together on aisle 15

March 31st, 2021 - 5 Comments

I had shot number 1 yesterday. For months I’ve been bemoaning my lowly place in line, which was really no place in line. Nine months shy of a qualifying 65th birthday, I began to believe — because I grumbled it so often —”I will be the last person on Earth to get the vaccine.” Then one day in the desert it rained down bread from heaven, and in the morning I gathered up my laptop and made an appointment at a pharmacy just a few miles from my house. At the door, a kind young man greeted me as if I were a wanderer out of the wilderness and 10 minutes later, the dose delivered, I sat in a socially distanced folding chair in Aisle 15, waiting out adverse signs.

Aisle 15 was the Baby Care aisle and Aisle 16 was the Adult Care aisle, and so I perched in view of the teething toys, and stacked on the other side, the incontinence briefs. It was a blatant reminder of the one life we share on the lonely trek between then and when. A year ago I wrote about the hope and good health bequeathed to us born into the vaccine generation, the first little ones freed from polio, measles, tuberculosis and all manner of misery and plagues. As it was, so shall it be. We are and will always be saved by the grace of community, by human wonders and works, faith and fellowship, led from the bleak bondage of fear to the promised land of rest. On Aisle 15, together.

“Here For You” a new dharma talk

Photo by Birger Strahl on Unsplash

Karen Maezen Miller · Here For You

being free

September 22nd, 2020 - 11 Comments

A Manifesto for a Sane World

Get off Facebook. It has destroyed truth, corroded society, and degraded our intelligence while enriching a single misanthropic person to inconceivable wealth and power.

Quit Twitter. It serves no purpose now other than to elevate the ego of one dangerously corrupt and self-obsessed human being.

Watch no cable news. Never set eyes on Fox. Subscribe to a newspaper, if you can still find one, but not any newspaper. These days the Washington Post is the standard of excellence and independence.

Protest with your mouth, your feet and your dollars. Open your eyes. Get out of your chair.

Realize that every moment spent scrolling, clicking and typing into your device amounts to silence. Silence is doom.

Know enough to be afraid. Without fear, there is no courage.

Have no hope. Hope is a slogan that will divert your attention from the reality at hand.

Believe nothing. Investigate for yourself. Search the internet the way you used to. Look for evidence, not false assurances. The truth is always the simplest and most obvious thing in the world.

Be sane. A sane mind creates a sane world.

If you need a friend, contact me via my website. Send me a message asking for my mailing address and then write to me. I will respond.

Originally published on Nov. 26, 2016.

through the door

July 7th, 2020 - 8 Comments

The way out is through the door. Why is it that no one will use this method? — Confucius

Yesterday I was doing morning yoga but I was thinking about what I would make for dinner. The problem was, I didn’t have all the ingredients. Not fresh thyme, not pecorino, not shallots, not the pound and a half of beefsteak tomatoes. How many was that, anyway — one, two, four? Come to think of it, I didn’t have a single one of the ingredients! It was hot and getting hotter, so why was I trying so hard to make tomato soup from nothing? I’d twisted myself into a sweaty heap before the answer floated down from heaven. I’ll just make something out of what I already have.

I’d spent nearly ninety minutes mentally freefalling through deep space when all the while I was planted on mother earth with spinach in the fridge.

One hundred and ten days of going nowhere can feel like falling through a black hole, as if anyone could tell you what that feels like. And that’s what it feels like too, not knowing how it feels. At the beginning we actually thought we could see an end, we thought we could go back, we thought it would turn out. We carried a sane, logical, and highly orthodox expectation that it would all be okay. But now I wonder: had I ever even been mildly inconvenienced before this happened? Thrown for a loop? Knocked back on my heels?

“My life has been destroyed,” my daughter would say about the piecemeal disassembly of her world. “You can’t understand because you’ve already had a life.” That much was true. She clung to the hope, the absolute necessity, that she’d return to school, pick up where she left off, and resume her steady progress toward the glittery future she’d imagined.

There have been many dark days, spiraling into darker days, dark beyond dark.

Last week she sat on the sofa and read a list of protocols that had just been handed down for the fall semester in her drama studio: no more than six people per class, no fewer than six feet apart, no removing of masks, no uncovered mouths, no noses, no faces, no people, no performances.

I held my breath.

Perhaps she had already expended all her disappointment and despair, because something amazing happened instead. She said, “I don’t have to do it. I can do something else.” And so she will take other courses, happily, gratefully, with interest and enthusiasm. She worked it all out within a day, saying it was what she wanted to do all along.

Here we are entombed by walls that turn out to be doors, and we walk through. We just walk through.

***

Photo by Filip Kominik on Unsplash

freedom dreams

June 10th, 2020 - 5 Comments

The dreams go like this: I board an airplane and soon after we take off there is a loud boom like a shotgun blast from behind me. We are going down. Or I’m on some kind of a boat that I need to get off of but my baggage is below deck. I run through dark corridors to find my things but they are lost and we are sinking. Or my plane is in the air but I look down and see that we are flying impossibly low over roads and trees, just a few hundred feet off the ground, veering around buildings that tower above us, and I know I won’t survive.

I wake and wonder if I’m having these dreams because I need to get out of the house after three months of confinement. That it’s the virus, the president, the police, the social upheaval, the chaos that haunts these futile efforts to flee.

But then I realize the share of humanity whose dreams are not like mine at all. Their nightmares are lived in broad daylight, their faith and solace shattered every moment by the failed promise of freedom, safety, and belonging.

I’m only beginning to wake up.

***

Friends helped put together this list of Fiction to Change Minds, a selection of powerful novels that help us see the truth beyond our own. Whether you are a reader or a writer, a student or a teacher, it’s a way and a place to start.

Photo by Yulia Agnis on Unsplash

beside still waters

March 15th, 2017 - 15 Comments

The Lord is my shepherd;
I shall not want.
He leadeth me beside the still waters:
he maketh me to lie down in green pastures.
He leadeth me in the path of righteousness for his namesake:
he restoreth my soul.

This is not quite how it goes. I know it is not quite how it goes. I don’t remember how it goes, but I mumble it anyway. It is the least and the most that I can do.

Standing by the bed in the ICU, the respirator inflating my father’s chest like a pipe organ, I leave aside the Buddhist incantations that I’ve memorized and whisper remnants of the old soul song. I will dwell in the house of the Lord forever.

This is a passage from Hand Wash Cold that I’ve been thinking about lately and a lot. Soon after my father died 10 years ago, I told my sisters that I would take his dog to live with me. That’s how the old girl ended up here, in a picture I took this morning.

On the far side of 15, she’s not quite on her last leg but clearly on her last three legs, as arthritis hobbles and sometimes topples her. I’ve pulled her from the pond twice. And yet she still wants to wander in and out, not hearing, perhaps not seeing, and not managing much of what she used to do so dependably. So I’m at her side most days, all day, watching for the wordless word she will give me, when we both know beyond knowing what time it is.

I’ve had a number of visitors to the garden lately, and the subject of nearly all these encounters has been life and death. Not surprising since it’s the only subject there is. Some people have seen the warning light of a crossroads ahead. Others are investigating how to be with the sick and dying. I always tell them not to make too much of the dying part, since it happens by itself and without us ever knowing quite how or when, but rather to work on the being part, since only when we know how to be can we be not afraid. Oh, to be not afraid. That is quite simply everything you can do for everyone.

I rattled around Amazon last week and picked up George Saunders’s new and brilliant novel, Lincoln in the Bardo. It is wonderful in the most daring and difficult way, and I recommend it.

The author has imagined life in the graveyard, populated by grotesquely self-obsessed specters who linger longingly and in great distress because they do not know that they are dead. And when they realize it, they are buoyantly free to leave all suffering behind.

I can imagine life in a garden, populated by self-obsessed specters who linger longingly and in great distress because they do not know that they are alive. And when they realize it, they are buoyantly free to show goodness and mercy forever.

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pledge of allegiance

December 19th, 2016 - 13 Comments

Today I stood in line behind nineteen other patrons served by a diminished staff of two underpaid postal workers, packages stacked cattywumpus in bins and on counters, the holiday stamps sold out, the customers impatient but still peaceable, because what else are you going to do, the wait stretching ever longer behind me as if to the end of time, or at least out the front door, and I thought to myself: this is what this country needs, indeed this is what this country is. Neighbors assembling in democratic fashion, first-come first-served, inconvenienced, to do something selfless for someone else, using an old-fashioned and unglamorous system that still ably conveys their tidings across inconceivable distance and indecipherable zip codes with a high degree of reliability, affordability, and yes, even speed.

Perhaps some of us have overlooked what is already great about this country.

Anyone with the proper perspective can tell you that greatness is not stitched on cherry red gimme caps or emblazoned in ten-foot-tall letters atop the penthouse floor, but found in inconspicuously small things. Small things have filled my time since I leapt off social media and invited people to save their Facebook likes and send me mail instead. Since then I have spent a little bit of every afternoon writing to folks who gamely wrote to me first, people in California, Massachusetts, Illinois, Nevada, Wisconsin, Missouri, Virginia, Oklahoma, and Iowa, states I name here so you can know that you made my day.

Your mail has saved me. Saved me from self-obsession, that is. From my own fear, angst, and despair. Because before I respond to a letter I read it several times, entering your life by quieting my own. This is nothing new, just something to be rediscovered: a key, I think, to civil society and noble friendship, the ability to interrupt for a moment the nonstop stream of self-absorption that otherwise engulfs and destroys us.

What I’ve shared with most folks is the vital necessity to take the long view right now, much like a postal customer, and to do small things with great love, as Mother Teresa taught. To be sure, there will be shameful waste and ruin, thievery, greed, lies, crimes and disruption on a grand scale, but our independent spirits can still rise. In these treasonous times, I pledge allegiance to the United States Postal Service, and to the flag of a Forever stamp. If you’d like my address, just send me a message through this Contact form and I will promptly respond because it is the single greatest thing I can do.

what’s holding you back

October 11th, 2016 - 6 Comments

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Is it possible to live in a universe without fear?

I wish more people would ask.

Anxiety disorders are the number one diagnosis of the mental health industry. Each year, about 40 million American adults seek treatment for debilitating fear and dread. Now children are swelling their ranks. In one recent year, 85 million prescriptions were filled for the leading antianxiety drugs. Antidepressant use has quadrupled over the last twenty years. About one in ten people suffer from chronic sleeplessness. Deaths from prescription painkillers are epidemic and higher than those from illegal narcotics. There are 140 million people in the world with alcoholism. In America, heavy drinking is the third leading preventable cause of death. These numbers may not be completely accurate, but they are entirely true. If they don’t apply to you, then they apply to people you know and love, people you live with or used to live with, people barely alive or dead too soon.

We live stupefied by our own deep terror, our unmet fears. Out of fear, we crush our own spirits, break our own hearts — and if we don’t stop — rot our own flesh.

How do we end up like this? I don’t know why we reach for noxious cocktails to drown our fear and pain, but we all do, and they don’t work. Every time we turn away from what is right in front of us we are headed in the wrong direction. So don’t turn away.

These days we live in what we consider to be a mobile society. It seems like we can do anything from anywhere. And yet, we are immobilized as never before. Some of us are too terrified to unlock our doors and step into our neighborhoods. Too timid to take a walk, drive our cars, or board a plane. We live straitjacketed by our touch screens and chained by convenience. If what we’re looking for isn’t on the closest corner, like Starbucks, or streaming, like Netflix, we don’t feel terribly inclined to go farther. I hardly ever have to leave my own confines, having fashioned a world in which nearly everything is delivered to me automatically.

Nearly everything. read more

the age of undoing

July 9th, 2013 - 9 Comments

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In the end, what ties everything together is how predictably it falls apart.

Like everyone, I must have seen heaps of leaves all my life, but I never really noticed the part where they fall to the earth. When you watch a tree drop its leaves, it will change you. It will alter your ambition and interrupt your agenda. There’s nothing like the sight of falling leaves to give you a glimpse of reality, especially if it’s in your own backyard.

It was my forty-first birthday. I was looking out the garden window in our guest room, also called our office, but which would be lost to either use when a baby took up residence a year later. I was alone, in the middle of the day, amid September’s melancholy stillness, with nothing to do except give undue consideration to the sad landscape of my recent loss. Three months earlier I’d left my job, planted my savings into this decrepit house, sacrificed my slim claim to fame and greatness and brought myself down to earth. And for what? I was no clearer on the why. Then it began to rain, more like the suggestion of rain, a translucent veil that fell like lace from the crown of the sky. Did this even qualify as rain? I had to wonder, being a transplant from the land of whipcracking cloudbursts and tornado warnings with sudden raging floods that crested two feet higher than your front door. That was rain.

I remember this event not because of the birthday, one of many that would come after the year I stopped counting, but because of the delicate mists that carried the first leaves down from the sycamores, leaves still partly green and as wide across as my two hands. What a show—the water, the light, and the leaves gliding into a soft landing of letting go.

I was forty-one years old before I ever saw a tree lose its leaves. After that, everything I saw was a falling leaf. Everything came down. read more

uncaged

January 27th, 2013 - 5 Comments

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Your children are not your children.
They are sons and daughters of life’s longing for itself.

When they are young, our children can seem like the tiny thorns to our bloom: our creative yearnings confined. As they grow up, our children can seem like the blooms to our thorn: their freedoms caged.

And yet, our longings are the same, two parts of an indivisible whole: life’s longing for itself.

I’m excited to share two upcoming events that examine motherhood as the unfolding of a creative journey. I hope you let yourself out of the house and come, where you are certain to meet a part of yourself you thought you’d lost.

Lost in Living
A full-length documentary by Mary Trunk
Friday, Feb. 1, 6:30 p.m.
Free, or a $5 charitable donation to benefit the All Saints Foster Care Project
All Saints Church
132 Euclid Ave.
Pasadena

Behind the domestic curtain of motherhood, where the creative impulse can flourish or languish, are four women determined to make a go of it. Filmed over seven years, Lost In Living confronts the contradictions inherent in personal ambition and self-sacrifice, female friendship and mental isolation, big projects and dirty dishes. The complex realities of family life unfold in this documentary film about the messy intersection of motherhood and artistic expression.

Magical Journey: An Apprenticeship in Contentment
Discussion and book signing by Katrina Kenison
Friday, Feb. 8, 7 p.m.
Free
Vroman’s Bookstore
695 E. Colorado Blvd.
Pasadena

“No longer indispensable, no longer assured of our old carefully crafted identities, no longer beautiful in the way we were at twenty or thirty or forty, we are hungry and searching nonetheless.”

An inspiring, beautiful book for every woman whose children are growing up, but who is not done growing herself. Kenison explores the belief that even as old identities are outgrown, new ones begin to beckon, inspiring readers to summon enough courage to heed the call.

Heed the call.

(If you subscribe by email and are unable to see the trailer below, click here.)

how to train a peanut

February 2nd, 2012 - 6 Comments

I’ve trained a bluejay, out of my own delight, to perch like a cat outside my door.

He doesn’t want me to sprout wings and fly. He can fly.

He doesn’t want a song and dance. He has a song.

He has a dance.

He wants a peanut. That, I can do.

For Jena Strong.

imprisoned with an i

June 23rd, 2010 - 9 Comments

We are enslaved by our understanding of “I” – Maezumi Roshi

We are each imprisoned with an I. The I that you think you are, and the I that you think you’re not. The I that you like on good days, and more often the I that you don’t like. The I you interpret, analyze and diagnose. The I you want and wish for; the I that you want to become. The I in obsession, and the I in addiction. And so on and so on, a life sentence of solitary confinement without release. Four dank walls and a hard cot: call it your “comfort zone.”

Imprisonment begins with an I.

We are enslaved by our understanding of who and what we are. By our opinions and preferences. By our ruminations, fantasies, ideas and values. By our knowledge and understanding. Understanding is limited. But our true nature is boundless. How can we understand something without limits? We can’t even come close, but we keep banging our head away at it, like battering a tin cup against jail bars.

What has shot me off in this wretchedly abstract direction is something simple and concrete: our appetite for information, and the habitual way we confuse information with action. Many of us want to change the way we live, and we start by informing ourselves. I can see the point. It’s why, for instance, you might read this blog. Sorry to disappoint you, but other Buddhist bloggers shell out far more information and explanation than I do! Armed with a self-righteous view, they might even yell and fight! Prison riots are exhilarating in their way, but they always end up lengthening your sentence. read more

karen maezen miller

paradise in plain sight

Posts Tagged ‘Freedom’