The big Q, the big A

September 29th, 2009    -    1 Comment

How is your daughter? How is your husband? How are your in-laws? How is your job? How is your boss? How is your dog, your fish, your garden, your laundry, your dishes, your life?

How do you answer?

It’s easy to think that Buddhist practice is about the big questions. Birth and death, cause and effect, form and emptiness, delusion and enlightenment, attachment and non-attachment, and whether a dog has Buddha nature or not. I just hope you’re not actually thinking about any of that stuff.

My Zen practice is koan practice, and every time I meet with my teacher in dokusan, or face-to-face interview, I present my understanding, so to speak, of the inscrutable koan I’m working on at the time. I recite the koan and its verse, which by this time I’m pretty well convinced that I’ve nailed.

After we talk a bit about how far along I am, the state of my spiritual genius, he’ll wrap up the interview with what sounds like a simple social courtesy:

How’s your family?

Read the rest and leave a comment on “The Laundry Line”
my blog at Shambhala SunSpace

The Big Answer: The winner of the giveaway of the Feeleez Empathy Game is C who blogs at Once. Thanks to all who answered.

When the last bluebird sings

September 28th, 2009    -    8 Comments


I’ve been watching it for some time now, anticipating the end and knowing what it would mean.

When I left my lonely life of accomplishment behind, when I first moved with my husband to this house, to my stark empty-handedness, I called my mother soon after. She had raised three independent daughters, three whiz kids, and I had never said the words that tumbled from my blubbering lips:

I need you.

She came to visit, but before then she sent me a houseplant. It was the kind of plant sold at grocery stores and florists, just a pot of common ivy and indistinguishable indoor greenery. For decoration, it had a slender spike stuck into it with a bluebird on the end of it. I’ve had it since then, all 12 years, in one spot and then rotated to another. I treated it like a talisman, and then a memorial, thinking to myself:

This is my mother.

About a year ago it started to fade. The ivy yellowed and dropped off. The other stalks shrunk. Little remains but the spike with the bird on top. It seems to have bugs now, or some kind of blight. I know it’s time, and so I moved it to the patio. As part of every morning service at the Zen Center we chant this line, and so I chant it now:

The four elements return to their nature as a child to its mother.

It’s time to let the old girl go, to let it all come to rest. My mother is telling me to go, to take flight, to sing my own song. A few weeks ago I heard myself say, as if reading my own heart, “I don’t want to write about parenting any more. Motherhood is about so much more than the kids.” Yes, it’s true the kids are part of it, I said, pounding my chest, but my life and work have moved to a larger purview now. Like what, you might ask, if I haven’t lost you in this pile already. And so I tell you:

The laundry.

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Barefoot and pregnant with meaning

September 24th, 2009    -    5 Comments

Going to sit a three-day sesshin on this anniversary of September anniversaries.

Details to follow.


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I hate you*

September 22nd, 2009    -    89 Comments


*and other ways to say I love you.

Today I had a: conversation/fight/tantrum/major meltdown.
The fact is, I’m having a tough time with the transition to: going back to work/daycare/no sleep/solids/no nap/the big bed/the twos/the threes/a new sibling/the layoff/the new job/kindergarten/fourth grade.
I’m just so frustrated with: naptime/potty training/bedtime/no time to myself.
I shouted/screamed/slammed the door/broke down/sobbed/made her cry.
I should have: seen it coming/stopped in my tracks/used my words/taken a break/left the room/given myself a timeout.
This is so much harder than: I thought/anyone told me/it was last year.
How can I: learn from my mistakes/do better/raise my child differently?

My friend Kris Laroche sent me a Feeleez game recently to give away on this blog. Because of all of the above, I feel happy to share it with you now.

Kris is one of the founders of Feeleez, which originated tools to teach kids what some folks call emotional intelligence.

Getting along peacefully is what we all want to do. A tool to help our children identify and talk about their feelings helps parents talk about their feelings too. Personally speaking, that has always been a more urgent need in our household, and that’s why I’m so glad to offer you this gift.

Kris was an early adopter of Momma Zen, for which I feel so grateful, and she checked in with me recently to find out how else I was feeling. Frankly, Kris, I’m feeling relieved now that I said all this, and empathize with all the moms who I know are having a rough go of it these days.

I’m giving away a beautifully crafted and packaged Feeleez Empathy Game with 25 matching pairs of Feeleez cards to help you and your children learn to recognize and express feelings in a non-confrontational way. It comes with a guide for several game ideas including memory games and charades. It’s a lovely addition to your home or classroom.

To enter, simply leave a comment telling me how you feel right now, including a way to contact you by blog or email if you win. Seriously, I feel sad when I choose a winner that I can’t contact! The giveaway ends next Monday, Sept. 28. Enter as often as you like whenever the feeling strikes.

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The secret is out

September 20th, 2009    -    10 Comments


Back when The Secret was making the world spin, I read a blogger rave about it. It seemed every time she applied the technique, she found a choice parking spot at her favorite shopping center. The kind you never get. It feels good to find a parking spot, and with such a modest gain, the woman didn’t think she was being greedy. But then I wondered, “Why doesn’t she just give the parking spot to someone else and feel really good?”

It’s no secret. These things keep bubbling up like hot wax and we get stuck in gooey dissatisfaction and self-service. We may think we know a secret, but we’re always exposed for who we are. We’re just the last to see it.

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Peek inside my medicine chest

September 18th, 2009    -    26 Comments

It’s the time to reach for a tonic.

For fatigue: Be tired.
For impatience: Be still.
For inflammation: Chill.
For despair: Empty completely.
For fear of getting nothing done: Get nothing done.
For having no time: Take time.
For lack of love: Love.
For disappointment: Dance.
For inadequacy: Give.
For no reason: Be unreasonable.
For others, pray.

For these and all other symptoms, exhale.

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Every bit love

September 15th, 2009    -    12 Comments

The other night I stepped into the living room to deliver the announcement: Timetobrushyourteethwashyourfaceitsbedtime! My husband and daughter were watching an ancient baby video, one of the ones we haven’t watched in, oh, nine years or so, a dozen obsolete formats ago.

We were starstruck.

She was not yet two. We watched her waddle in circles around the lemon tree, and then repeat a circuit around the yard, climbing the steps over and over, little feet sailing, arms flailing, head tucked and hell-bent on a mission called growing up.

She stood in sunken, soggy diapers twirling her goldilocks curls and rubbing her bedtime eyes.

She danced in a loopy bounce to grandpa’s ragtime piano, bathed in a spotlight of self-immersion and propulsion.

She emptied her first Halloween bag piece by piece, cooing a drooling baby talk of approval, chirping a drunken birdsong of eees and opps and umms that we understood perfectly.

I said to my 10-year-old, “Now do you see why we love you so much?”

Everything seen and unseen. Heard and unheard. Known and unknown. The confusion, the fear, the fatigue, the worry, the doubt. The rage, the gulf, the hurt, the tears, lonely sleepless anxious terribleness, all of it, the ugly underside of it, and the unwrapped rosy red yummy of baby’s first bobbypop. It’s all love.

My sweet lord. Every bit love.

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Buddhists and gardeners raise your hands

September 14th, 2009    -    No Comments


Shortly after my husband and I moved into our house with its old garden, we invited the experts and academics over tell us what to do. Some would say that our backyard is Southern California’s oldest private Japanese garden, dating from 1916. Some would say that it isn’t; that by virtue of geography, topography, plant selection and cultural anthropology, it can’t ever be Japanese. We were twisted into a fit by these and other debates about the right way to care for the place. Heaven forbid we make a fraudulent move when we were already paralyzed by ignorance from the get go!

You might not fall victim to this kind of dialectic. You might be able to sweep it aside with the simple observation that the Japanese garden originated in China and the Chinese garden originated as a Persian pleasure park, and that a garden is a garden no matter what you call it.

One day we stopped asking the experts. That was the day we got dirt under our fingernails. Conventional wisdom holds that our garden isn’t the real thing, but try telling that to the pine tree.

Read the rest and leave a comment on “The Laundry Line”
my blog at Shambhala SunSpace

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It takes a mother

September 11th, 2009    -    2 Comments


Last night at the back-to-school picnic, a few of us moms looked around for a garbage can.

We were on the front lawn of the neighborhood school where all our kids and a good number of dads sprawled having summer’s last sandwiches and drinks. There wasn’t a trash can to be found.

“We don’t need a trash can because we have moms,” I said, and it was true, each of us with hands full of apple cores and bread crusts, totes of green waste and recyclables, water bottles sweating rivulets inside our stained handbags.

It takes a mother to spread a meal and make it disappear.
It takes a mother to clean up after.
It takes a mother to adapt, undo, invent and start over.
It takes a mother to heal a mother, a sister, a brother and a father, a nation, the world.
A mother to be a mother again.
I’ve given up thinking that the good old boys, with their bully monsters and toys, will get a damn thing done.
It takes a mother to make it better.
A mother first and a mother last in line.
I wish it wasn’t so, and it’s not always.
If you’re a father and you do all this, that’s how good a mother you are.
And I bet you have a sack of trash to prove it.

***
If you, your friend, your mother, husband, sister or brother are thinking about joining me at the Rochester Mother’s Plunge, now is the time to commit. If you have the means but not the time, consider funding a full or partial scholarship. I have mothers waiting for a fairy godmother to appear. Email me at kmiller (at) turningwords (dot) com to make a mother’s day.

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Mashed tomorrows and gravy

September 8th, 2009    -    13 Comments

mashed-potato“What day is tomorrow?” my daughter asks. She’s three years old and I couldn’t be more pleased that she has learned the days of the week.

It seems precocious, and more evidence of what I hope will be an accelerated future.

“Wednesday,” I say.

“No, what day is tomorrow?” she asks again.

“Today is Tuesday, so tomorrow is Wednesday.”

“But when is it tomorrow?”

I’m no longer sure what she is asking.

“It goes Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday,” she ticks them off. “But when is it Tomorrow?”

When is that day called “Tomorrow” that factors so eternally in our plans and schemes? I gape at her clear-eyed misperception, at her supremely intelligent confusion. How many times have I lost her in the mists of my ramblings about that never-to-come day?

Everything, it must seem to her, is going to happen Tomorrow. And for good reason: it’s where we adults live most of the time, straddling the yucky puddle of the here and now, teetering on our tippy toes to affix one foot on a better future. One we think we can control. It simply can’t be done, and so we keep toppling over, face first into our good intentions. We complain that our lives are out of balance, and wish we could one day learn how to live in the moment.

I hear a lot about living in the moment. I hear about how and why and when and how hard it is to live in the moment. The truth is, there is not a single person alive who is living anywhere but the moment. It’s just not the moment we have in mind. The moment we aspire to live in is a different kind of moment, a better kind. A moment of solitude, perhaps, of quiet satisfaction, of thrilling accomplishment or satisfying retribution, of deep confidence and unshakable certainty, with children asleep and ducks lined up and ships come in and an extra spoonful of gravy on top. That’s the moment we are waiting to relish.

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Things you can do when you are home alone

September 2nd, 2009    -    4 Comments


1. Rent a movie without special effects. And watch it.
2. Borrow a fat book. And read it.
3. Not make breakfast. Not make lunch. And not eat it.
4. Talk to no one but yourself. And write it.
5. Miss them.

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Still blowing smoke

September 1st, 2009    -    1 Comment

Thank you to all who have asked about us here in Los Angeles. Everyone who has said a prayer, offered a place, a shrug, a sigh. Some of you know our little town, our mother mountain, which is downslope of the beast. Conditions seem to be turning today, no better day than this. I posted this piece on Shambhala SunSpace because of the marvelous teaching that comes ready made in the smell of smoke. The fire is massive, and I wouldn’t be surprised if you can smell it too.

“Diligently practice the Way as though putting a fire out on top of your head.”

There is engaging language in my spiritual tradition, in the old writing and the poetic phrases. It’s easy to take the language as inspiration or as metaphor, inclined as we are to analyze everything for deep meaning and exalted purpose. This is what religious scholars do, what intellectuals do, and it’s obvious why. We can almost never believe that things are simple or straightforward, that they are what they are. What do we use our brains for if not figuring things out? Everything has to mean something else.

I’ve heard a phrase more or less like the one above many times and thought it conveyed urgency and desperation. It does. But then I saw with my own eyes this week the startling science of extinguishing fires. How you put out a fire is exactly how you should practice. How you put out a fire on the ground is exactly how you put out the fire on your head – your insane, compulsively anxious, fearful ego mind.

Like you, I wish practice was merely a matter of writing this post, or reading a book, or making a list, or thinking positive thoughts, or losing five pounds. But I’ve seen the firefighters, and how they practice. They do not waste a moment to theory, philosophy, inspiration or appearances. This is what I learned with my own eyes:

Read the rest and leave a comment on “The Laundry Line”
my blog at Shambhala SunSpace

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An immodest proposal

August 30th, 2009    -    5 Comments

For reforming healthcare in the United States, preventing the angry and overprivileged from being a burden to their children or country and making them beneficial to the public.

1. Pass healthcare reform.
2. Outlaw televised town halls.
3. Cut out television.
4. Read quietly.
5. Remove refrigerator lightbulbs.
6. Better yet, curtail residential electricity between 9 p.m.-5 a.m.
7. Go to bed when it gets dark.
8. Raise gasoline taxes and fund a National Sidewalk Act.
9. Pound salt, hit the bricks or take a hike.
10. Don’t believe anyone who says they can see Russia from Alaska.
11. Eat like the French. Or rather, don’t eat like the French don’t eat.
12. Regulate cupholders.
13. Forget the drive-thru.
14. Ban antibacterial soap.
15. Floss.
16. Rebrand, reposition, repurpose and relaunch beets, cabbage, chard and sardines.
17. Hand wash cold. Line dry. Cool iron when needed.
18. Trust me, this only happens in Hollywood.
19. Pry this computer from my cold, dead hands.
20. Laugh. It’s the only medicine you can afford, and it may be the only one that actually works.

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