you see a star, it's either really bright or it's a comet that's burst through the outer stratosphere and is plummeting toward Earth, due to explode a thousand feet up and take out thousands of trees in a repeat of Tunguska that practically screams you'll be late for work tomorrow, er, if you're not dead.

But this place.  Oh my God.

We were eighty miles out of Dallas.  We could see it, glowing on the horizon like a nuclear plant with serious problems, but it was far away.  Standing out in a field on the prairie just a mile or so from the Red River, we looked up and saw stars.  Hundreds and thousands of stars.

"There's a thousand stars in the night sky, I wonder which one could be yours."  --Big Country, "The Broken Promise Land"

It takes a human eyeball about forty minutes to fully acclimate to the darkness.  I spent the forty minutes lying on my back in the field, staring up at the sky.  I only pried myself away to go to bed because it was freezing cold and at some point I needed to get some sleep.  (Yes, sleeping in the field was an option, but there were cows, and cows, though they aren't very bright, are extremely curious.  Imagine waking up at three a.m. to find a heifer nosing your forehead. One might never lie on one's back in a field again.)

I was back in the field the following morning for some walking meditation.  I lay down on my back again, and  my sweater rode up on my stomach.  After a while I felt something walking around on me.  I looked down (not very easy, with the breasts the size of Montana; I kind of had to flatten 'em and move them to one side) and beheld a very tiny grasshopper.  It was maybe the size of my little fingernail, bright green, wide-eyed and  moseying around on my stomach in a just-hatched sort of way.

"You might want to watch out," I told it.  "I'm a mass murderer."  (When I was a kid, grasshoppers infested the mint and asparagus plants in our backyard.  I must have killed thousands of them.  I've felt bad about this ever since.)  The grasshopper did not seem alarmed.  Neither did another one that hopped up next to the first one.  So I shut my mouth and just watched them until they hopped off and disappeared into the grass.

I wonder if I've been forgiven.

Anyway, I had a pretty good time at the retreat, in case this isn't obvious.  And I caught a stomach bug. Well, that wasn't so great, but I guess into every intestine a stomach bug must fall.  Maybe it was the vegetarian food.  I've always preferred they take it easy on the vegetarian.

Coincidentally, Joan and I are sneaking out of town this weekend for her birthday.  We're going to Bonham, and that's not far from the retreat center.  I've already emailed them to see if we can stop by and look at the stars.  Answer: Yes.

Cool.

And The Tide Comes Rolling In

Believe I may have mentioned that Awakening Heart throws these mini-meditation retreats every so often. We had one today, in the morning, so I headed over there right after the Early Swim. (1800 meters. A mighty mile, and change. Rah.) Although I've been told that the Big Spiritual Breakthroughs happen at these retreats, I've never experienced one myself. I experience small ones instead, like suddenly realizing months after the fact that at some point I had quit yelling at other drivers from the safety of my car. Just quit doing it, after having done it all my life. Wow. On second thought, maybe that is a Big Spiritual Breakthrough. It certainly seemed pretty big at the time.

At this particular mini-retreat, we talked a lot about anger. Bro. ChiSing had an experience with anger this week (yes! Buddhist monks still have tempers!) and we talked about that, as well as the Buddha's advice on how to meditate your way around anger. Short version: Love the person for his positive qualities, even if you are angry with him. If the person has no positive qualities, then love that person even more, because she is very sick, and without your love, she will probably die. (Yes, folks, it's time to embrace Sarah Palin. First one to do it without vomiting achieves Nirvana. Go!)

Seriously, though: As we were meditating after this lesson, I came to a stunning conclusion that may have actually been a Big Spiritual Breakthrough. This is pretty exciting, if you're me. A little background: Since oh, roughly birth, I've suffered from these seemingly random fits of anxiety. They're really kind of hard to describe, except as a feeling of being absolutely not-safe. At any moment the floor's going to open up and swallow me, some random blimp is going to plow into me, another car's going to hit me, I'm going to get fired or shot or nailed by a lightning bolt or otherwise inconveniently dispatched. They last about, say, half an hour and then they kind of just go away. There's sort of a pattern to when they show up but I haven't quite nailed it; all I can say is that they seem to be more common at certain times of the month than other times. And despite the lack of Jen-swallowing floors, random blimps, angry cars, firings, shots and lightning bolts, there seems to be fuck-all I can do about them except ride them out. What I tend to do instead is run around trying to reassure myself of the lack of Jen-swallowing floors and random blimps and angry cars and--yeah. This does not help, but it lets me feel like I'm doing something, which feels slightly better than not doing anything, I guess.

Anyway, today after the whole discussion of anger and meditation, it suddenly occurred to me that the fits of anxiety are caused by nothing. They come from nowhere and they don't mean anything, either. They are products of that wild and wacky organic brain disease of mine, and nothing more. See, bipolar disorder is a lot like epilepsy, which is one of the reasons they treat it with some of the same medications they use for epilepsy. Check out this link for some commentary by a doctor who treats both. One thing that both epilepsy and bipolar disorder have in common is the kindling effect, which can basically be summed up as, "the more episodes you have, the more episodes you're likely to have." And so it is with these fits of

anxiety. They just roll in like the tide.

Taking my regular cocktail of meds probably does a lot to keep them from getting worse, and there's one in particular that I can pop in emergencies, but guess what, people? Trying to figure out what causes them, and what's more, trying to find something to put a stop to them, actually gives them more power. I don't have to like it, but I'd do a lot better to Just Accept It and find some ways to cope with them when they're around (sometimes I can feel them coming, like the barometer dropping before a storm). I even came up with some ideas to that effect, which is also

kind of a new thing.

So that was it, my Big Spiritual Breakthrough. And I'm fine with it. I can become a stream-enterer some other time. Like maybe when I'm not being stalked by a Jen-hunting blimp.

Talk Thursday: A Proclamation To The World

Gee, that's nice and subtle. But, that's the topic and I'm stuck with it, so I might as well roll with it, as my old Great-Aunt Maude used to say. Everybody ought to have a proclamation to the world, and here's mine:
GET OVER IT, ALREADY.

In all seriousness, though, if one were to take all the Sutras and the commentaries and the koans and the writings of Confucius (just for variety) and the poetry of Li Po and throw it in a blender, and if one were to pour the resulting great big philosophical mess into a pot and try to boil all of Buddhism down to its most basic essence, this is about what you'd be left with. Buddhism teaches that the quickest way to make yourself completely miserable is to get attached--to things, people, theories, ideas, concepts. Why? Because everything -- things, people, theories, ideas, concepts -- is temporary. Everything changes. Nothing stays the same.

If you're hanging on for dear life to, say, a girlfriend who's trying very hard to be nice about breaking up with you (and I've been on both sides of this equation, so I know of what I speak), the best thing that can possibly happen is that you're going to make both people miserable for a longer period of time. The worst thing that can possibly happen is that you get arrested for stalking, which can be very embarrassing to explain to potential future employers (and potential future girlfriends.) But that's a very real risk if you can't just get over it, already, and let go. Same story if you cling to an object that you simply must have that, by the time you can afford it, no longer makes any sense in the context of your life. I see a lot of men, for example, who are by God going to own an open-top Ford Mustang even though what they really need, what with the wife and three kids, is a nice mini-van or SUV. I see women do the same thing with certain pieces of jewelry and pricey outfits.

And ideas--good God, don't get me started. I have an aunt and uncle who almost literally had to hold their noses to vote for John McCain in the 2008 election, but they had voted Republican their entire lives and they were not going to vote any other way no matter how bad they thought their candidate was. (Not voting at all apparently wasn't an option, either.) And I'm not saying they were right or wrong to vote the way they did, but the very idea that they couldn't not vote for the guy, however much they disliked him -- that's attachment, all right.

Now, this can be taken too far the other way. I've run into Buddhists who like to play "more unattached than thou" (kind of a variant on Christianity's "holier than thou," I guess). These guys (and they are mostly guys, for some reason) do strange things like chop their little fingers off to prove how unattached they are to their bodies, or walk 200 miles to a monastery (living off the kindness of strangers, and whatever they find along the way) to meditate for a year, hoping there will be room for them when they arrive because phoning ahead for a reservation is playing hell with the fickle finger of fate. Yeah, I agree; that's a bit weird. To push something away is the opposite of clinging to it, but either way you're still controlled by that thing.

So the Buddha, being a pretty sharp guy, came up with a little thing he called The Middle Way. The idea, if I understand it correctly, is to neither cling to things, nor push them away, but just let them be what they are. It's kind of like standing in a stream. You don't try to hang on to any particular water molecule; you just sort of let them all flow around you.

Take people, for example. They will come and go like the tide. Enjoy them while they are around. Don't chase after them when they're gone. They'll either come back or they won't. Things are sometimes harder; everybody has a thing they prize above other things, and it's hard to cope with the reality that the thing will fall apart someday and be worthless. (Take my BlackBerry. Please.) But ideas are probably the hardest of all. Trying not to get attached to ideas, just letting thoughts flow through your brain and not pouncing on them and carrying them off like a cat with a feather toy, is sort of the mental equivalent of standing on one foot on a peaked roof during a thunderstorm and yelling algebra equations at the sky.

Fortunately, there's this thing called "meditation." Do it every day for forty or fifty years, and supposedly, you too can just let thoughts flow through your brain. Or so they tell me. I'm not yet attached enough to the idea to become convinced. But then, I've only been at it for four or five years at this point. I'm still a youngster. Would I speed things up if I trekked overland 200 miles or so to a monastery and checked in for a year? Maybe, but I'm unattached to that idea. Seriously. Frickin'. Unattached.

To wrap this up, the world would be a lot more peaceful if we could all become a little more unattached from the things that drive us the most crazy. Like, say, traffic. And politics. And maybe money. And look, America could use a Buddhist president. Next time out of the box, we ought to give that some serious thought.

In the meantime, get over it, already. Yes, you know who you are.

Quick Book o' the Decade plug here for The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins. It's been a very long time since a book made me cry. I'm halfway through the second book in the series, Catching Fire, and it just keeps getting better. Check it out. And don't get too attached to any of the characters. I'm just sayin'.

Retreat!! Retreat!!

Playing on the iPod: "While We Sleep" by Jeffrey Koepper
Meters swum today: 1800 (bonus!)

Sorry for lack of blogitude lately, but between Joan's knee surgery (and she's recovering nicely, thank you, though she's still limping around and making bad cane jokes) and the Olympics (faster! higher! farther! bring on the dancing electric drummers!) it's been a little hectic around here. Oh, and I discovered just how serious my Thing With Food really is. The whole time they were prepping Joan for pre-op I kept wishing they'd hurry up so I could go back to the waiting room and snarf down my peanut butter sandwich. That, plus job stress that's not getting any better, plus Michael Phelps and Dara Torres (did I mention Dara Torres?) and I'm about climbing the walls. Luckily for me, it's almost time once again for the Awakening Heart Sangha's quarterly Day of Mindfulness Retreat.

What is a retreat, you ask. Well, I'll tell you. A retreat is where you go sit in a room with a bunch of total strangers, do very little of anything and stare at the floor. Okay, there's some walking around that goes on, and some "mindful eating" toward midday (that's my favorite part -- see, there's the thing with food again.) And we do some journal writing and stuff and, well, anyway, it's a quiet and peaceful kind of day. I've heard some folks do this all weekend or even for an entire week, without a single news break to announce the Olympic medal counts. And, like going to the gym, I always have a great time once I get there. It's just going that's difficult. If you haven't been showing up for the regular service, and, uh, I kind of haven't, you feel vaguely guilty showing up for the special events. Kind of like being a Christmas and Easter Christian, I suppose.

Anyway, the second I mentioned that there was a retreat coming up Joan said, "YES. GO. I INSIST." Or other words to the effect that I might possibly be driving her nuts. Again, job stress, etc. Plus, last night I had a bad nightmare. I pretty much finished my bad nightmare phase in college and if I get one now, it's because there's Something. In. My. Life. That. Needs. Attention. This was a verybad nightmare. Just briefly it was like something from one of those "Saw" movies (I hate those movies, though I was rather taken with "Hostel," which was suspenseful, clever and honestly scary, I have to admit). People were being buried alive and I could hear them pounding and yelling, "I'm not dead! Let me out!" but I was more concerned with getting away from these freaky people whose idea of a good time was to hurt other people.

Okay, I get the symbolism: Something's getting buried and I'd rather run away than deal with it. Yes, but WHAT IS GETTING BURIED?! Really, my subconscious could trouble itself to be more specific. Couple nights ago I had a dream that this guy was showing me the various ways one could shave a cat. Yes, the symbolism was apparent there, too: "There's more than one way to skin a cat." But, again, MORE THAN ONE WAY TO DO WHAT?!! And, again, nothing specific. How irritating.

You can tell it's time to go on a retreat when I start TYPING IN CAPITAL LETTERS. Yeah. Like that.

Go Michael go! Go Michael go!