Tag Archives: Impermanace

Dogs Are Better Than Us: Everyday Magic, Day 150

Posted on December 15, 2010 | 6 Comments

It’s true. They just are. It’s not the same with cats: some particular cats might be better than some particular humans, but for the most part, cats don’t care about being good. Dogs, on the other hand, are the Boddhisattvas of the animal world, come back to earth to help us even though as enlightened beings, they could go to, say, Jupiter or other dimensions. Okay, they do eat the most disgusting things in the universe, jump up on us at unsuspecting moments, bark to go out and then back in with no rhyme and reason and occasionally fight other dogs. But just because they have issues doesn’t mean they’re not way better than your typical human.

My dog is especially better, which is not to say she is the only best dog in the world, but she’s sure one of them. We found her — of course! — at the pound. She was the dog the staff kept at their desks because she was so sweet they couldn’t bear to be away from her. A lab-mation (mostly black lab with a shield-shaped spread of white and dalmation spots on her chest, she loves everyone, and after 12 years with us, particularly us.

We got Mariah Lily Karumba Lassman because my then 10-year-old son Daniel needed a friend and our house in the country needed a dog. Did I mention I was a cat person before her? Despite her eating all the Birkenstocks in the house and being sock-obsessed, she was a pool of love from the get-go. She spent a good part of her life sleeping with one child or another, kind of like an 80-pound body pillow.

When guests arrived, even ones who didn’t like dogs, Mariah walked over, put her head tenderly in their laps and looked up with great understanding. She won them over. When delivery people or other strangers came, she ran out to greet them and rolled on her back. When any of us were sick, she slept on the floor, lengthwise against our beds, ready to jump up and follow us from room to room. When critters circled the outside of the house, she circled the inside of the house, barking them away.

She is also a wizard with cats. I once found her lying down, face to face with Saulina, our cat of 20 years who was so smart that she did our taxes for us. They stared at each other for hours in that position, and I realized this was probably a daily pit stop in their lives when the humans were gone. I’m sure they were transmitting life-giving information about healing properties of the universe, each from their respective planets. Mariah was a love bunny with a series of kittens, and is now good friends with Miyako. She’s also been a staunch defender of each kitten in his/her time from Judy, the old cat, who doesn’t mean to be so bad but suffers from PTSD.

Now Mariah is old. Her eyes are glassy (but the vet said she’s not blind), she walks with a limp because of her arthritis, and she’s graying at the edges. Yesterday, she wouldn’t stop cry-barking, so I took her to the vet from hard-core steroids and painkillers. “12 is old for a lab,” people tell me, but I haven’t really faced this reality. Yet this reality is coming fast, and as I carry-pushed her into our bedroom, where she’s slept for years on the floor beside us, I nudged her onto a large pillow, covered her with a fleece blanket, and prayed for this good dog to live happy years, and least happy months more. Some beings seem too good to die.

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Sorting Socks As Rite of Passage: Everyday Magic, Day 46

Posted on August 30, 2010 | 1 Comment

Before I drove 500 miles — fueled by herbs, cold medicine, coffee, and thrills for Natalie’s launch into college — there was the necessary sorting of the socks. For many years, our socks were routinely mixed up in the laundry (thanks to my wonderful does-all-the-laundry husband), and in recent years, just about all our other clothing too (as Natalie grew up and I grew thinner). It was easy enough to separate her size 6 jeans from my size-umm ones, but socks were far more complicated.

So as we were packing, it fell to me to sort the socks — from her drawers, my drawers, and corners of the laundry room. I ended up dumping everything on the kitchen table, trying to sort by color or size, but I quickly lost track of what I was doing because of the stories so many socks brought back, from the tiny pink embroidered toddler socks she still had to the many cool frog or Jewish star socks I found for her at airports over the years. There were also at least twice the amount of mateless socks as matching ones. Furthermore, she no longer wanted her teddy bear or giraffe socks.

In the end, I decided the socks needed to mate across species, and that if she would no longer wear the more idiosyncratic socks, I would. Although I managed to keep from crying too much in the sorting, I know that waiting at home in my sock drawer are now little surprises. I might lose it some days because I’ll be missing the previous wearer of such socks, but I know I’ll also find something too — like how much love brings together like with unlike and carries us forth into the world, one step at a time.

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My Field Got a Crew Cut: Everyday Magic, Day 14

Posted on July 27, 2010 | Comments Off

Every year it happens: the large brome field surrounding our house gets a great summer cut. The guy who hays our field comes with his tractor, and over the course of an afternoon, the field goes from shoulder-length wild-child grass to a chic crew cut. Then the grass is corralled into long strips so it can be balled up into these massive haybales (about six feet high).

For me, the day of the crew cut feels like a clearing, making space for what comes next even, if it’s just big balls of hall. In a similar way as our April burning of the prairie feels like a rite of passage, so does haying time. The bales, especially in dim light, seem like animals grazing in the freshly-cut field, and the real animals — turkeys and deer mostly — come out to investigate soon after the tractor leaves. The cycle of the farm continually reminds me of change, impermanance, new life. Somewhere a cow will eat this hay on the other side of the seasonal wheel, deep in winter. Right now, the open slate of the field gleams in the 95-degree wind.

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Writing Into Mortality & Beyond: Everyday Magic, Day 13

Posted on July 26, 2010 | 1 Comment

Today I had the joy of facilitating a mid-summer writing retreat for people living with serious illness at Turning Point: The Center for Hope and Healing in Kansas City (actually Shawnee Mission, KS). While this is something I’ve been doing  for years, each time is new, giving me a front row seat to witness courage, curiosity and the power of how we create (even and especially in the face of mortality). Many of the eleven people who participated are carrying long-term progressive illnesses or stage four cancer diagnoses, years of trying one new medication or another, weeks that stretch into long deserts of moving through chemotherapy or grief, and other assorted hard stuff. One woman just lost her beloved to late-stage cancer two weeks ago; another balances late stage cancer treatment behind her and heart surgery ahead of her; yet another watches her strength and balance ebb and flow due to Parkinson’s.

Whatever the story, it’s a story about facing mortality: our own or our loved ones. As such, it’s a story about loss and grief — even if we’re lucky enough to only lose a few body parts and a false sense of immortality. It’s also a story of the joy found in being present for whatever everyday magic life gives us, whether it’s a glimpse of a red bird singing to one woman from a rooftop, reminding her someone is watching over her, or a hanging out at a family beach party for another woman, a welcome respite from cancer treatment.

In these workshops, I use writing prompts that aim us not so much toward the hope of returning to the old life, pre-illness, but the hope of finding meaning, connection, love, acceptance and strength in the current life. This necessitates also facing, and sometimes writing or talking through, the times meaning evaporates, connections dissipate, friends and families don’t know how to show their love, and it’s hard to not feel betrayed, weak and lost. I tell the people in such workshops to try to cultivate an attitude of curiosity and kindness for whatever comes up in their writing, to treat their responses or even moments of not being able to respond as they would a dear friend. I also encourage us to witness each other: listen carefully. In doing so, we open the ears of our ears and then can better figure out what our own lives are saying to us. I also bring snacks, and today, that included cherries because even if life isn’t a bowl of cherries (or a chair of bowlies as Mary Engelbriet writes), we can still find sweetness that replenishes and nurtures us.

We laugh a lot. We cry (and always, there needs to be a handy tissue box). We talk about struggles, breakthroughs, fears, and great loves. Yet I’m also amazed by how quickly people make a circle of support together, offering each other not just resources, but a kind of understanding that helps everyone in the group look into the issues tipping out when their mortality is stirred. In these workshops, we often speak of how to live, especially when the days are numbers and yet no one knows what those numbers are. There’s something about facing the hard stuff of life, whatever it is, that rips the veil of whatever-ness off, and lets us see clearly what matters, who we are, and how to live.

Photos from workshop used with permission of participants. For copy of My Tree of Life: Writing and Living Through Serious Illness, a book I edited of past participants’ writing, go to the Turning Point store. I also encourage people with serious illness or who are caregivers in the Kansas City area to check out Turning Point, make contributions, and/or take some classes. See a blog by one of the class participants.

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Juxtapositions When Things Go Wrong

Posted on June 14, 2008 | 1 Comment

I’m driving home from the airport, thinking how surreal it is to is to have just driven there, taken the blue bus from long-term parking to terminal C, stood in line with others who thought they were Newark, NJ-bound until they saw the florescent blue “Canceled” under “Departures,” and after waiting a suitable amount of time, learned my fate. I would be flying to Newark tomorrow, through Cleveland, at a time that would necessitate waking before 5 a.m. I nodded, took the new ticket, and traced my so-previous steps back to the blue bus, the long-term parking lot, the car, the highway, and then the interstate.

As I drive, everywhere the sky is brilliantly blue. The storms — which flooded our basement from the bottom up — passed, right on to New Jersey, which is why the flight is canceled. The light is so clear that the green, every direction, glows. Yet there’s a dead deer near the medium of the interstate. Yet there’s outrageous waves of construction, which slops the line of cars I’m in to at times. Yet when I called Ken, he told me he was at a light in Lawrence that went out, and every direction he looked, electricity was off. Yet my son is in a job interview at this moment in a place with no lights.

The easy is juxtaposed with the hard all over this weekend. We spent hours last night soaking up water in towels, squeezing those towels into buckets, and hauling out 50-something buckets of water. The night was silky beautiful, one of those just lightened up and cooled rare summer night when the humidity doesn’t beat up everything in sight. Being our habit when faced with sudden stress (and don’t old habits die hard?) we juxtaposed screaming at each other about the way to clean the basement with laughing, hugging, and joking about how we needed to clean the basement and get new carpet anyway.

Everywhere I look, all the time if I were paying attention, there are these juxtapositions, these “how-can-that-be?” buddied up with “thank-heavens-for-this.” Right before I went to the airport, I was paging through Buddhist Sylvia Boostein’s book Happiness is an Inside Job. I was caught by a comment from the Dhammapada, a compilation of sayings attributed to the Buddha: “Anyone who understands impermanence, ceases to be contentious.”

Meanwhile, there’s power outages, little floods in our basement and huge floods that cover over 40 square blocks in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, just northeast of here. There’s canceled flights and big, open, shining skies. There’s roadkill outside and lovely air-conditioning inside. There’s also occasional moments like this when I find myself immersed in empty, alive time; hours not planned into any one thing or place anymore. All impermanent, and in pausing, observing this constant passage of weather, change of plans, and wide skies between the airport and my house, I realize there is no need to drive myself crazy over any of this. All I need to do is drive myself home.

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