Monday, August 14, 2023
In bed around 8:15, in BRR twice, awake at 3:02, up from BRR at 4:45, it rough night, nasty minnows in the bucket: thoughts of world vulnerability, collapse, doom. 66℉, high of 68°. Severe weather: beach hazards, waves 5 to 9 feet, also Flash Flood watch, 2 to 4 inches of rain expected😨. AQI=25. The wind is 9 mph off the lake, 3-18/26. DPs 59-64. Sunrise at 5:55, sunset at 7:56, 14 hours of daylight.
What are you, nuts? A not uncommon expression in my younger days, usually spoken affectionately. I'm asking it of myself in my old age. The metaphors of thoughts darting around in my head while half-awake 'like minnows in a bait bucket' or dashing to and fro like a caged squirrel aptly describe my brain. This morning the thoughts that stayed with me on full awakening were of our vulnerability because of our total reliance on technology, especially computer technology. I had a thought of being on a hill overlooking LA and the city going dark, not just from lack of electricity but from the destruction of the internet, of 'the cloud.' Food, water, gasoline unavailable; savings and checking and retirement accounts disappeared. Vague thoughts of neutron bombs able to destroy enemies through radiation without widespread blast and heat damage. All the ways as a species we can destroy one another. On other mornings it's bad dreams, dreams of bad experiences as a lawyer or experiences from childhood or regretful self-reflections, lost friendships that I should have maintained, my tendency since childhood to withdraw within myself and its costs, or despairing thoughts about the social and political unraveling of America, competing hatreds, fascism, likelihood of violence, etc. Cacophonous thoughts, unwelcome, unwanted, but like the Last Judgment mirror unpitiously (a neologism?) revealing all sins, failings, faults, and cowardices. Not a day but something is recalled, my conscience or my vanity appalled.
Κύριε, ἐλέησον
LTMW I see a pretty little downy woodpecker as the first morning visitor to the Clausen feeding station, perched on the sunflower tube which is more than half empty. Now a chickadee arrives. It's a gray breezy morning with a feeling of storm in the air. A pretty little chipmunk had climbed the shepherd's crook up the squirrel baffle that keeps her from getting to the sunflower seed tube. They keep trying, hoping. Now a pair of house finches arrive, one on the sunflower tube, the other on an orange. A chickadee works on the long niger seed tube.
Maurice Ricard has a Ph.D. in cellular genetics but is also an ordained Buddhist monk who lives in Nepal and serves as the French interpreter for the Dalai Lama. In Sunday's NYT magazine, there is an interview with him that struck home, especially in terms of my disquieting early morning 'bait bucket' thoughts. From the interview:
OK, so I’ve been meditating twice a day for probably 15 years, and I feel as if it has improved my ability to control my thoughts and emotions instead of letting them control me. But still, sometimes I’ll walk by a mirror and have an extreme flash of self-loathing. Or I’ll get all agitated over something stupid, like finding a parking spot. Will that stuff ever go away? Well, they can. Absolutely. You know, once I was on the India Today Conclave. They said, “Can you give us the three secrets of happiness?” I said: “First, there’s no secret. Second, there’s not just three points. Third, it takes a whole life, but it is the most worthy thing you can do.” I’m happy to feel I am on the right track. I cannot imagine feeling hate or wanting someone to suffer.
For a while now, people have been calling you the world’s happiest man. Do you feel that happy? It’s a big joke. We cannot know the level of happiness through neuroscience. It’s a good title for journalists to use, but I cannot get rid of it. Maybe on my tomb, it will say, “Here lies the happiest person in the world.” Anyway, I enjoy every moment of life, but of course, there are moments of extreme sadness — especially when you see so much suffering. But this should kindle your compassion, and if it kindles your compassion, you go to a stronger, healthier, more meaningful way of being. That’s what I call happiness. It’s not as if all the time you jump for joy. Happiness is more like your baseline. It’s where you come to after the ups and downs, the joy and sorrows. We perceive even more intensely — bad taste, seeing someone suffer — but we keep this sense of the depth. That’s what meditation brings.
Do you ever feel despair? There’s no point. We can feel sad if we see suffering, but sadness is not against a deep sense of eudaemonia, (A Greek word used by Aristotle to describe the happiness attained by people who base their actions on reason and morality. One scholar has drawn parallels between eudaemonia and the Buddhist concept of nirvana), of fulfillment, because sadness goes with compassion, and sadness goes with determination to remedy the cause. Despair: You’re at the bottom of the hole, there’s no way out. That’s fatalism. But suffering comes from causes and conditions. Those are impermanent, and impermanence is what allows for change. . . . We deal with our mind from morning to evening, but we spend very little attention on improving the way we translate outer conditions, good or bad, into happiness or misery. And it’s crucial because that’s what determines our day-to-day experience of the world!
What’s the wisest thing the Dalai Lama ever said to you? I remember I came out of this one-year retreat to take care of my father. (Ricard’s father was the philosopher and writer Jean-François Revel. Father and son collaborated on the 1997 book “The Monk and the Philosopher,” which consisted of a dialogue between the two on various philosophical, spiritual, and political themes.) At the same time, I was interpreting for the Dalai Lama in Brussels. So I told him: “I’m going back to the retreat. What is your advice?” He said, “In the beginning, meditate on compassion; in the middle, meditate on compassion; in the end, meditate on compassion."
Sorry, are you wearing an Apple Watch? Yes.
Why does a Buddhist monk need an Apple Watch? I walk in the forest. I try to count 10,000 steps to be healthy at 77 years old. I don’t do many interviews anymore, but when I do, I usually don’t put this on, because the first thing the guys say is “Why do you have an Apple Watch?”
Speaking of Buddhism, here is a jotting in this journal a year ago today: "I watched Geri walking Lilly from County Line Road onto Wakefield Court, thinking what a beautiful sight they were, how much they give meaning to my life, and how mortal, how impermanent, we all are. I'm getting a bit Buddhist, focusing on our impermanence, how everything and everyone we love will disappear, dust to dust. "
And Speaking of Feeling Crappy: "Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my Soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral effort to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people's hats off -- then I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can. This is my substitute for pistol and ball. With a philosophical flourish, Cato throws himself upon his sword. I quietly take to the ship." Herman Melville, Moby Dick or The Whale, 1851.
When I was a young professor with 1st year law students, I regularly read this opening paragraph of Mody Dick to my Property Law classes some day in November of the 1st semeste with some reassuring wordssr when most of them were stressed and nevervous about their first law school exams approaching in mid-December. I read Moby Dick many decases ago and often wonder how many people read it anymore. With all its minutiae about whaling, it's not an easy read.
And Speaking of Accusing Half-Dreams:
Who shall deliver me?
Christina Georgina Rossetti
1830 (London) – 1894 (London)
God strengthen me to bear myself;
That heaviest weight of all to bear,
Inalienable weight of care.
All others are outside myself;
I lock my door and bar them out
The turmoil, tedium, gad-about.
I lock my door upon myself,
And bar them out; but who shall wall
Self from myself, most loathed of all?
If I could once lay down myself,
And start self-purged upon the race
That all must run ! Death runs apace.
If I could set aside myself,
And start with lightened heart upon
The road by all men overgone!
“I wake and feel the fell of dark, not day”
Gerard Manley Hopkin 1844 - 1889
I wake and feel the fell of dark, not day.
What hours, O what black hoürs we have spent
This night! what sights you, heart, saw; ways you went!
And more must, in yet longer light’s delay.
With witness I speak this. But where I say
Hours I mean years, mean life. And my lament
Is cries countless, cries like dead letters sent
To dearest him that lives alas! away.
I am gall, I am heartburn. God’s most deep decree
Bitter would have me taste: my taste was me;
Bones built in me, flesh filled, blood brimmed the curse.
Selfyeast of spirit a dull dough sours. I see
The lost are like this, and their scourge to be
As I am mine, their sweating selves; but worse.
Groundhog Day
Rita to Phil: The wretch, concentred all in self,
Living, shall forfeit fair renown,
And, doubly dying, shall go down
To the vile dust, from whence he sprung,
Unwept, unhonour'd, and unsung.
Sir Walter Scott.
Phil to Rita: I would have thought Willard Scott.
No comments:
Post a Comment