The Day I did Everything Right

Doing everything right is as much of an ego trap as doing everything wrong.

So hard to switch off the grasp!

I had a lovely day, yesterday. An easy day. Healthy, rested, good energy. Everything that depends on me got fed and cleaned. I was able to hook my hand on my inner thigh in twisting trichonasana as if I had it there all the time, as if it were Jay's ass. Every trichonasana in the book--ha ha.

Then at the end of the day, my stomach started clenching, I couldn't get to sleep. "What about tomorrow?" I kept thinking. Lying in my clean white, ironed sheets. "Will I do tomorrow as well?" How do you unclench?

I worry, I worry, I worry. And worrying makes me mean. When I'm exercising, I'm thinking--okay--how will I get this done Friday? This is such a great day! This is going so well! Oh, God, will Wednesday be okay, too?

What would I be like if I didn't do this much yoga, meditation and exercise? Probably exactly the same, only fatter. Man....no relief in sight.

There was this moment in The Darjeeling Limited where Owen Wilson's character is sitting with his brothers in the desert and he says something like, "Okay, we're going to come back here every year and do this..." And Adrian Brody says, "No we're not. We're never going to come here again."

And I really liked Wes Anderson then, because he got at something so essential about that character--the need to take every new experience and find a place for it--to make it a ritual. I do that. Okay. This tea is wonderful. I'm going to come here every second Thursday and sit in this chair by the window and drink it in this cup. And if I don't do that, I'm a failure. Shit! I forgot! It's the second Thursday of the month! I was supposed to go to that shop and sit by the window and have that god damn jasmine tea again. Acck. I suck. You grasp it. You make it precious. You take control.

And that is what closes your heart, I think. Sorry, this is all very unformed, I know. You have to understand, Dear Reader, that I am using this blog mainly for me, I am trying to figure things out. I am trying to open my heart. So I am occasionally going to be incoherent. If you have insights or things to add--please don't hesitate.

But I really empathized with that character, because I am that Owen Wilson character. I do plot out my life in 15 minute chunks, I know where everyone has to be and what they have to do and what they have to have to be there, and if I screw up, I've failed. I am quintessentially uncool. And it's funny that I've evolved into this, because, listen, Dear Reader, I was the wildest, sweetest thing you can imagine. I didn't wear a watch, I didn't wear shoes. I jumped into trucks with strange lumberjacks at stoplights and sprang naked into mountain springs with them 20 minutes later.

Not that this sort of behavior was so great for building a stable life, or maintaining a good GPA. Or a GPA at all for that matter. (At one point at Dartmouth, my GPA was .8) And at 41, with two kids, this sort of attitude is not at all productive.

Well, when I was sitting this morning, I realized that this self, this one who's getting the house organized and clean, this self that always has an umbrella and that I always thought was the goal, is not it. I realized that this is as much of a storm flushing through as anger or jealousy, so I let that flow through me, and felt better. I saw my body and my breath as being as much of a force of nature as the grand canyon. Subject to the same immutable laws.

Hmmph.

That's my 1/2 hour. Thank God.

Shivasana

Went to yoga yesterday. Yesterday morning was hard. I kept feeling like all my nerves were exposed. Everyone's voice sounded harsh. I kept feeling as if I were going to cry.

Then I went to yoga.

Jane was teaching the class, and her beautiful luminous daughter, Catherine, back from her road trip to Oregon was there. These two women are unbelievably beautiful, in this sort of 1945 South Pacific Coca Cola girl pinup sort of way. Jane just radiates happiness and peace. They look so all american that you almost don't register the blue hair and tie dye. And I know Jane's dragged Catherine all over the place--grew up in Ashrams, on the beach, wherever. Jane's educated--phD in pyschology. Catherine dropped out of high school, dyes her hair blue, works at our local health food store and has affairs with girls. The two of them seem to have a good relationship. They're always riding bikes together or shopping together or just hanging out. Catherine's about a year older than Nick. A few months ago, Catherine took off to Oregon without telling Jane, which Jane just took in stride. "Well," she said, smiling her movie star smile, "It did come as a surprise..." and then she started tap dancing. Well, not really. But that's what she always looks like she's going to do: start doing time steps down eighth street and bursting into song. Tye die and all. Catherine gave me a little pot of blue hair dye before she left. "Go for it. Be brave." she told me.
She was back, unapologetically, in about 3 weeks. Some poor besotted male is following her around.
Well, he won't be the last.
But in shivasana, I had the strangest thing happen. I thought I might be going crazy. Right before, I kept seeing this sort of dark movement around me, as if I had a shadow self and I could see it. I watched it all through yoga. I wondered if maybe something was wrong with my eyes. Then, at the end of class, while I was lying there, I felt it all sort of gather together. It wasn't a really bad feeling (it didn't feel like evil or anything) I could just feel it pool together like smoke, and then, all the sudden, I felt it just lift out of my body (it was sort of like the feeling you have after you give birth) and blow away. Then I sort of fell asleep and when I woke up, I was like a new person. I felt so light and happy and peaceful and soft. And it gave me the strangest take on people--it was like I was seeing everyone from a distance, but I could so see their motivations and their frustrations. I could see who meant well and who was just lost. It was so strange. I talked to Jay on the phone, and I could see him suddenly in toto.
So, after yoga, I took my new, strange light self to our local hippie bookstore/dry goods/rabble rousing enclave/hemp jewelry store and bought a dress and a candy bar. Then I went home and registered for class and tried to download new printer software (can't find my disk and the printer's off the computer for some reason), took Nick's Thunderbird in for a new tire ($94.50!), went to the library and read a book about perfume that made me really want to buy a bottle of Joy. I'm tired of Niki de Saint Phalle. I'm tired of trying to be complicated and mysterious. I went to the mall and tried on perfumes for the rest of the afternoon,.
Nick and I made sweet potato curry. He went out, I went over to Jay's farm. Swam in the pond, ate peaches off the tree, made love and slept like a stone falling in a clear lake.
Had a dream about Wiz. "Here's what I do on my breaks, " he tells me, smiling with his crooked discolored teeth and taking me by the hand. He opens a door off the unit I hadn't noticed before and we step out into a sunny fall day. There's a strange little train right there. We climb on one of the cars (they're like coal train cars).
"Duck!" he says. The train starts going at breakneck speed into a tunnel.
"I'm not too good with enclosed spaces...."I start to say.
"You wanted to come see..."he says, "lie down--quick--"
I lie down just in time. The train hurtles through the tunnel, earth and roots are inches above my face. Wiz is lying beside me, holding my hand in his cool dry fingers.
Finally, we're through, into the light and the cool fall day. I start to sit up, but Wiz pulls me down again. Another tunnel.
Then the train stops in front of a school. An old brick school. Wiz gets out and goes inside. "Don't follow me." he says. I get out, too. I sit on a bench on the corner. There's a town square in front of me. The train pulls away. I wait and wait and wait, watching the townspeople in this little town walk around. The town, come to think of it, looks a lot like Port Clinton, Ohio. I start worrying about who's manning the ship in the unit. We've been gone a long time. Finally, the train comes back. There's a smiling Vietnamese lady driving it.
"Hurry! Time to go back!" she says.
"Wiz isn't back yet." I tell her. "I can't go without Wiz."
"You have to go. No one is watching the patients."
"I'm waiting for Wiz."
She waits, too, looks exasperated. Finally, she takes off. I'm alone in the street. The sun is going down.
Wiz comes out of the school.
"What are you still doing here?" he asks. "Why didn't you go back?"
"I was waiting for you."
"You weren't supposed to wait for me."
"Well, you didn't tell me that. You're the one who's always harping about communication."
He sighs. "Well, I guess we're walking."
We start off along the tracks. Back to work.
I wake up in Jay's arms, tightly folded, the fan blowing, the sun up. Green light and lark song.
He smells so good.

Love your life.

That's my 1/2 hour.

Holy Oil

So, this weekend was a hard one.

Every summer, I get a mom. Head.

I don't know how the accident happened, but here she is. Were the kids fighting? Was she turning around? Was there an argument with the daughter over the radio station?

Neuro checks every hour. We know how I feel about neuro docs. I think they're all smarter than me, but I think they're mostly all bastards.

1700, her pupil blows. Fixes. Till then I'd been getting reactions. But I'm not sure. You think you can trust your own eyes, you know? You think you can trust your own perceptions, but nowhere does it become more apparent we live the ego's story than in interacting with patients. So often, even though you have the intention of being vigilant and objective, your own hopes and wishes get projected on to the situation and you see what you want to see.

Does it move? Does it not? So many times I've called someone in: "the pupil isn't reacting."
"Yes it is," Wiz'll say, "see?"

I called him in on this one several times.

Then...gone.

Did it happen when we turned her? Did it happen when I suctioned her? Did we have the lights dim enough?

Was it because I interrupted the holy oil?

I can be an asshole, sometimes. I don't stay an asshole for more than a few seconds, but sometimes my initial reaction to something is that of an asshole. And you just can't undo it, once it's done.

The resident, Dr. Wetter and I, sat down with this woman's parents to tell them frankly what was going on with her. They had their pastor with them. I don't like pastors, in general, I think they're crazy. I think it's crazy that we pay people to be pastors. Okay, no I don't. But a lot of pastors are not responsible people. They think they feel a "call" and that that gives them a right to a living, and I distrust that. Sometimes I think it's genuine, but sometimes I think they're full of crap. They always feel they deserve more access to patients than is theirs by right of law, they always interfere, and they feel they don't have to answer to anyone because they believe they're chosen by God.

So anyways, we're having this conversation with the parents, and the pastor interrupts and asks if he could be permitted to lay hands on the patient and anoint her head with holy oil.

Dr. Wetter and I are both silent for a second. Then our clinical paranoia kicks in and we both start shaking our heads.

"Well, we just put a ventric in..."Dr. Wetter starts

"It's really important not to introduce anything foreign around it.." I have visions of their dirty old holy oil compromising the latex on the ventric catheter.

"I'm afraid I have to say, no." Dr. Wetter states.

"Could you anoint her with your spiritual intent, instead of the actual oil?" I ask.

"Of course," the pastor says, nodding. He has a bad haircut and a big wooden cross hanging around his neck with an effigy of the crucified Jesus on it. "We understand completely."

So I lead them back to the patient and I leave them alone with her for a few minutes.

I go back in--because we've just admitted her and we're pushing things as fast as we can and running labs, blah blah blah, and...guess what they're doing.

They're fucking anointing her head with holy oil!!!! Holy Oil! On my precious patient in my precious clean ICU. They're so sneaky about it too. Rats. I get pissed.

"Excuse me, " I say, in my best movie nurse voice, "didn't we discuss this?"

They look up at me, innocent, caught, round-eyed. Like possums at the cat food when you switch on the porch light. And I look at the grandmother and suddenly I see these poor elderly people, who have lost so much in one day, who are old and weary and bent over their dying daughter, and trying to do anything, anything, anything at all to appease the fates, the terrible storm of life that sweeps us in front of it like dross, unappeasable, implacable, merciless --trying to put oil on the water--anything, anything at all. Any offering. Oil on the water. Oil on the sea.

"Oh, God. Oh, okay." I say. "Please, please forgive me. I'm so sorry. Do whatever you need to. "

"Hands?" the pastor asks me.

"Sure."

He puts just a small drop. Then he prays. I pray, too.

"You tried to stop them from putting holy oil on her?" Wiz echoes in disbelief, when I tell him about the incident later, after work the next day in the utility room. After she's gone. "Jesus Christ, Haley. You're right. You are an asshole. "

I get defensive. "I back pedaled."

"Asshole." He sighs. "Oh, well, you can sell yourself down the river, but I'm still not buying you, Haley Patton."

We're washing blood and shit off blood pressure cuffs. Still no unit attendant.

"My grandma said you can sell your family down the river once but you can't sell them twice."

"You did okay. Here is what killed her: she wasn't wearing a seatbelt and went through the windshield of her car at 60 miles an hour. Did you turn her, did you not, when did her pupil go, I was in there as much as you were. You're not God. Did you fuck up? In the 12 hours you watched her, yep, being a person, I'm sure you did not do everything perfectly. Nor will you ever, in your entire life, have a day as a nurse where you do everything perfectly. Did you do your best? Of that I am sure. Did you do a good job? That, too. She was gone, Haley."

"The oil," I say.

Wiz nods.

"Christ."

Kyrie eleison.
Christe eleison
Kyrie eleison.

Float Trips

Float trips are always over before they begin.

As soon as I'm putting the canoe in the water, I'm already getting out at the end of the ride. I'm in the rattling school bus, wet and sunburned and dehydrated, listening to the retired schoolteacher driving it chatter on about Rachel Ray or how she's just discovered garlic or whatever. I'm on every other float trip I've ever been on since I've been three, and, for some reason, I'm never sitting in the canoe.

Ever.

One float trip, a year and half ago with Jay I was actually "on." We floated the Eleven Point in the Ozarks and it was the most beautiful trip I've ever been on. Of course that was when I still loved and trusted him. Now, I still love him, but I don't trust him, and it really came home to me sitting in the canoe with him for 2 days that something essential has been lost, at least temporarily.

This is just awful. How do we get back from this?

Stephen Maturin, one of my favorite characters in literature (Master and Commander, etc.) reflects--and I'm paraphrasing--that the worst thing that can happen to a couple is for one person to become morally superior to the other. And that's true! Moral one-upmanship is death to romance. And we've got it big time. I have been WRONGED and we both know it. Every comment echoes back to it. Our big fight three weeks ago (his tirade, actually) looms between us, in the things I say and the things I don't say, and 48 hours in a canoe gives you a lot of time to think.

It was occasionally fun, but it was never really light. I kept trying to push my thoughts away, to focus on the moment, the water and the beauty and fill us up with that. I think I was successful in this about 60% of the time. My thoughts would start chewing up our RELATIONSHIP and then I would breathe and think "canoe, blue water, duck, heron, cold, paddle" and get filled with the present. He was trying, too, and we were okay when we were touching. We are always okay when we are touching. But he's awfully worried about stuff. He just doesn't know what to do. And the stuff he's worrying about is huge. Big life foundation stuff.

He told me, "I found this notebook a few days ago when I was cleaning out the office--I had copied down this Rumi poem in it years before--I just loved poem--it was about how someone steals into his tent and carries his troubles away with him--and I realized it was about you. Do you think you can know about someone before they come into your life?"

Yeah, I kind of do. I think maybe the idea of time being linear is a mistake and maybe it kind of all happens at once, but our organizing perception is linear. The float trip's already over. The vase is already broken.

This is why right speech is so important. It's not that the lies you tell are so bad, it's that you have to think about them all the time, and that keeps you from being direct and present with the person you're with. And then you miss that person. You lose them entirely, because you're in your own head worrying about spinning your own fiction so you don't get caught. It's my fault, too. I didn't tell Jay about having breakfast with Abercrombie. I did it to get a bit of my own back. I have zero interest in Abercrombie and I would never cheat on Jay. But then, when I told Jay the funny story about getting locked out of the house, I had to invent a reason why I was out that early in the morning, and then I had to remember it. And that takes so much fucking energy. And then I felt bad, and I felt I was giving the entire situation too much weight.
And then I was mad at Jay for feeling like I had to do this in the first place. And then I understood why he was so angry at me. You can say, well, that isn't very healthy! But who's healthy? Are you healthy? Does that mean you don't get to be loved?

This translates to what goes on when you sit. On a larger scale, your ego is a lie. Your story is a lie. You don't know the truth, you don't know your place in it. So you create one--pure spun fiction. I did this, I like this, lalala, All an independent creation. Don't be mad at yourself, everyone does it. But remembering it gets in the way of being, doesn't it? Your float trip is over, before it begins.


That's my 1/2 hour.

DON'T WASTE YOUR TIME

My tummy hurts.

It is only 10 in the morning. Here is my day so far:

I woke up late--6:29 am. I remembered I'd agreed to meet Abercrombie, our anesthesia attending for breakfast at Ernie's. Since I'd blown him off a few weeks ago, I decided I'd better go. But I didn't want to. I consulted The Book of Answers, which I'm addicted to, and it said, "DON'T WASTE YOUR TIME."

Nuts. Time with Nick is so precious, you know? Even 15 extra minutes in the morning. But I went downstairs, woke him up and ironed his shirt. He can iron, but he won't starch, and I think it's important his shirts be starched for this internship. Then I threw on some old ripped jeans of Jay's and a t-shirt (and that great grey cardigan I found a few days ago!). I can't find any of my sunglasses for some reason, but I did find a pair of Lilly's from when she was about 9 under her bed. They are little kids sunglasses, too small, and with thick white frames and a picture of Pocohantas on the side, but I can't stand life without sunglasses, so I put them on. Then I went upstairs, made myself a cup of cafe con leche in the Blue Willow cup--yes, it's back--got in Elka, the Saab, and went roaring off to Ernie's. Puttering off, actually. I think Elka needs her brakes checked because when I step on them lately, it's sometimes a little bit before anything happens--i.e. the car stopping.

I get there. Place almost empty. No Abercrombie. Fucker, I think. He stood me up. Oh, well. I sit down. Cindy is my waitress. She was my partner in microbiology lab. She's smart as shit, and looks like a short slightly pudgy Rebecca Romijn. (spelling? sorry). She was going gangbusters in science until she got married and had a baby. Now she's waiting tables at Ernie's. The fate of many of us. She'll pick up the reins again, in her thirties, probably. I sit for a few minutes, then go ahead and order. Fortunately, I've brought a book--Wide Sargasso Sea, by Jean Rhys, with whom I feel a reluctant intellectual kinship. Well, one knows when one's sniffed out one's pack, I guess.

But Abercrombie shows up. Unshaven, slightly stinky, and with his dad.

"He's living in my basement," Abercrombie states, and doesn't offer any further explanation. Abercrombie is in the middle of a divorce. I warned him. He told me about a year ago his wife was taking kickboxing.

"Your marriage is in trouble," I informed him, right there, standing at the pyxis.

"That's ridiculous."

"Pay attention. Your wife is about to leave you."

It sucks being right all the time.

So now he has 4 kids under 5 and a dad living in the basement. His dad was really nice, though. Funny, easy to talk to. We had a nice breakfast. He picked up the check.

"If I didn't like you," he told me. "I wouldn't have picked up the check."

"I'll leave the tip."

Abercrombie informs me as we're leaving that he's meeting with his lawyer right after this. Right next door.

"Hunter? Your lawyer's Hunter?" Hunter, if you don't recall, is Jay's best friend.

Small towns.....

I really have to go to the bathroom at this point, but the rhythm of the situation doesn't allow for it. I think: I'm close to home. I'll just rush home and go. As I'm driving, my phone rings. Thinking it's Jay (we're going on vacation in about 3 hours) I pick up the call without screening the number. But it isn't Jay. It's Charles. Charles is my first boyfriend from college. He's an astrophysicist. But he has no common sense and is very absent minded. For example, Charles once couldn't go to church because he couldn't find his shoes. Then he couldn't go to work, either, for about 4 days. He worked at NASA. He's very smart, and they were very forgiving. He eventually did get fired. I used to think it was for his political convictions which are, no surprise, way left of center, but now, come to think of it, maybe it was because there were just too many incidents along the lines of not being able to get to work because of no shoes....he speaks very slowly and is impossible to get off the phone. He's been through two wives. They've all been driven crazy. He's very good looking, in a Humphrey Bogart sort of way (in fact, Humphrey Bogart was his great uncle or something) and he was amazing in bed.

"I can't talk," I tell him, "I have to pee desperately."

Long silence. "I remember," he says slowly, "when I used to go down on you and sometimes I think you would sort of pee. That was exciting." All of this takes almost 9 minutes to get out.

"Great. I'm getting off the phone. " Yuck! Men are pigs. 24 years ago I was an idiot and went out with him for 6 months, and he's still stuck. I pull up to the house...and realize I don't have my key. I walk around the house, trying all the doors, getting mobbed by the dogs, but of course, my responsible son has locked everything up tight. Finally, in desperation, I decide to go in the back yard. "Can I stay on the phone while you do that?" Charles asks.

"No. I'm hanging up now."

"Okay, wait--the reason I called is to get your advice."

"Hurry, my kidneys are going to burst."

"Clarissa has kidnapped the children."

Clarissa is his frequently institutionalized estranged drug addict wife.

"How long have they been missing?" My bladder is sending stabbing pains throughout my abdomen.

"3 weeks. "

"3 weeks!"

"I initially thought I might have gotten the date she was supposed to bring them back wrong."

"Call the police."

"Really?"

"Do you know where they are?" I ask. "Have you heard anything at all from them."

"No."

"You must call the police. Now I have to pee."

I hang up. Mercilessly. 3 weeks. He needs to write things down--like when his kids are due back.

I pee. Then I realize I have to do something else, too. But I don't want to do that in my back yard. I decide to go to my parents, hunt for their spare key, and poop there. I get in the car, go tearing off to my parents. My brakes are really frightening me. Pull up, run into their house, make my way through the stacks of newspapers, priceless china and silver and old clothes, move all the books off the top of the toilet and go. Where have they been bathing, I wonder as my bowels loosen, staring at the ancient dead crickets in the tub. They've been in Ohio all summer, but the tub looks like it hasn't been used in months. Then, when I'm done, sitting relieved, I remember that, for reasons known only to them, they always shut off all the water in the house when they leave. I wipe, get up and run around looking for the water main. Can't find it anywhere. I find a pile of keys and grab them, hoping one is mine. Then I go back to my house, after first wandering aimlessly around my parents picking up old pictures and getting all teary. That house is a trap. One of the keys does indeed open my door. But what am I going to do now about their toilet filled with Ernie's relics?

I have a lot of empty glass milk bottles in the car that I intended to take back to Clover's this morning before I left on my trip. I fill them up with water. Then I go back to my parents house, dismantle their toilet and pour the water in. Success. I am able to flush the toilet.

I have never had such trouble flushing a toilet. I have never been so greatful for city water.

Wow. Plumbing is a major major advance for civilization, isn't it? That never really hit me until today. I mean, I always knew it, but...

DON'T WASTE YOUR TIME.

That book had no idea.

That's my 1/2 hour.



"

Death

Okay.

The best thing happened today.

I have this young patient who was in a motorcycle crash and broke his C3-C5 vertebral bodies leaving him an incomplete quad. He had no feeling below the nipple line and gross motor movement only in his left upper extremity. That's his left arm, for you civvies. Sort of. No squeezing, no fine motor, no thumbs up.

Day after day, I go in, do my neuro checks, chart. "Absent to pain, absent to pain, absent to pain" only this morning...I pinch his toe with the hemostats and guess what?

You can guess.

He jerked his foot away and grimaced.

He did that with both feet, in fact.

I was so happy I kissed him. (on the forehead)

I went running for the resident: "Withdraws to pain! Withdraws to pain! Withdraws to pain!"

The resident, Dr. Wetter (who I like. He's gangly and has adult acne and does a lot of yoga.) came in and repeated the neuro check. Then we got the neuro attending and his team in and they put our boy through his paces, and he really has improved. He can even twitch his left knee, but it's very hard for him.

He's not out of the woods, of course. But this is a good sign. He has a terrible case of pneumonia, which could still kill him.

I feel like my real boyfriend is Death. Dealing with death this much is like dating a really charming, slightly sadistic, good looking alcoholic. He throws me a bone here and there, just to keep me coming back to the ICU. The things I battle and battle for he'll finally concede a little bit, but he always has to have the last word. Fucker. People suffer and suffer, and spiral down and down until they go.

But I've seen some good things, too. I hope this isn't a false hope. I hope he gets better. He's awfully young. 17. I had a dream last night that Nick (it didn't quite look like Nick, but I guess that's who it was) was five and somehow, he'd died. We'd wrapped him in a blue sheet and had him by the riverbank and they were going to burn his body. I was kneeling on the smooth wet stones by the river and had my cheek next to his little cold plump one and I wouldn't let him go, but they were setting the torch to the pyre. I woke up screaming and sobbing. Jay held me tight.

"It's okay, it's not real. It's just a dream." He told me. It was 4:07 am. I looked at the red numbers on the digital clock by the bed when I woke up.

But I couldn't close my eyes again, because I would see the little boy, and that they would set the pyre on fire and he would be gone from me forever, just ash. This child I loved more than my life, gone.

It is hard to be "on" when you have just woken up screaming from a nightmare. It is hard to be who someone wants you to be. I couldn't stop crying. I was still in the dream, couldn't get the image out of my head, still can't.

"How about a nice job in a health clinic," Jay murmurs, stroking my hair, "where you give vaccinations and treat poison ivy?"

"I am an exile." I told him. "I am tired of being an exile."

I am. I want to go home. How did I get so far out here? And where am I? And why did I come here in the first place?

That's my 1/2 hour. Sorry it's so screwy.

Thinking

I got a comment. Check it out. There's also a link posted to another article from Shambhala Sun by Anne Cushman which I really enjoyed. It's about yoga, and its commercialization.

Here's how I feel about this--same ref I used yesterday--from another Shambhala Sun issue--okay I'm going to digress about Shambhala Sun for a minute.

I used to eschew reading this magazine. I really looked down my nose at it. All these trendy "buddhists" ...there were a bunch of them at Dartmouth and I really didn't like them. They seemed to be using their buddhism as a way to set themselves apart and look down on others. It became just another token of elitism. And elitism, while at the same time I just slather after it, really ticks me off.

The magazine seemed like it was just another fashion prop--also heavily Tibetan (and most Rinzai zen buddhists sort of secretly look down on the Tibetans, a reflection I think of the class system here in America, which I would love to go into but not right this second--I remember my few weeks at Tail of the Tiger 21 years ago--all those 40 something women arriving with their Louis Vuitton luggage for retreat. Gag me. (But, to be fair to the place, I also remember sitting in their meditation hall by the orange lacquered columns after hiking a few miles over the hills in the snow from Milarepa, and smelling the incense and warming my frozen toes and thinking, that maybe there was a chance for some peace here.)

The magazine seemed to just embody that sensibility. Vogue for buddhists. The ads for the sensitive financial management companies...the $125 zen clocks.

But then I turned 40 and something has changed.

I copped to myself. And I copped to my buddhism. I decided it was okay to show it. I began to understand the importance of the Sangha, something I'd never given enough value to before. The Sun is imperfect, but there's a lot of wisdom in its glossy pages, and it connects me to the larger sangha. I really can't do it alone. Which is why Hokukuan being on hiatus with no word from Seido really concerns me. Somehow, being down in my basement doing my morning practice by myself was okay when I knew the sangha was still going on. I would think about them--"now they're doing this, they're bowing, they're chanting" and I would feel connected, even though I couldn't get there physically. But now, I'm just down there by myself, and I gotta tell you, I feel like Robinson Crusoe.

Oh, well.

But back to yoga and grasping and commercialization. That's so funny that the Wii gives you bonus poses! Don't you kind of wish there really was something like that? Maybe that way I could finally get into the side crow--which absolutely terrifies me. I'm convinced I will break both my wrists and get a skull fracture. I've been trying to do it for a year...anyways. I think the commercialization of yoga is a good thing, because yoga is very sneaky, and people will change for the better if they start doing it even if they are doing it for the wrong reasons. I have watched this happen with two of the yoga teachers at the gym I used to go to, who you know, taught aerobics and then got yogafit certification under duress from the management. After two years they were unrecognizable. Hairy armpits, jewels in their bellies, even a little newsletter! Look at how trendy "going green" is becoming...that can only be for the good. And who am I to say what is right? Who am I to say this path is better than that one? I can't presume...I'm just happy more people are coming on board--because that means there are more yoga classes available--even in benighted Little Dixie.

Anything to get one out of a burning house.

Okay--that's my 1/2 hour. I have to go ride my bike to my shrink, now.

Namaste.