What a week it has been in my world, one of false dichotomies, joy and sorrow, birth and death. At times such as these, I am glad I am not a black and white thinker.
Wednesday I watched in amazement as my lovely Springer Spaniel Feebee gave birth to six tiny puppies. The next day the earth trembled and the movement gave rise to a huge tsunami affecting the north eastern part of Japan and taking countless lives.
As separate as these events are, in essence they serve to emphasize what we as humans can sometimes forget -- this is life. It is all part of the continuum we find ourselves in from the moment we take our first shivering breath to the instant when our breaths cease. And as miraculous as it was to see these wriggling, sightless creatures emerge from their mother dog, so too was observing the live video from the air above the Sendai airport and the coastline of Miyagi prefecture depicting small aircraft strewn about like model ones and ships banging around and into each other while the wave of furious water demolished homes, cars and roads in its path.
Destruction like that, a miracle? Not in the sense of having a beneficent effect in its wrath, but rather that it was not worse. One can argue that such a seemingly merciless occurrence which has ravaged so many lives can have no positive effect going forward, but that is an example of how humans tend to think in such extremes. Was it horrific to watch and think about the people who were killed by this natural force? Yes. Sad? Unspeakably, yes. Did the world end? No. We humans are resilient; we rebuild and go on.
Life began for six small puppies, much-wanted and from parent dogs whose breeding is such that their offspring will be lovely, even-tempered adults dogs one day. Feebee as a first time mother didn't know what was happening as her contractions got serious and the first puppy was pushed from her body. She yelped and barked with pain, but then as soon as she smelled the wet warmth of this moments old male pup, she began to lick him and clean him with vigor. She nosed him to her side and he blindly squirmed to a nipple, latched on and sucked for all he was worth. I can't describe the surge of feeling I felt for her, the mother and for the five other babies as they eventually made their way into the world. Pride. Love. Compassion.
Many people routinely engage in such either/or, black and white thinking. They feel boundless optimism when things are going well. They can just as quickly sink into total despair with the first setback. For them, things and people are all good or all bad.
We would do well to move more towards more of the dialectical style of thinking subscribed to by many Asian cultures. In the words of the Buddha himself, " We are what we think, all that arises with our thoughts. With our thoughts we make the world."
Monday, March 14, 2011
Tuesday, March 8, 2011
On giving it to the universe
I am not in control.
It took me many years of pretending that I was to be able to utter those words aloud, an admission that was both terrifying and freeing at the same time. I could not make the world a perfect place, I was powerless to change other people, and I could not slow down time. Accepting this reality made me freeze up at first, then it allowed me to breathe again. How long had I been holding my breath? How long had my racing thoughts and plans kept me from living in the moment?
I was into my early thirties before I felt safe enough to allow meditation and mindfulness to be the way I lived each day. Anxiety always lurked just below the surface in most of my decisions despite others' reassurances of my capabilities, intelligence and strength. As a daughter, sister, wife, new mother, and full-time teacher, I carried no heavier load then most young women had done for centuries, but I fought daily to keep every ball in the air and make it look easy. I could plan the best dinners, create lesson plans each day to keep my students engaged, serve on the board of directors of the womens' shelter, deal with my then husband's sporadic employment, interact with and love my baby. What was different about my life then? I thought I was in control. I did not allow the thought of failing at any one of these things to enter my mind. Then my father died suddenly at age 55. My marriage began to decay. I needed to start over as a single mom. My inability to orchestrate life manifested itself in severe panic attacks.
Science is able to document this phenomenon very well - anxiety causes the brain to produce too much cortisol which sends the body into evolutionary survival, fight or flight mode. Your heart pounds, the blood leaves the extremities to go to the organs preparing you for battle, your mouth is dry, your breathing accelerated - yes, you're pretty sure you must be dying or losing your mind. It didn't take me too many of those experiences to realize that a) I was trying too hard to be perfect, b) that once I described this, I found out many people experienced panic attacks and that I wasn't crazy, and c) there were ways to avoid feeling that way, both via medications and by changing the way I was over-thinking and fretting about every part of my life.
Enter (or should I say re-enter?) breathing. I had learned to breathe properly many times over - to project my voice on stage when acting, speaking or singing, in pre-natal classes for labour, for relaxing before sleep. Such a simple thing was easy to forget when life seemed to be smothering you.
In all my reading and study of Buddhism were the seeds of what I had been missing as it applied to living better and with less fear, and that was the concept of impermanence. In fact it is one of the three marks of existence in Buddhist philosophy, though not an easy one for the western mind to embrace. Great thinkers from many traditions have written about the continuous state of flux that life holds, in words far more eloquent than I. It simplifies down to this: Nothing lasts forever. Nothing good or bad. Somehow, once I meditated on that belief, everything seemed a lot easier to deal with. No human being has control over the process of growing old, of not falling sick, of dying, of decay of things that are perishable and of the passing away of that which is liable to pass, including joy and sorrow and every emotion in between.
Sure, I still worry and find myself obsessing over some things, but it is much simpler and less anxiety-provoking to release problematic people, situations and material things than it once was. All of us are continuously becoming. I try to remain mindful and in the moment, and to give it to the universe. It never was mine to control.
It took me many years of pretending that I was to be able to utter those words aloud, an admission that was both terrifying and freeing at the same time. I could not make the world a perfect place, I was powerless to change other people, and I could not slow down time. Accepting this reality made me freeze up at first, then it allowed me to breathe again. How long had I been holding my breath? How long had my racing thoughts and plans kept me from living in the moment?
I was into my early thirties before I felt safe enough to allow meditation and mindfulness to be the way I lived each day. Anxiety always lurked just below the surface in most of my decisions despite others' reassurances of my capabilities, intelligence and strength. As a daughter, sister, wife, new mother, and full-time teacher, I carried no heavier load then most young women had done for centuries, but I fought daily to keep every ball in the air and make it look easy. I could plan the best dinners, create lesson plans each day to keep my students engaged, serve on the board of directors of the womens' shelter, deal with my then husband's sporadic employment, interact with and love my baby. What was different about my life then? I thought I was in control. I did not allow the thought of failing at any one of these things to enter my mind. Then my father died suddenly at age 55. My marriage began to decay. I needed to start over as a single mom. My inability to orchestrate life manifested itself in severe panic attacks.
Science is able to document this phenomenon very well - anxiety causes the brain to produce too much cortisol which sends the body into evolutionary survival, fight or flight mode. Your heart pounds, the blood leaves the extremities to go to the organs preparing you for battle, your mouth is dry, your breathing accelerated - yes, you're pretty sure you must be dying or losing your mind. It didn't take me too many of those experiences to realize that a) I was trying too hard to be perfect, b) that once I described this, I found out many people experienced panic attacks and that I wasn't crazy, and c) there were ways to avoid feeling that way, both via medications and by changing the way I was over-thinking and fretting about every part of my life.
Enter (or should I say re-enter?) breathing. I had learned to breathe properly many times over - to project my voice on stage when acting, speaking or singing, in pre-natal classes for labour, for relaxing before sleep. Such a simple thing was easy to forget when life seemed to be smothering you.
Sure, I still worry and find myself obsessing over some things, but it is much simpler and less anxiety-provoking to release problematic people, situations and material things than it once was. All of us are continuously becoming. I try to remain mindful and in the moment, and to give it to the universe. It never was mine to control.
Wednesday, March 2, 2011
A longing . . .
My eyes open and I'm momentarily suspended in an amorphous semi-fog between sleep and consciousness. I blink a few times, letting in the dim light and the shapes in the bedroom -- windows, mirror, lamp on the night table. Turning my head to the left I see the comforting form of my sleeping wife, her head almost hidden by the fluffy down duvet, her small shoulders angled to the bed as she coaxes more slumber from the night. It is not time for her alarm yet.
My tears surprise me for a second or two and then I remember. I was dreaming and now I am awake and I wanted that dream to be real and it isn't and . . . my thoughts run together like watercolours in the rain . . . I sigh so deeply that I am afraid I will wake Julie. Instinctively, I reach for Gabi, stretched full length along my side, and tangle my fingers into the ruff of wavy fur on her elegant neck, as she sighs, too. My dog is real.
What I dreamed is not.
She comes to me often this way, my mother. The situations are so mundane, so everyday, as if her death almost twelve years had not interrupted us. In these dreams the flow of life continues, and we are planning, preparing for something. Sometimes we are travelling together in car, listening to the radio and singing along as we always did, our two blonde heads thrown back, only now I am driving, not her. Sometimes we are arriving at a place so familiar to us both, excited to be here and to see who's waiting for us there. She always urges me to enter first and when I do, I find that it is not the place as we remembered it; there is neglect and decay. No one we know is there anymore and I go back to her to tell her this, but she has gone, too. I do not search for her.
I look so much like her. In dreams, she is eternally her sixty-ish self, hair done, lipstick on, wearing the shades of coral and camel and chocolate brown that looked so great on her. There is no hint of illness, no sign of the ravages of cancer that would consume her body. She smiles and hugs, smiles and makes tea, smiles and loves me.
The dreams are not always so sadness-provoking. We have funny adventures that only she and I would ever see the humour in. We play little practical jokes on my brothers and giggle as we watch them fall for them. Sometimes all her grandchildren are babies again, somehow all one year of age - Luke, Quin, Lauren, Duncan, Angus, Peter, Amy . . . even Nolan and Zoe, who came after she was gone - and in her (now my) living room. She and I are on the floor, building block towers with them until they are crawling all over us with squeals of delight and drool. I wake from dreams like this with pure sunshine in my being and a sense that all is well.
As long as she lived my mother let me snuggle into her, from times when I was small and scared, through my teens years when we would share the den couch watching TV, her leaning back on her side with legs extended, me behind her legs, my head on her hip. I did that until I was forty-five years old, cuddled into her warmth. Sometimes we talked, sometimes we just were. I remember her hands and fingers, oval nails and flawless skin as I played my own fingers through hers.
That's where I was this morning before my eyes opened. And my tears won't stop until they do . . .
My tears surprise me for a second or two and then I remember. I was dreaming and now I am awake and I wanted that dream to be real and it isn't and . . . my thoughts run together like watercolours in the rain . . . I sigh so deeply that I am afraid I will wake Julie. Instinctively, I reach for Gabi, stretched full length along my side, and tangle my fingers into the ruff of wavy fur on her elegant neck, as she sighs, too. My dog is real.
What I dreamed is not.
She comes to me often this way, my mother. The situations are so mundane, so everyday, as if her death almost twelve years had not interrupted us. In these dreams the flow of life continues, and we are planning, preparing for something. Sometimes we are travelling together in car, listening to the radio and singing along as we always did, our two blonde heads thrown back, only now I am driving, not her. Sometimes we are arriving at a place so familiar to us both, excited to be here and to see who's waiting for us there. She always urges me to enter first and when I do, I find that it is not the place as we remembered it; there is neglect and decay. No one we know is there anymore and I go back to her to tell her this, but she has gone, too. I do not search for her.
I look so much like her. In dreams, she is eternally her sixty-ish self, hair done, lipstick on, wearing the shades of coral and camel and chocolate brown that looked so great on her. There is no hint of illness, no sign of the ravages of cancer that would consume her body. She smiles and hugs, smiles and makes tea, smiles and loves me.
The dreams are not always so sadness-provoking. We have funny adventures that only she and I would ever see the humour in. We play little practical jokes on my brothers and giggle as we watch them fall for them. Sometimes all her grandchildren are babies again, somehow all one year of age - Luke, Quin, Lauren, Duncan, Angus, Peter, Amy . . . even Nolan and Zoe, who came after she was gone - and in her (now my) living room. She and I are on the floor, building block towers with them until they are crawling all over us with squeals of delight and drool. I wake from dreams like this with pure sunshine in my being and a sense that all is well.
As long as she lived my mother let me snuggle into her, from times when I was small and scared, through my teens years when we would share the den couch watching TV, her leaning back on her side with legs extended, me behind her legs, my head on her hip. I did that until I was forty-five years old, cuddled into her warmth. Sometimes we talked, sometimes we just were. I remember her hands and fingers, oval nails and flawless skin as I played my own fingers through hers.
That's where I was this morning before my eyes opened. And my tears won't stop until they do . . .
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