Loving A Rogue

Two months ago, a scrappy white stray tom cat showed up at our house. It was a blustery, rainy day. That, combined with his color, led us to dub him Blizzard. At first, hungry and skittish, he was vocal about wanting food but would not come anywhere near us. We dutifully put out wet and dry food twice daily, and established a routine. He was always around near mealtime, but then disappeared.

Gradually, though, he began to stick closer and closer to the house, for more and more hours of the day. Within a couple of weeks, he surprised me by coming right up onto the floor of the shed where his food dish was as I was filling the bowl. A few days later, he rubbed up against my leg. I tentatively reached out a hand, and he allowed me to pet him. I was exultant. We had won him over.

But although now Blizzard spends all his time nearby, and loves to rub against me, and purrs loudly when I bring the food, he is filled with mixed messages. He frequently swats at my hand as I fill the bowl. Sometimes the claws are drawn in, and it's just a tap. Often, though, he draws blood. He has been in the middle of a caress, and suddenly turned and grabbed me around the leg with both front paws, sinking in deep. Two days ago, while happily greeting me, all at once he jumped up and bit me on my calf, again drawing blood.

I believe part of the problem is the fact he is unneutered, and we hope to trap him soon, and take care of that. But beyond that issue, it seems that Bliz has been living in the wild for some time, and has gotten a bit confused about how to appropriately express love and affection. Let's just say he sends lots of mixed messages.

And yet - every day, twice a day, I go out there to feed him. I stay centered in my body, trying to calm him as much as possible. I pay attention to his body language, and remain alert to what he may be trying to tell me. When he whacks me, I am startled, but I have never been mad or thought to myself, "Fine. No more food or love for you!" I simply regroup, refocus, and keep right on loving him.

Blizzard is very docile and sweet with the rest of our cats, never instigating any fights. A couple of toms from the neighborhood have begun showing up late at night to terrorize him, and I hear him in the wee hours, squalling. I jump up from my bed, and rush out, to chase away the intruders, and Blizzard saunters off once again to his post underneath the shed, where he spends the night. In other words, I have adopted him, for better or for worse, just as surely as if he were any of my other animals.

What amuses me, thinking about it today, is that I tolerate this erratic behavior from a cat without a second thought, when I am so sensitive when it comes to human beings. Blizzard may very well rub against me and purr one moment and bite me the next, but it doesn't in any way lessen the amount of love I have for him, or the amount of patience I bring to the relationship. I am not thinking about my needs and wants when I approach him. I am thinking about what he needs, what is going on for him.

Why, then, is it so hard to do that with humans? When my mother hurts my feelings, I question her love in the absolute. When a friend snaps at me, I retreat in silence and resentment, instead of extending a concerned hand of compassion. When my boss is in a bad mood at work, I am convinced that it is something I have done, and I fret all day about how to make it right, even though I don't know what "it" is.

Then I go home to this stray cat, Blizzard. I am patient and compassionate and loving. I willingly lose sleep to protect him. I offer myself up to him day after day, making myself vulnerable, because I know that he wants to love me - he's just not sure exactly how to do it yet.

Ah, loving a rogue. I need to learn to treat everyone in my life as if they were a scrappy stray cat that showed up at my door.

Everything Changes

In a discussion this evening on the Three Marks of Existence, Tony Patchell focused on impermanence, the flux of life.

The Three Marks are (1) impermanence or inconstancy, (2) dukkha or suffering, and (3) non-self. A fourth mark is also frequently added, that of nirvana, or perfect composure, to round out the set.

Tony began with that most famous of quotes from Suzuki-roshi, when asked to summarize Zen: "Everything changes." A full acceptance of that fact, of the absolute fact of transciency, goes hand in hand with the concept of selflessness - because what are you, if you change every moment?

Tony said that we as Zen students must first hear those words from a teacher, or read them in Buddhist writings. Then we must contemplate them, and analyze them, studying them until we can bring them to our own understanding. But even that is not enough. The final step is to meditate, to turn to zazen. Because it is only through zazen that we fully comprehend in our bodies what it means to be impermanent, to be always changing.

Impermanency - it is both incredibly terrifying and comforting at the same time. Terrifying for the obvious reasons. All the "good" things will go. When I think about losing those I love (my wife, my friends, my family members, my animals), it makes my heart clamp up. I'm a little less frightened when it comes to objects. I believe that I could recover relatively unscathed from the loss of my car, or my home, or other such items. But even there, I have vulnerable spots. I get frantic thinking about house fires, not only because I worry about all of my dogs and cats, but because I panic at the thought of all of my writings and computer files going up in flames. It's my words that I'm attached to. Hah! Talk about impermanent!

So how, then, is the thought of impermanency comforting? When I am in a dark place, I know that it will not last. When my legs hurt while I sit zazen, I know that the pain is not endless. When I am frightened, or unsure of myself, or embarrassed, or lonely....everything changes. When I am exhausted, and hopeless, and burned out, pessimistic, angry, frustrated...these feelings pass. What an immense relief to know this is true.

Right now, I am wholly here. Now. And now again. Bam. Right here.

Pay attention. This is it.

Who Am I To Give Advice?

I have found myself in the awkward position recently of having people ask me for advice. Not little advice, like, "Can you recommend a restaurant?" or, "Do you know of a good place to find organic produce?" Big advice. Questions like: "How can I live with having screwed something up really badly?" Or "Should I leave my job and move to another state, because I may have found a temporary escape from a bad situation I'm in right now?"

Wow. Me? You're asking me?

One of the friends has asked for advice over email. That's a little easier for me, because I can read the note, and then sit with it for a day or two, mulling it over. But the second friend asked me today in person, face to face, while she was crying. I found myself sitting there quietly, listening, and listening, and listening. It was so much to process. A third friend, also in the room, jokingly said, "Oh, you're just sitting there with your Buddha expression." If only!

It is not because I am feeling tranquil and calm and serene. It is because I am slowly sorting through things, trying to make sense of my feelings. Because what comes up first is: Who the hell am I to be giving advice to anyone? For goodness sake, look at my life! Look at all the wrong turns I have taken. Look at all the pain and suffering, the missed opportunities, the ridiculously convoluted path that I have followed to get me to where I am now. Me, offer a road map to someone else?

But I keep sitting, quietly. And the other voice surfaces. Yes, it says. You have experienced a great deal. But each pain, each loss, broke your heart open a little bit wider, and taught you a little bit more about compassion. Without all those twists and turns, you would not have this poet's soul. You would not have the desire to reach out to others. You would be closed off and broken, and you are not. You are whole. You survived.

So now I find myself in this place, where people I care about ask me for advice. What shall I say?

In a poem I wrote a couple of years ago, I penned these lines:

The phone rings. A friend struggles with her marriage’s end,
asking for answers. I make my words a mirror
of her own wisdom, know I cannot predict
what will grow in someone else’s garden.

That is what I learned during those long, hard years. No one had answers for me. Only I had the answers. What I needed was friends who would listen to me talk, friends who would compassionately hear me try to figure out exactly what it was I needed to do, searching through my own soul's truth.

Today I remind myself of that. After some thought, I offered a few tangible suggestions to these friends, strategies for planning. But the most important thing I could do, in the end, was listen, and remind them, in turn, to listen to themselves. The most important answers always lie within.

If Only All Theater Was This Good

I saw some of the best drama I've seen in ages - and the actors were all kids.

The show was called "Prop 8 Love Stories," presented by Cinnabar Theater. The actors are between the ages of 10 and 17. They interviewed couples, gay and straight, about their relationships, and then presented a montage of the results.

One of the things that was fascinating is that the actors’ genders do not necessarily match the genders of those they interviewed, so a boy may portray a lesbian, a girl a gay man, a girl a straight rabbi father….

Although the couples are mixed, they all have a gay connection. The rabbi and his wife have a gay son. A young woman engaged to be married to a young man talks about the process she went through when her father came out as a gay man. And then there are lesbian moms, gay dads, everything else. It’s fascinating.

The project is the brain child of creator/director Brian Glenn Bryson, but it is co-written and directed by 14-year-old Dezi Gallegos (who also acts in it, wonderfully!), and there is original music, composed by 16-year-old Audrey Maye Tatum, with choreographed dancing, so there are some elements of music theater, as well.

The interviews examined the dynamics of couples, families, coming out stories, fear and discrimination, the Prop 8 battle, death and religion, weddings, and ended with a section on "hope."

These kids beautifully and tellingly explored what it is like to be in a relationship completely unlike their own life experiences - since they were portraying, in some cases, an 80 year old man, or a dad with three kids, or two moms talking about how they met. If only those in the cast were changed, this kind of theater would be worthwhile; those teens (and pre-teens) have learned something they will never forget.

But of course, their message is going much further, as they stand on stage with their words of compassion and fear, bewilderment and hope, yearning and dreams. This is the sort of drama that should get extended runs, playing to audiences around the country, with kids from Kansas and Louisiana and Alaska taking on these roles. This is about opening hearts, one audience member, one cast member, at a time.

We went with a group of friends to see it performed at the Glaser Center in Santa Rosa (the Unitarian Church). The kids also performed at Fort Mason in San Francisco.

It is showing again in Petaluma on the weekend of July 16 and 17 at Cinnabar Theater. If you happen to have either of those nights free, and live close enough by - get a ticket and go. You'll be glad you did.

The Latest Rendition of "The Dog Ate My Homework"

I really have been trying to get back into a regular blogging routine. Where once I was posting five times a week, lately I have been lucky to get in two. It seems that there is always something that comes up. Each thing, in and of itself, sounds perfectly reasonable. But as a list, it begins to resemble the kid telling her teacher why her math assignment is late once again.

My list thus far has included: "I had to take my grandmother to the hospital." "My parrot had a heart attack." "I was up all night at the newspaper."

See what I mean? Well, this week, I was resolved to get back on track. Ah, but wait. Are you ready for the latest, greatest excuse?

"The dog scratched my eye."

On Wednesday night, for once I got home early on a deadline night from the newspaper. I was going to get a good night's sleep, and spend the next several days catching up on things, including blogging. It was 10:30 p.m. - Sabrina was already fast asleep; she wakes up at 3 a.m., starting work at 5 a.m. in Santa Rosa. I crawled into bed, and as I was lying down, my lab Ripley flopped down next to me in the dark, closer than I realized. Suddenly I had an excruciating pain in my left eye. She had unintentionally stuck one of her nails directly into my eyeball (not the lid, the eye). I capped my hand over the eye and drew my breath in sharply and audibly, loud enough to wake Sabrina up. "What's wrong?" I was barely able to talk. The pain was incredible. I wasn't sure at that point what I would find when I uncupped my eye.

After a few moments, time enough to get my breath back, I went to the bathroom to look. My eye was tearing, and very red. But what was alarming, was that I could actually see what looked like a rip in the white of the eye. We called Kaiser - and then what had been an early night turned into a late one.

I was lucky, and it ended up being only a few scratches to the cornea, with no damage to the eye itself. There were particles of dirt from Ripley's nails in the eye, so the nurses did a 20-minute saline/water rinse to clean out the eye, I was given antibiotic eye drops for the next five days, and painkillers to help me sleep for the next couple of nights - REM sleep is the hardest, because your eye moves rapidly, so the painkillers help alleviate that.

But here comes the excuse part. I was told to rest my eyes for at least a couple of days, not reading or spending time on the computer. I managed to get through all of Thursday, only cheating by checking my Blackberry. By the end of the day, my eye was tired.

It's feeling much better today, after a second night's rest, and so I am daring to sit down at the keyboard.

Really, though. Enough is enough. Could we get through just two weeks without a trip to a hospital or an emergency room? Barring any more unforeseen disasters, I truly will be blogging on a more regular basis!

How to Eat with All Your Senses

On Saturday night, Sabrina and I decided to celebrate the second anniversary of our wedding with a special dinner out. An acquaintance had raved about the food and atmosphere at the Madrona Manor, located just outside of Healdsburg on Guerneville Road. I drive past its front gate every time I go to Russian River Zendo. I knew it was pricey, and an extravagance. But it seemed the perfect choice, and we managed to get last-minute reservations for 8 p.m.

Oh - we had no idea what we were in store for! The food was beyond anything we could have imagined. It is French cuisine, with local produce, and a Sonoma twist, prepared by chef Jesse Mallgren, born in San Francisco and raised in Sonoma County, but trained at some of the finest restaurants around. We chose from the "compose your own menu" selection, which allowed Sabrina to have seafood and meat for almost every course, while I had a rich selection of vegetarian entrees.

For Sabrina: scallop sashimi with borage, Meyer lemon, uni and fresh wasabi; Lobster "cuit sous vide" with carrot, fennel, pea and coriander; abalone; northern halibut with corn, miso, dashi and porcini; lamb. For me: beets with gorgonzola; haricots verts with burata, hazelnuts and truffle; potato gnocchi with peas, mint, pistachios and creme fraiche; and the Madrona Manor Signature Cheese Course, around the world in cheese.

But that is just a small piece of it. In between each course, we received little "palate ticklers," tiny taste tests to ready ourselves for the next bite. A slice of hollowed-out radish filled with butter, or a yogurty-drink beside a single ravioli. A dish of strawberry sorbet to freshen our mouths before moving on to the next taste.

Part of the beauty of it all was the presentation. Every course was brought in a plate or bowl especially designed to showcase what it was serving: a large, broad-brimmed bowl with only a small dip in the center to hold the food; a long, angular plate divided into four sections, each containing one small bite; tiny glasses; perfect little spoons.

And with this, another part of the beauty was the portion size. We were given just enough to enjoy the flavor, enough to appreciate what we were eating, not enough to sate ourselves. We ate, we tasted, we relished each bite, but we did not stuff ourselves. We were on a journey of exploration.

The dinner stretched out over three hours. The service was impeccable, and constant, but not stiff. We felt pampered, without feeling that we were about to make a grave misstep by picking up the wrong fork. We were served each course, had time to eat leisurely, then a few moments to ourselves to talk, and enjoy the ambience. We sat outside, on a covered porch, in the summer evening, looking out over lush gardens.

It was an absolutely luxurious experience of being in the now. I cannot remember the last time I was so present with my food. The newness of the tastes, the surprises, kept us continually open. I was aware of every plate, every wait person that approached and laid down a new fork, every shift in the room.

To cap the evening, it turned out that we had met one of the servers before at a friend's Thanksgiving dinner. She remembered that it was shortly after our wedding and mentioned that. We said yes, and told her we were celebrating our anniversary. Moments later, she reappeared with two large plates with tiny cups of creme brulee at their centers, and the words "Happy Anniversary" written in gorgeous script with chocolate sauce on the edge of the platters.

(We still had dessert coming, of course: Chocolate to the Fourth for Sabrina, with devils food, soft Gianduja ganache, sorbet and mousse, and Strawberries & Cream for me, with orange financier, lemon verbena and brown butter sable. Plus they sent us home with clear plastic bags of caramel corn, tied with brown ribbon.)

Oh, what a dinner! After, at home, I found myself wishing I had taken pictures of the food, captured each course. But then I had to smile at myself. No, no. It's better this way. It was exactly as it was supposed to be. Perfect for those three hours.

Walking Around with No Skin

On Tuesday night, I gave a student dharma talk at our Zen sitting group. The topic that I chose was anger, the precept that I have been studying, and struggling with, and turning inside out on a daily basis for the past few months.

I spent several days carefully planning what I would say, trying to balance my own story with a few insights culled from the pages of Buddhist teachers like Robert Aitken and Thich Nhat Hanh and Seung Sahn. It felt pretty reasonable and coherent, on paper.

But when I sat in front of my sangha members, fourteen of them, and began to talk, all sorts of doubts cropped up. As part of my dealings with anger, I chronicled instances from my past when I had lost my cool. In sharing them, speaking them out loud, it seemed they became shocking, startling. It felt as if I was portraying myself as a person who snapped easily and often, a walking time bomb. I grew uneasy as I looked around the circle, trying to read everyone's faces. Did they think I was a monster?

A piece of me wanted to backtrack, and rewrite the script, to begin making explanations. After a reference to anger with a girlfriend, I longed to say, "I have been in a relationship with Sabrina for six years, and not once in that time have I ever yelled at her, or even raised my voice."

I scrambled through my memories, thinking of all of the other reactions that come with far greater frequency than my own anger or outward violence: disassociation, depression, fear, self-doubt, nightmares. Those have been my main battle.

But, no. That is not the point. I also have anger. It is there. It is inside me, often buried, but inside me nonetheless. And at times, it does burst out, usually inappropriately. I need to face that in all honesty and courage.

After the talk, a couple of my sangha members thanked me for my honesty. This, too, is something that catches me a little off guard. I appreciate the comment, since I know it is offered genuinely enough. But, there is simply no other way I know how to be. Even when at times it might be better to keep some things more private, out of self protection, I've never been very good at drawing that line. Most of my life, I have walked around with no skin. All you need to do is ask. If I know the answer, I will tell you. It's all here, right on the surface.

The downside to that, of course, is that on the day following such a talk, I feel completely naked in front of the world. And it is only through sitting, and breathing, and writing it down, that I can begin once more to believe that I will be able to walk into that room and face those people without fear. It is a process, one that I undertake over and over again.