Waking Heart

The Listening, Part II

2012-04-21T02:47:57-07:00

Written by Rumi

Listen, and feel the beauty of your separation,
the unsayable absence.

There is a moon inside every human being.
Learn to be companions with it.

Give more of your life to this listening.

As brightness is to time,
so you are to the one who talks
to the deep ear in your chest.

I should sell my tongue and buy a thousand ears
when that one steps near and begins to speak.

The Listening

2012-04-14T10:40:56-07:00

I am not writing this with the mental image of someone else reading it, which is far from how my writing began. At age six, I was writing simple poems, and at age eight, I wrote a story that I sent to Golden Books. In the last ten years, my skill at weilding words became very satisfying. I felt capable of communicating the fine subtleties of abstract ideas, content that someone on “the other end” was receiving and comprehending them, perhaps even experiencing an improvement in their well being or at least smiling when they might have gone without. My skill with words became satisfying, but silence has taken over.

Do you know what it feels like to move through the day without any words arising in your mind? It sounds very Zen, but I no longer identify with Buddhism. The focus on impermanence and non-existence is too much like nihilism and alienation for me to benefit from it. Utter silence sounds like an accomplishment, but it happens when you reach a point, deeply and completely and, to be honest, somewhat traumatically, of sensing that no one else, and I mean no one, is listening.

We speak, even to ourselves when alone, motivated almost entirely by a belief in a listener. When this belief subsides, there is no will to speak. Not even inside.

I don’t know if this is an accomplishment or just some sort of psychological shock, or if the distinction matters. What I know is that something unusual happens, but only when I let myself sink into the aloneness.

If I struggle with this demotivated state, this lexical depression, and attempt to fight it off by straining to speak or reaching out (which I lost the will to do years ago… oh God, it’s been “years,” sigh), if I ache and yearn for the listening ear of someone who once heard me, I flop around in pain like a fish in an evaporating pond.

If I let myself sink into it, which is to say, I indulge in the pain of it, lying alone in… I would say “my room,” but I no longer have a home… or a country… anyway, if I lie there letting the pain overtake me like a tsunami, well you would think that things would get worse, but they don’t. They transform.

In that tsunami of pain, the pain that comes from feeling utterly unheard or unreceived and losing the will to speak, only there do I truly grasp that I will never, ever experience anything outside of “my” awareness. I mean, if I experience it at all, it is thereby in “my” awareness. It would be impossible for “me” to experience anything “other” than “my” awareness.

The yearning to commune with others, to be heard, is a yearning to experience the awareness of someone other than oneself. But this is impossible, as I just said. Go with this, because there’s a jewel in it, so keep looking at this and opening to it. The first realization is that this is impossible, but don’t stop there. Keep going. If it’s so impossible, why are we so painfully driven towards it?

In utter silence and solitude, sinking into “my” own awareness, the edges begin to blur until I realize that there are none. “My own” awareness is not my own at all. It is “the” awareness. The only “my own” about it is the chatter, which as I said died for the most part.

When I bleed out into “the” awareness with no postulated listener, none whatsoever, then this awareness encompasses the listener. Or the need for a listener dissolves. Something like that. Self and other become one in a singular awareness. Communion is happening right now.

So who am I writing to? And why? I have nothing to offer you. You don’t need anything, certainly not from me. Yet, I am not separate from you. When you breath, as you listen to the air moving into your lungs and out again, this is happening not only in your awareness but in “the” awareness. You are heard and received by the entire universe. The whole cosmos is listening.

Hidden Perfection, Lasting Gifts of Broken Love

2011-10-08T07:27:36-07:00

In the Tibetan Bön tradition, two people can see the purpose of a relationship and precisely how it will unfold, including its beginning, middle, and end, upon first meeting that person. In Tibet, they make a point of honoring this. They make peace with how the relationship will unfold, before it even begins, and they aim to fulfill its purpose. Then, if and when they part, they part with a sense of peace and warmth.

When I first met my ex-boyfriend, I told him this. After the words left my mouth, I looked deeply into him. I was lying on my bed, and he was sitting on the carpet near my bookshelf. Though we had only just met, I saw everything. The deep love, the intensity, the closeness, and also its strange short-lived nature, the unexpected turn of events, the loss and sadness. I saw a paradox of co-existing opposites: profound contentment and intimacy running as deep as marriage, coupled with terrible anxiety and a sense of alienation. I saw the whole thing, as if there were two of him, or two very different relationships with the same person, and I shuddered, and I could not look him in the eye.

Why I put that out of my mind, I do not know. But it left me with the question of purpose. The hidden perfection. Nothing ever really goes wrong.

A few nights ago, I wrote about imperfection and losing that “all is right with the world” feeling, the challenge being to find peace in this moment despite what happens, despite memories, regrets, or lost hopes. Resting with imperfection and allowing it to just be.

That same night, in the middle of the night, I drifted awake, not completely but almost, and on the edge of waking, I felt a very light, loving presence say, “Just wait! You will arrive at a moment in which you see how perfect everything was.” As though I were stuck on one thread in the tapestry and had yet to pull back and see the full pattern.

Already, I see a hidden perfection emerging.

After a year of unemployment, I was introduced to a Native American psychologist in town who heals emotional suffering in children and adolescents using story, myth, and metaphor. We immediately formed a deep connection, and he offered me a paid clinical internship. In addition to conducting psychological evaluations, I will provide therapy under his supervision.

He began training me one month ago. I am learning a lot about the children and adolescents I’ll be working with. Most of the children have had severe trauma and abuse. Many have lost family and friends. Some have lost their home. Every day is a struggle with overwhelming pain, grief, and anger.

Their stories remind me of my former love. The first time we ever spoke, he told me a great deal about his past. His childhood was filled with severe abuse, neglect, and loss. His story came out over the phone unbidden as he shared, for reasons he could not understand, things he had never told anyone. I felt a connection with his past. I could always see it in him.

Throughout our relationship, the enormity of love and compassion I felt for him was beyond description. I loved all of him. My love for him was bigger than me, deeper than me, and overwhelmed my heart. We were fond of wondering why that love was so strong. That love was there before we met and persists to this day.

Now, even though our relationship has ended, in my training I often imagine sitting across from a boy enduring trauma and abuse. A year ago, I might have imagined seeing more suffering than I know what to do with. I might have felt helpless, or I might have been reminded too intensely of my own past suffering.

But now, do you know what I see? I see the early beginnings of a man who, one day, someone will love with all their heart the way I loved and continue to love my ex-boyfriend. I see someone capable of being strong, resilient, and independent, like my ex-boyfriend, as well as loving, tender, and generous.

And my heart explodes with love and compassion for that boy just as it does for my former love. Exactly as it does for him.

He trained my heart. For that, I feel the deepest gratitude and reverence. I turn my mind to him, put my hands together at my heart, and bow deeply, whispering, “Mahasiddha.”

Even the alienation that I felt towards the end, when all the warmth and closeness seemed to evaporate, replaced by the empathic perception of surface selves disconnected from that deeper, silent space within him, it would be easy to think that things went wrong there, but actually, they may have been perfectly right.

One night, I described my perceptions to him. I said that I sensed two parts to him. One part was a chaotic cloud of thoughts and desires, fleeting selves that seemed to have no solidity. Those selves felt so unfamiliar to me, as if I hardly knew them, or they hardly knew me. The other part was that vast space within him, wordless and peaceful, and ever so real. That part was intensely familiar to me from the first moment we met. He said that part of him was “the real me.”

I will never forget that, because it was the part of him I had trouble sensing with my ordinary eyes or my ordinary mind. It would be easy to dismiss my perceptions of his true self and see only the surface selves, but he made it that much easier for me to trust my deeper perceptions.

Now, I can imagine taking all of the turbulent, cloudy surface selves of the children I see and looking right past them to the deeper, truer self. In Buddhism, they call this one’s “Buddha nature.” Already perfect. To see the Buddha nature in someone has a healing effect, they say, because it helps them to see it too. And even if they do not see it, that is not even the point. You see it, and you realize how everything they are, absolutely everything, is a gift in some way.

All is Right, Even if All is Not Right with the World

2011-10-05T16:46:10-07:00

In this moment, in every moment, the goal is peace not perfection. This is something I tend to forget no matter how many times the moment cracks open and shows me that the past does not matter.

When hopes come to fruition, there is a sense of perfection. When outcomes seem right and meaningful, whether expected or not, there is a sense of perfection. Things don’t have to be good. They don’t even have to be pleasant. They just have to be perfect, right?

to create imperfection
take a table spoon of perfection
and add a pinch of expectation
~ John Weeren, About Zen

When outcomes seem all wrong, on the other hand, and nothing can make them right again, there is a sense of imperfection, one of the most intolerable, unbearable perceptions I know. Memories and regrets can populate this present moment like a swarm of ants ruining a picnic… or zombies breaking in and eating your brain.

I recently stumbled across a novel that caught my attention, How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe. So far, on every page I have either laughed out loud or nearly dropped the book in sudden contemplation. Charles Yu writes, “Within a science fictional space, memory and regret are, when taken together, the set of necessary and sufficient elements required to produce a time machine.”

In his novel, a time machine repair man is called again and again to scenes in which grieving souls attempted to return to right what went wrong in their past. But they cannot make it right. Ever. Even with a time machine. They can only watch helplessly as the same events repeat themselves, and some people end up stuck in a loop. In a similar sense, attachment to perfect outcomes can make the present moment a living hell as memories run in a loop, never turning out right.

The need for things to turn out right is so strong. We crave, more than anything, that all-is-right-with-the-world feeling. In contrast, the height of true perfection in this moment, this eternal now, is tender, open peace among other things that, frankly, have nothing to do with the past or future or any facts describing the present moment. That all-is-right-with-the-world feeling… but without all the world stuff.

Just… all-is-right.

In the past several weeks, I’ve been struggling with an all-is-wrong-with-the-world grief, a highly tenacious anguish much like posttraumatic stress complete with intrusive flashbacks and random episodes of panic. My all-is-wrong-with-the-world grief stemmed from the abrubt end of a relationship that was as perfect as I ever could have hoped.

As the last pieces of us were all but cast to the wind, I dreamed that my ex-boyfriend’s white Lexus flew out of the sky into my backyard and crash landed in the grass with an impressive nose dive. What a strange dream, I thought, until I remembered something.

My ex-boyfriend once brought my boys a large cardboard replica of the General Lee, the stunt car from the Dukes of Hazzard. He built the car himself from cardboard, plastic pipes, paper mache, paint, and other materials. I wanted to put his impressive sculpture in special spot and stare at it, protect it, preserve it, and honor it, but that was not its purpose, of course.

“Don’t worry if they destroy it,” he said, “I want them to enjoy it.”

“Okay,” I replied warily. “I’m taking that to heart. I’m not going to worry.”

He might have said the same thing about our relationship. Not one month later, the General Lee looked as though it had crash landed over one too many dirt hills. Another month later, it was in soggy pieces.

None of us grieved. I was chagrinned but content. My ex-boyfriend was amused. My boys enjoyed the pieces as much as the whole, and when the pieces had nearly disintegrated, they moved on without regret.

Another month later, my relationship was breaking apart. Like the General Lee. I had wanted to put our relationship in a special spot and stare at it, protect it, preserve it, and honor it, but that was not its purpose, of course.

Insert Dukes of Hazzard sound effect: Nana na na na nanana na na na na!

Being Enlightened and Being Alive

2011-03-26T12:38:47-07:00

What does it mean to be the vast, singular awareness while simultaneously living in a physical body? In innumerable physical bodies, apparently, each with the subjective experience of being one singular awareness? My sights are on awakening, as they’ve always been, but my attention is often jerked back to my physical experience, either pleasantly through passion and sensuality, or very unpleasantly through severe health problems and economic challenges. Lately, it’s mostly very unpleasant, which is compounding the dichotomy. At the same time that I must acknowledge being a human being, I feel like less of a human being.

I’ve noticed that as my health problems consume my attention, my posts become less coherent, less about awakening and love, less about the collective and more about myself. I’ve wanted to let that happen, to speak authentically. Nothing is more precious than the truth. As I allow that contraction, watching it happen, my personal health issues seem to get swallowed up the vastness again, and I no longer care what happens to me or what I experience. Not only is my personal pain a drop in the bucket compared to global tragedies, but pain is just pain.

There is a fine line, however, between that expansion of perspective and resignation, like the fine line between the pursuit of awakening and the neglect of the physical. My inner world is continuously and quite obviously manifested in my outer world, and I’ve used that capacity consciously many times before, but I’ve found it difficult lately to want things to be any different than they are. That lack of desire perplexes me. I’m not sure if it reflects my ever-deepening, giddy hopelessness or a determination to let go of all desire and attachment (or both), but I’ve also been acutely aware of the coincidence: that after many years of wishing I were no longer in a physical body, my body is falling apart.

My uncle asked me why I did not simply go to the divine light, or the kingdom within, and ask for perfect health. I have asked for that, of course, but deep down, the conditions of my body seem to be serving a purpose. After running away from it, I have been forced to chase life. Slowly, the meaning of being alive, of being full of life, is sinking into my bones (along with the calcium and B vitamins). Being full of life is different than surviving or being attached to the body. Unlike mere survival, being full of life is not the opposite of dying. That is the visceral realization developing in me only now. Perhaps being full of life is the opposite of resignation. Whatever the case, the lesson is happening in my body, not my mind. Perhaps that is the point of being in a body in the first place.

I sent a message to my Buddhist friend asking if he would meditate on my health. We stopped communicating last fall, but my need was genuine, and we agreed to remain open to one another’s genuine needs. I didn’t hear from him. A few nights later, I dreamed that he was in my presence, and he was saying things that hurt while waving a gun around. I pulled out a gun and asked him to stop, but he kept going. I put the gun to his head and to my surprise, pulled the trigger. I felt instant remorse. The bullet passed through his head as if it were a ghost but came out of the base of his throat, where he bled, and after that, he was unable to speak any further. He wandered away in mute anger. I followed him, pleading for forgiveness and contemplating my karma, and then I woke up, abruptly and in grief.

When I returned to sleep, I dreamed of turquoise again. Months ago, I had a similar dream of a pendant on a copper chain (like the copper in a telephone wire). The pendant was an upside-down tree, branching out from the center of the throat with aquamarine gems attached to the branches like fruit. Aquamarine and turquoise are both associated with the throat chakra, with communication. My ex-boyfriend gave me a large turquoise necklace. The next day, I wore the necklace and imagined healing light surrouding my Buddhist friend’s throat.

That night, I fell asleep in a state of peace and relative painlessness. Two hours later, I woke up in sudden wrenching pain, my heart pounding and heavy. I got up and checked my email to find out if the pain was an empathic response to someone. My Buddhist friend had just sent me a long message, coincidentally, regarding the well being of a mutual friend, and he addressed my health. I stopped reading at “I saw this coming,” which triggered a bolt of adrenalin, defensiveness and grief. Every time I experience physical or emotional pain, there is someone there to tell me how it reflects my failure to do things right. The byproduct of this pain and its consequences, however, has been the deepest self-forgiveness I’ve ever experienced. I’m grateful for that. In any case, I’m beginning to believe that my health problems are strongly affecting my heart and adrenal system, making me extremely overreactive to stress. I have been praying for stronger nerves. Someday when I’m stronger, I will read the rest of the message. Simply and straightforwardly and without blame (or self-blame), I just could not continue reading. I returned to bed with a racing mind, an erratic pulse, this strange slow throbbing and trembling, and an urge to vomit, but as I relaxed, I opened, and I felt an enormous amount of love coming to me. I don’t know what he wrote, but I stopped wearing my turquoise necklace and felt more at peace with silence.

In the meantime, my medical sleuthing continues. I’ve been attributing profound episodes of weakness and fatigue to anemia, but my heart seems to be involved. My pulse is “all over the place,” chest pains are frequent, my chest has felt continuously tight and heavy for more than a month now. At rest, my heart beats very weakly, and when I exert myself, I experience angina so painful it brings me to the floor. Something is not right. Waking heart indeed.

Last night, I went to sleep asking the universe to show me what is wrong. I dreamed that I was surrounded by millions of chaotic ants each equipped with some sort of electrical sensor, and they were following or sending electrical signals, but they were disrupting signals that were supposed to happen naturally, and inside the great building where most of the ants were housed, the room was flooded. I dove in for a short swim. Not only were the ants in the fluid dead, but the electrical signals were washed out. Next, I dreamed that the doctor was cleaning out dust and ash from within the chambers of my heart, and he said I had an infection surrounding my heart tissue (i.e., myocarditis). He also said that my heart is too big. A metaphor, I presume.

I’ve enjoyed entertaining the romantic yet alarming notion that my waking heart has gotten so big that my empathy with suffering in the world is drowning and weakening it. At the end of the day, however, I don’t have any notions at all. The problems are too complex to resolve with the intellect alone, which brings me back to the value of the body (and being alive)… much learning and wisdom is gathered not through thinking but through being. Direct experience.

I think I need to find a real doctor to complement the multidisciplinary chiropractor bent on healing me with nutrients. He did discover that my gastrointestinal tract was inflamed, my persistent cough is not accompanied by signs of chest congestion, and my kidney infection never fully resolved and ordered lab tests to find out what antibiotic might finally kill it.

My Zen teacher in Florida called and asked, jokingly, if I could get up from my death bed to talk. We had a lovely conversation in which he remarked on the palpable intensity of my energetic presence, and I could sense his energetic presence as well. He sent healing to my heart. As we spoke, I could not help but feel, deep in my bones, that nothing is really wrong, and things are simply unfolding as they will, which is fine. There, that’s when I feel it… being full of life.

Hidden Tsunamis

2011-03-15T11:28:15-07:00

One of my old friends in my old town, a dear soul with horrifying psychosis, recently wound up back in the hospital. One year ago, I accompanied her to the emergency room after a particularly damaging bout of inner trauma and spent an exhausting twenty-four hours arguing with doctors, nurses, and government workers to admit her (see Full Circle, March 22, 2010). They finally grasped her situation. After a week in the psychiatric ward, they placed her in transitional housing with a case worker and medication. I watched the side effects of medication turn her into a veritable infant, drooling and shaking and shuffling, but she nevertheless walked nearly a mile to my house for some kind of comfort. After many weeks, she was evicted from transitional housing for inability to pay rent and ended up in a women’s shelter, I think it was. She applied for disability and was denied. She struggled to find work, but even on medication, she suffered the effects of extreme stress and chronic illness, and she still couldn’t think straight. Over the course of a year, she was bumped from one shelter to another and lost every menial job she found.

She struggled to survive, against such pain and anguish, I doubt anyone I know would last two days in her shoes. Her only lifeline out of hell was an obsession with spiritual teachers. Two weeks ago, she stopped taking her medication. The police found her under a stairwell in the airport waiting for a flight to Arizona where she hoped to meet one of her teachers.

Every day for her is an earthquake and a tsunami and a nuclear meltdown, but she’s expected to move forward as though everything were fine. I called her in the psychiatric ward, but she would not speak to me. She is beyond posttraumatic stress. She is the tsunami victim stumbling through the rubble dying of dehydration and radiation poisoning, while clueless relief workers advise her to polish her resume. During my visit in December, after picking her up from the mall where she spent six hours applying for every job from fry cook to accessory cashier, my ex-whatever, Jimmie, told her she should approach local companies with a presentation about what she could offer. After putting my jaw back on, I spent a good day whacking him in the head with reality and returning to the same refrain: “You know, it is actually humanly possible for a person to find themselves in an unsolvable situation!!!” Pant pant. “People do die in this world! Some die alone and hungry! And no amount of ‘pickin’ yerself up by yer bootstraps’ would have been enough!”

People died when the tsunami hit Japan. People died when Hurrican Katrina hit New Orleans. The World Trade Center. The whole world jumps up and rushes to offer aid, but there are hidden tsunamis and invisible hurricanes, inner disasters that can take years to end a life… slowly and agonizingly and alone.

There are hidden tsunamis in my life, and my instinct is to scream for help, wave my hands in the air, and look for relief workers. Sometimes, they come. They pull me out of the rubble. They feed me and nurse me back to health. There is so much love in this world. Then, another quake. Another tsunami. The disaster is some chronic disease combined with the demands of single motherhood. Looking back at my life, I’m convinced now that it’s lupus. My grandmother is convinced that it’s Addison’s disease. The anemia is really bad now, probably because of the fluid in my lungs. Regardless of the diagnosis, my mother bailed on medical care. She offered instead to buy me a book on living with chronic pain. She taught my son how to call her, and she’s making repairs to the house in preparation for my eviction. I watched her replace boards on the wooden fence, and it was like watching someone build a coffin on one of those western movies where the hero is expected to die in a shoot out at noon. The lease ends in May, and she often tells me how much of her retirement money has gone for my rent. I cannot convey to her what each and every day is like for me… like crawling through the mud and broken houses, thirsty and bleeding, wondering how I will make it through the day. The challenges are real and intractible. They are consequential. My ex-husband is making preparations to care for our boys in Holland. I do not have the physical capacity to pack my things. As near as I can imagine, I will crawl out of this house in May with nothing.

Every night now, after my boys are asleep, I make a hot bath with candles and kirtan. Floating in the warm water, my body is soothed, and I let go of fear. I breath, and I look up at the giant wave hovering above me, and smile. No one is rushing to save me, and I’m not going to scream anymore. I thought about committing suicide. I have all the equipment necessary for a quick and painless death. My boys are suffering because of me, and I continuously wonder if they would have a better life. Yet, whenever I consider it, I just feel overwhelming love. I’m not afraid of dying. I just love everyone in this world so much. Ha! I didn’t make that happen in me! It just happened. To anyone sending love, I thank you. Love trumps pain. Love trumps fear. What a strange discovery. I don’t have it in me anymore. Unless it becomes intensely clear that my children would have a better life, that option is off the table.

Then, as I sink into this universe of hidden tsunamis, deeply at peace, resting truly, no longer screaming or expecting to be rescued, moments of sheer joy rise up out of nowhere and delight my heart. I sat out on the patio and watched my boys inflate and chase balloons in the backyard only to watch them pop, one by one, on the dry grass. It was like watching loose chickens scramble around a farm. I laughed so hard. This morning I began teasing my five year old that he had a secret crush on Dora the Explorer. Yesterday, I was driving on the highway when my seven year old had the sudden, overpowering need to use the bathroom. You know how, when you have to go, it’s all you can think about? I gave him an empty water bottle and an imaginary bathroom pass and started laughing hysterically, then we turned every song lyric on the radio into something about peeing. “I tell you once more, before I get off I-4, don’t pee right now! Ba ba ba ba.” (That’s “Don’t Bring Me Down,” by Electric Light Orchestra.)

Dozens of birds visit my back porch every day to eat the birdseed that my five year old dumps on the ground for them, and they have gotten so comfortable with their visits that they drop in for a bite when I’m sitting right there on the patio.

Whether we see it or not, everyone is sitting on a building quake under a poised tsunami. If you do see it, it might terrify you, and if you don’t have the option of ignoring it, it may bring enormous, unimaginable suffering, but it’s okay. The forces of love and joy are apparently much stronger, and regardless of when death comes, they will still be standing.

The Body Fragile, the Heart Strong

2011-03-11T06:39:59-08:00

Last night, following the advice of the acupuncturist I dated last spring (one of my incarnate angels), I made a hot bath of baking soda, canning salt, and ginger to help clear my body of infection. As I soaked in the water, I watched the movie Synecdoche. Perfect timing! An aspiring Zen priest and good friend once highly recommended it after seeing it three times in the theater.

The movie begins with a man obsessed with a fear of dying. He watches his body deteriorate in a hundred unusual and painful ways. He feels extremely fragile. His life falls apart, and solace is eternally elusive.

Logically, the movie should have intensified my feelings of horror about everything. Dark and disjointed, it is not a feel-good movie, which is what I was looking for. But it didn’t make me feel worse. Paradoxically, it lifted my fear.

What if your entire existence occurred in that space between living and dying? What if this predicament that evokes the most horror, suffering the failure of the body but not quite dying, watching everything that ever mattered disappear as a result… what if that was one’s eternal existence? And there was no escape?

Then, struggling to keep it all together is not the name of the game. Avoiding pain is not the driving force. Suddenly, you look around… at everything just as it is right now, and you just feel tenderness. You know that everyone suffers and everyone dies.

My predicament is the sorry combination of high demands and low capacity to meet them, and whatever took my health makes me look like a lazy malingerer. So I’ve been in a continual state of crisis for a very long time with a few periods of normalcy, and communicating how impossible things regularly become is very difficult.

I just now went to Thesaurus.com to find a better word for “lazy,” and one of the three headline articles was “The Illness that Fakes Being Sick.” A little synchronicity. The illness is Munchausen syndrome, “a psychological disorder characterized by the feigning of the symptoms of a disease or injury in order to undergo diagnostic tests, hospitalization, or medical or surgical treatment.”

They should have a word for actual illness that looks like Munchausen syndrome. Oh yeah… lupus. They have a support group here, and one of the things they most discuss is how difficult it is to convince friends and family of the challenge and severity. After all, if you have stretches of hours here and there when you can walk across a room like a normal person, you must be fine!

After watching Synecdoche, the longing to be understood has left me. Why is it so important to make someone understand my suffering when we all know suffering? I can safely attest that the physical pain of bad arthritis, kidney infection, fatigue, and pneumonia (what am I forgetting?) can be rivaled by the pain of a lost love or perpetual loneliness, and the will to live is stronger when the pain is only physical, so there is an underlying contentment in it that cannot be found in love pains.

Which makes me realize, the truest form of suffering… I mean, REAL suffering, is to experience a total loss of love. But we are never subjected to that fate. We do not live that existence, ever. That, my friend, is always an illusion.

After watching that movie, I felt my heart open up again to all the beings in the world who suffer. No wonder it comforted me, and no wonder it gave me strength. I dreamed of my lost Buddhist love. I saw him walking through a large room, smug and ignoring me, and he was so painfully beautiful, it hurt horribly, and I woke up and thought about that scene, which seemed very painful. As I looked deeply at that scene, all the ways in which he loved me and gave his heart to me flooded my mind. So he didn’t jump into a needle and let me inject him into my vein. Good. He didn’t turn me into an addict. All he ever did was love me and care about my well being, and I’m sure he still does. Whatever pain still lingered from the dream quickly turned to such overwhelming gratitude, I bathed in it for hours. I could not say “thank you” hard enough.

I got the sense that everyone in the world deserves that same gratitude. If we look deeply enough, we can see why.

I think the bath helped. I got out two hours later stinging with ginger, but I felt almost normal. My mind was clear, my fatigue gone. No arthritis pains. Still a chest cold but it’s improving. The most improved part of my body, however, was my heart.

In case you want to try it, this is supposed to help the body fight viral and bacterial infections. Make the bath as hot as you can stand it, and add the following:

3 lbs canning and pickling salt
3 lbs baking soda
1 tablespoon powdered ginger
Synecdoche

A Prayer Request

2011-03-09T15:24:06-08:00

My poor health is taking a heavy toll on my children. My youngest son suffered for more than a day with a severe asthma attack and pneumonia before I got him to the hospital. Struggling to sustain things is starting to seem very selfish.

My kidneys have healed, but the arthritis, fatigue, and illness continue. On the weekend, I tried to rest while my boys played in the backyard. My older son dug a hole behind the shed big enough to lie down in. In the meantime, the house filled with ungodly amounts of dirt, complementing the existing mess. On Sunday, my mother hosted a birthday party for my five year old. Like me, he was coughing and congested. My fatigue was so intense, I had to hold onto something to sit upright. We walked in the door, into my mother’s lavish three story gated estate, and she immediately dragged my boys off for nicer shirts and combed hair in preparation for photos. She hushed everyone as we sat around the dining room table for cake and ice cream. She succeeded in keeping the boys so quiet that at one point, everyone was bored, and she joked about turning on a radio. It was the most grown up birthday “party” I’ve ever seen for a five year old. I badly wished I had the strength to take him to Chuck E. Cheese. After everyone was done eating, my mom brought my son to the front door and wheeled out a new bicycle complete with a red bow. My son has a bike, a very nice bike, and it fits him perfectly… something I told her before she bought it, but she wanted to impress him.

Such is her way. Lavish to impress but tight and reserved to nurture. My son responded with little emotion. She put him on the bike, which was far too tall, and steered him around the driveway. In the meantime, I collapsed on a chair and felt as though the life were draining from me. My brother and grandmother put their arms around me. Breathing was hard. My lungs have filled with fluid.

We went home, and I fell on the floor. I asked my mother if she would cover the expense of continued visits with her doctor, but she never responded. She just encouraged me to eat more. I have gotten into the habit of “making a case” for my poor health, which makes positive affirmations challenging.

The boys played outside again, and I noticed that my five year old was coughing and wheezing hard. I stumbled into the kitchen and struggled to cook macaroni and baked beans. I couldn’t breath, couldn’t think straight, could barely stand, but I managed to cook everything and spoon it onto two plates. I sunk to the kitchen floor, shaking, and called my older son to carry the plates to the table. I could hardly speak. He wandered in and grabbed the plates and took one to my five year old, who was still coughing and wheezing. I dragged myself to bed.

All night, I could hear my son struggling for air and coughing. Neither of us slept. He thrashed and sweated, and I tried to comfort him. I was all out of medicine.

In the morning, I got my older son to school and spent three hours on the phone trying to find a doctor for my son. State benefits for uninsured children are decent on paper, nearly absent in practice. I found one walk in clinic with a two hour wait. I packed a bag with books and stuffed animals. At the clinic, I was not done registering at the front desk before they took my son to the examination room and got him in a breathing mask with vaporized asthma medication. Three full treatments and one shot of steroids later, and he was still struggling for air. They admitted him to the hospital, where he spent the next twenty four hours under constant care.

Lying in the bed beside him, watching the blood oxygen monitor, I felt deep sadness and fear. The way a mother would feel, I suppose, if she wanted to stand between her child and a grizzly bear, and she couldn’t run fast enough to come between them.

My ex-husband called from Holland not long ago, and I let him have it. I told him his absence from their lives was despicable. He said he had no choice. He was so unhappy in his job, but he found his dream career in Europe, and now he is happy again. “What would you have done,” I asked, “if I hadn’t been in this world?” He said, “If you weren’t in this world, they would be in Holland going to a good school, getting good health care…” Before he could finish, I cursed at him.

In the hospital, his words rung in my ears.

I sent him a message that our son was in the hospital, and I never heard back. I didn’t sleep. My throat was swollen and sore, my lungs very congested, and I vascillated between chills and hot flashes. I suspect that I also have pneumonia, but the state offers no medical care for mothers.

Please send us your prayers. They will be felt. I know there is love all around. Even now, there are moments when the pain and fear suddenly part and some very blissful light shines down and fills the room so intensely and with such presence, I’m in awe.