Hello everyone from Portland, Oregon, where it starts getting dark at 3pm
Mom’s health
Mom was in a rehabilitation facility for a couple weeks, and everyone except for her thought that she should stay in rehab one more week. So she came home.
The impending Martin Luther King holiday sees her continuing to strengthen, though more easily confused. She’s not yet strong enough to leave the house. So either Abbe or myself lives with her full time. Physical therapists, occupational therapists, and social workers have dropped by to show Abbe and I how we can better work with her.
At times, she’s been more cheerful than she was before. Everybody is happy about that.
My Health — If not now, then when?
As for my own health, I’m hoping that no news is good news. My numb toes continue to slowly regain their feeling. And I’ve discovered that other parts of my body had also been numbed, but I hadn’t noticed, and now they, too, are regaining their feeling. I have mixed feelings about that – if these body parts start thriving, does that mean that the tumors will, too? Hope not.
I had lunch last week with Mary, who is my only non-family friend residing in the Portland area. Mary’s sister has a cancer analogous to mine. She expects to live just a couple more years. Before she dies, her whole family next fall is taking her on a cruise from the St. Lawrence River to Boston, sort of a Last Hurrah. I was sorry to hear about all this, and it reminds me that, though I feel pretty good these days, it could be something of an illusion. So I try not to waste time. Lunch with Mary, of course, is not a waste of time. In fact I plan to lunch again with her sooner than later. And we lunch at our local Shandong restaurant, complete with fortune cookies.
I find myself feeling more and more like an adolescent. All the issues I’d avoided since my actual adolescence have stuck around to torment me. I thought they’d fade away with time and good living!! Turns out they won’t. Who knew? In the meantime, I’m glad to have some extra time now to deal with them. I hate leaving tasks undone.
A couple old friends serve as key confidants in this process. One is Doug from Berkeley, my bike-riding friend. The other is my playful friend Eileen who, along with her husband, has howled at the full moon every month for the past fifty years. I mean, if you can’t trust a werewolf, who can you trust?
If not last spring, then when?
My condominium in Danville is about 20 minutes from Castro Valley. I paid it off about twenty years ago, at which time my mother injured her brain, so I moved back in with her in Castro Valley after her surgery to keep an eye on her. What to do with the condo? Rent it, of course. I got a great property manager. Mom and I split the profits, which became her main source of income for many years when she moved up to Portland. The pictures here are of that condo.
Well . . . . about nine or ten months ago, our tenant stopped paying rent. Normally, that calls for an eviction, but the pandemic changed the rules. So he’s still there, without my permission. A few months ago, we retained a lawyer and went to court. The judge found in our favor, so now the delinquent tenant owes me a court-ordered judgement of $16,000. Or he did. By now, it should be much more. I don’t expect to ever see any of that money.
Whenever the sheriff’s office puts it on their calendar, they’ll go and evict him. But still we wait. The property manager has located new tenants, but still we all wait. The property manager says he’s never seen anything like it in the thousands of rentals that his company manages. But still . . . .
Living in the past — Zen
I got an email today from my good friend Simon in Queensland. He was surprised to read about my interest in religion, which I wrote about in my last update. I guess I’ve been hiding it. Well, there was a reason to hide it in China. But since a lot of my life actually revolves around religion or spirituality, maybe I should write about it on this list, to continue tearing down metaphorical walls between my separate circles of friends, including my religious friends. I’ll continue chronologically from where I left off last time.
Zen — a Buddhist sect or independent of cultures or religions? It explicitly crops up more these days than it did in the seventies when I studied it. So when Mary and I went to lunch, I got a fortune cookie that said “A Master can act without doing anything, teach without a word.” It’s not exactly Zen, but it’s close.
It’s taken from page 2 of the Dao De Jing, a fundamental text of Daoism {Taoism). And Zen (called 禅 (Chán)in Chinese) is an amalgam of Buddhism and Daoism, Given where we were, a more Zen-like fortune might have said “Are the dishes washed?” In other words, don’t cogitate about it. Just do it! Dharma, anybody? Be present in the world and not lost in reverie. This concrete practicality made me love Zen, even though I’m actually lousy at doing the dishes.
The Japanese Zen master D. T. Suzuki, sort of a Zen ambassador to the West, once stated that the most important thing in Zen is love. His statement impressed me because Zen is usually known for unflinching efforts at meditation and discipline in the pursuit of personal enlightenment, and not something soft-edged like love.
As I mentioned last time, Zen absolutely distrusts verbal expression, particularly for provoking enlightenment, but also for more mundane situations. (which . . . also may provoke enlightenment).
Well, I never did achieve Zen enlightenment, but I did adopt its deprecation of language. For one common Zen exercise, simply eliminate language from your thoughts.In other words, stop talking to yourself in your mind! A lot of people aren’t even aware that they’re doing it. It’s surprisingly difficult to stop. Try it!
Back in college days, I got pretty good at stopping the chattering voice in my head. At first it was just a challenge. Then I noticed that it freed my mind from modes of thought imposed by years if language use. I focused more solidly on the non-verbal existential reality before me, noting that varied logical and linguistic ambiguities arose from the same reality.
I got better at mentally (and non-verbally) deconstructing my world and reassembling it in different ways. It broadened my appreciation of existence as well as social systems and religion. It’s a mental tool that I use to this day.
Living in the past — Alternate Realities.
While cultivating my interest in Zen, I had some rather strange experiences. But this was the seventies, so I took it all in stride. Adolescence is a time for visions, and I had strings of them back then, probably like most people. We might call them vivid dreams, though they feel nothing like dreams. They are as solidly real as a Zen exercise. The earliest one that I remember was quite simple. I woke up in my dorm room, but before I could get out of bed, I began floating up, so I had no traction on the floor. I gently rose like a balloon, softly bouncing off the ceiling. I looked down and there I was, still in bed, lying on my side. It was absolutely real. I was absolutely awake. It was wonderful.
Eventually I slowly sank down, joined my body and woke up again. This time I could gain traction on the floor and could walk away from the bed. Back then, we heard a lot about out-of-the-body experiences, so I was happy to have experienced one myself.
Another way that I dabbled in dreams was to wake myself up within a dream and then take control of it. It’s great fun. Anything you can imagine can take place right when you want it to. It’s the ultimate magician’s kit.
These strange experiences sated my appetite for visions and hallucinations, so I never was tempted to use drugs. I already had enough to make me question reality (or at least re-analyze it), a practice which I would eventually bring into religion.
The Vision Quest
Another common practice back then, derived from certain Native American customs, was the vision quest and the discovery of the ally, which is a spiritual animal guide or helper. For the longest time I could not locate my ally. But in 1975, I spent the whole summer traveling, kind of like one long vision quest, and I did have some hallucinatory visions.
One day, I was dozing on a bed in a Barcelona boarding house, when I was awakened by a rustling sound with soft padding coming up behind me. For a while, I just listened. Had a thief broken in? I looked.
No, it was a jaguar. And it was very very real. I was beside myself with fear.
The jaguar was a panther, dark without spots, but dark grey, not black. It was larger and more muscular than any that I’d seen before. Its panther face was a bit narrower than normal and slightly resembled a polar bear’s. I realized that this animal had to be my ally. It was in fact real and scary, but . . . different. I couldn’t afford to be afraid of it. Full of maturity, self-control and confidence, It quietly paced over to me, and then past me, heading forward and away.
I had to catch its attention before it left, I just had to.
So I summoned some courage and reached out with my left hand. I touched it on the cheek behind one eye. It paused and turned its head back to look at me and smile. Its eye narrowed and began to glow. How can a panther smile?
It headed towards a cheap wardrobe on the wall next to the bedroom door. An old and worn mirror hung on its face. The panther casually proceeded through the mirror and was silently gone. We had shown ourselves to each other.
So ever since that day, I’ve been running around with a fully self-confident panther.
Yeah, one could possibly deconstruct my experience and reassemble it into something more ordinary and rational with less grit and drama, so people won’t think me a psycho, and I considered trying that here, but dammit, I was there. I know what I saw. I know the terror that I felt. It’s simpler to just say what it was, and not over- rationalize it, particularly since its effects continue in my life.
For example, what else could it have been, if not my ally, that wracked my body with coughs for several months last year, to catch my attention, which led the doctors on an endless wild goose chase to find a cause, only to find cancer instead, which they found early enough to give me a few extra years. The rattling coughs immediately stopped upon the cancer discovery, like a big cat disappearing through a mirror, before I had even received any further treatments. And who had let loose this ally in the first place so it could flag my attention with coughs? Could that have been the Lord God?
Where I’m most aware of my ally is when I’m relating to people. It manifests itself as a feline sense of maturity, self control and confidence that I mainly associate with teaching school. That sense usually (usually)tells me when I’m on the right track. (depending upon the situation)
This is what I mean by an ally. Do you have such an ally, too?
Wow, that was fast.
I feel like I just now started writing and it’s already over 2000 words. So what about the elephant herd? And what would it be like to have an elephant as an ally?
And Happy Martin Luther King Day!
Today’s excellent opinion piece by Jamelle Bouie in the New York Times expands upon the idea that’s there’s a lot more to MLK than a speech. You can access it at this link.
And here is the conclusion of my own favorite King Speech, given in support of striking workers in Memphis, Tennessee. The conclusion is electrifying as he compares himself to Moses and predicts his own death the following day. I cry whenever I hear it.