The important things

“The most important things are the hardest to say. They are the things you get ashamed of, because words diminish them — words shrink things that seemed limitless when they were in your head to no more than living size when they’re brought out. But it’s more than that, isn’t it? The most important things lie too close to wherever your secret heart is buried, like landmarks to a treasure your enemies would love to steal away. And you may make revelations that cost you dearly only to have people look at you in a funny way, not understanding what you’ve said at all, or why you thought it was so important that you almost cried while you were saying it. That’s the worst, I think. When the secret stays locked within not for want of a teller but for want of an understanding ear.”

– Stephen King

Via Feminism is The Shit

In Dark Places

“Success is somebody else’s failure. Success is the American Dream we can keep dreaming because most people in most places, including thirty million of ourselves, live wide awake in the terrible reality of poverty.  No, I do not wish you success. I don’t even want to talk about it. I want to talk about failure.

Because you are human beings you are going to meet failure. You are going to meet disappointment, injustice, betrayal, and irreparable loss. You will find you’re weak where you thought yourself strong. You’ll work for possessions and then find they possess you. You will find yourself — as I know you already have — in dark places, alone, and afraid.

What I hope for you, for all my sisters and daughters, brothers and sons, is that you will be able to live there, in the dark place. To live in the place that our rationalizing culture of success denies, calling it a place of exile, uninhabitable, foreign.”

– Ursula K. Le Guin

Via Feminism is the Shit

In which I’m startled by a request

I was sitting at my desk the other day, lost in some piece of work or other, when one of my colleagues got up to leave the office and suddenly asked me to forgive her.  I must have looked a little startled because she stopped to explain that she’s off on a trip to see family Pakistan and it’s traditional to ask people forgiveness before going away.  Of course, I said I forgave her for anything she might have done to upset me.

After she left, I stopped to consider if I did have anything to forgive her for and realised that I was in fact still angry with her for coming into work with a very nasty dose of flu last year and giving it to me.  I was angry because this meant that I couldn’t visit my dying father for two weeks because he was so weakened by chemotherapy that we couldn’t risk him catching it off me.   My colleague couldn’t have known this, but still there was a sense of resentment.

Although it might seem a little strange to me, as a secular westerner, to be asked for forgiveness like this, I found it quite helpful in drawing my attention to this little grudge against her that I’ve been carrying around and in giving me an opportunity to let it go.  It’s also refreshing to have such a direct acknowledgement of the possibility of death, something which is just such an enormous taboo in western culture.   I hope my colleague comes back from Pakistan safely, but of course, she might not.  You never know when death might be coming for you and there’s something very life-affirming about facing this squarely.

Nothing to say

From Jay Sennett, Intentional Practice: Nothing to say about anything

A post that resonates right now.

A new approach

My boss came into my office this morning with a document that I’d written about approaches to dealing with perpetrators of hate crime and asked, “Um, did you mean meditation here?”

I looked and found that I’d typed “meditation” instead of “mediation” throughout the document, which is perhaps my subconscious reminding me that I’ve been neglecting meditation recently.

Meditation, along with education, might not be such a terrible approach to dealing with perpetrators of hate crime, but I’m going to be amused all day at the idea of suggesting it to high level police officers and policy makers.  I was quite tempted to leave it in.

Joy

After all the grief of the weekend, here’s a picture of 78 year-old Phillis Siegal and 84 year-old Connie Kopelov coming out of the New York courthouse where they were finally allowed to get married.   I cannot look at this picture without crying.  Sometimes life just seems to be made up of moments of total horror and absolute joy.

Thoughts in my grandmother’s final days

My 96 year-old grandmother is dying and I’m having a lot of difficult emotions.  She’s refused to let me visit her over the last few weeks and, now that it’s reached the final days, I’ve been dithering because she hasn’t requested my presence or said anything about what she wants me to do. 

So I’ve been wondering if I should just get on a train and go to see her anyway, not knowing whether she’ll even be conscious or aware of me, or whether my coming will cause her distress because she doesn’t want me to see her like this.  But if I don’t go, I’m worried that I’ll regret it, maybe for the rest of my life.  I’m frustrated, angry with her for what I experience as her controlling behaviour, guilty about feeling angry with her, and also guilty about  the fact that I don’t really want to go because I don’t want to go through another experience like the one I had with Dad just eleven weeks ago.  Death can bring up so many conflicting emotions.

Sneaky Hate Spiral

A little cartoon that, while not Buddhist, might amuse

Today’s Dukkha

1. My Grandmother is still dying and not doing anything to make my ego feel better about it!

2. Due to my own total lack of regard for the consequences of my actions, I’m pretty sure that I now owe my landlady a new fridge.  Interestingly, my ego is less bothered by the financial consequences of this minor disaster than by having to confess to my landlady that I’ve been really stupid and broken her fridge.

 3. My office, which is basically in the basement of my building, has a huge gaping hole in the ceiling, with damp coming through. It’s been there since last week and no one has come to fix it, even though I’ve been told not to switch the lights on in that part of the room because it might be dangerous.

Wow!

This is what grains of sand look like