Author: nicole

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On Framing Death

Although born with breath in our bodies, at some point we exhaust our share. Our supply runs out. We draw the last one. When that fateful day happens, we die. Whether we merge into the cosmic consciousness and become one with the essence of all there is, take a mystical trip upward or downward, come to inhabit another body, or simply cease to exist, is another matter entirely. I stake no claim on knowing.

But we can say with conviction: no one continues in their current form forever.

Death is something no one can escape from. It follows life as surely as night follows day, winter follows autumn or old age follows youth. ~Ikeda

Since we arrive with the guarantee that we will also depart, I always wonder why some people frame death, especially when it is the result of an illness like cancer, as “losing.” As in, “she lost her battle with cancer.” Such wording, while meant to convey the way a loved one has died, implies they could’ve been immortal if only… They lost, as if, had events gone another way, they could have “won.” But what might winning mean? In a battle for life, death is the certain winner. So perhaps life and death are not best framed as competitors.

It is fair to acknowledge the cause of death. And of course we can acknowledge our loss; our sorrow that our loved one’s time with us was shorter than we, and perhaps they, would’ve liked. But I don’t think we give life or death their full measure when we say someone lost because they died. Our loved ones may leave us, ’tis true, and perhaps it is of little solace that they are immortalized in our memories of them. But I would like to think that if we love them in death, as we loved them in life, they won.

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Don’t Give Up | #30in30 #WriteLikeCrazy

Anyone who has ever made a resolution discovers that the strength
of their determination fades with time.
The important thing is not that your resolve never wavers,
but that you don’t get down on yourself when it does and throw in the towel.
~Daisaku Ikeda

23 down. 7 to go:

I have made a commitment to write (and share) every day for 30 days. Some days it’s been a joy – especially those days when I have time to truly craft or be playful on the page. It’s also rewarding when I’m feeling a bit righteous and want to make a little noise about something on my heart. Unfortunately, not all days are sunshine. When I’m tired, or my day simply hasn’t gone as planned, I often debate skipping and just catching up the next day.

But so far I haven’t done that.

It’s difficult, continuing. I think it’s important to just acknowledge that. Even if you enjoy something, you may not enjoy it the same every day. And even if you’re committed to something, your commitment may not look the same every day. But here’s the thing… even though we acknowledge something is not as easy as we’d like, I think we owe it to our commitment not spend too much time lamenting.

Lamenting is the magic expander. It makes everything loom larger than it actually is. This is so hard, we think to ourselves over and over again. And suddenly we’ve made the thing heavier. We’ve made the task larger. And then it becomes too much! We mop our brow, woozy from the imagined strain. Tomorrow, we think. Maybe I can manage it tomorrow.

Just when I’m whipping out the handkerchief, ready to call it a night, I often realize that I have the same power to shrink the task as I had to enlarge it. And I tell the lamenter thank you, but your services are no longer needed. I remind myself of my original goal, and go from there.

My goal is to build a writing habit. That means I simply need to write. Something. Anything. Even a five-minute freewrite.

It all counts.

That doesn’t mean there won’t come a day when you really don’t have it in you. Not five minutes. Not five words. And that’s okay, too. On those days, be gentle with yourself. Who deserves your love, if not you? Don’t give up on your original determination. Don’t give up on you.

And this makes 24. 9:53 p.m. Home office.

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Returning for Love | #30in30 #WriteLikeCrazy

It was love at first sight – the Caribbean Sea. A girlfriend and I celebrated her birthday on Barbados. We made friends with the locals, navigated roundabouts while driving on the wrong side of the street, sampled the island rum, and won prizes dancing and guessing famous songs. I purchased a beautiful amber bracelet with matching earrings from a man on the beach. But mostly we bronzed in the sun and played in that divine water. Water ski. Jet ski. Snorkeling. Sitting still, admiring.

I cried when we left.

And maybe I shouldn’t have, because my tears brought me back. Daddy died suddenly. Friends, family and serendipity brought me to St. Maarten to mourn. The water was a little unsettled there, or perhaps it was my broken heart. But it was healing, nonetheless. The sight of it. The smell of it. The feel of it. The taste. The sound…

Weeks after my return home, I couldn’t sleep without hearing it. I still have the nature sounds clock on my nightstand a half decade later.

And so today when someone asked, Where would you like to go? I immediately imagined those gorgeous waters. St. Lucia.

I don’t know who, if anyone will accompany me when I go. But I shall go for love.

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Favorite Things | #30in30 #WriteLikeCrazy

From time to time, friends mention various and sundry ailments or concerns, and inquire as to whether I might recommend a remedy. Occasionally, I can! Below, you’ll find a brief catalogue of the items I share most regularly.

Beginning Meditation
Most people naturally assume my Buddhist practice incorporates meditation. It does not. However, meditation, even a few seconds once in a while, can benefit anyone. One year I felt unreasonably harried and unfocused and thought learning more about meditation would help me slow down a bit. It did.

I particularly like Jack Kornfield’s easy going and clear delivery and guided practice sessions. Once every year or so I listen to his mini-lectures and sessions again, as a good reminder to slow down and be fully present.

Shallow or Irregular Breathing
If you are like me, you rarely breath as deeply as you should. And in fact, there have been times we’ve I’ve caught myself holding my breath for no discernible reason at all! Andrew Weill’s two CD set includes a great lecture on the benefits of proper breathing as well as guided practice sessions.

I first heard this years ago, and still incorporate some of these breathing techniques whenever I need to wake myself up or relax.

Monkey Mind
Sometimes I simply can’t turn my mind off at night. For someone who needs a great deal of sleep in order to maximize productivity, it’s no bueno. There are many strategies one can employ, but my favorite is p.m.yoga. This is a big deal because I’m not really a fan of yoga for exercise. It’s just not my go to, despite wanting to enjoy it.

Gaiam’s DVD features a 20 minute series of poses that wind down the mind and body. Any time I follow this DVD, I fall asleep right away, and sleep deeply throughout the night.

As an aside, just doing a few of the poses helps me as well, if for whatever reason I’m not able or willing to pull out the DVD.

As another aside, I’ve only ever done the morning series twice – both about 6 years ago. But recently, I’ve found myself naturally wanting to do sun salutations some mornings. Maybe I’ll look at that DVD again…

Overall Wellness
I was very interested in tai chi a few years ago and purchased this DVD. I prefer the a.m. tai chi series over a.m. yoga (as I prefer the p.m. yoga over the p.m. tai chi). That said, I did both morning and evening tai chi for several days in a row and noticed a dramatic improvement in my overall feeling of well-being. I wasn’t expecting it, but there it was.

The main benefit I noticed at the time was the feeling of space around my organs. It was as if the air could flow more freely throughout my body.

Napping
I believe in power naps. I’m not sure I always did, but a busy schedule doesn’t really lend itself to hour-long siestas. Can you really feel refreshed after a 20- or even a 10-minute rest? Yes. The Ultimate Nap CD is the answer. When I bought this in a store, the CD came with napping supplies! I don’t usually have the ability to whip out the eye mask, and the lavender is just too strong for me, but the music is the thing. If you have earphones, even better.

I’ve used this on short plane trips, secreted away in my car, in my office. Well, you get the drift. If you can carve out a few minutes, you can take a good nap with this CD.

~~

So these are few of my favorite things for recharging and refreshing. What are some of yours?

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Continuing Faith | #30in30 #WriteLikeCrazy

To accept is easy; to continue is difficult.
But Buddhahood lies in continuing faith.

Nichiren wrote The Difficulty of Sustaining Faith to one of his most trusted disciples, Shijo Kingo. Shijo was being pressured to give up his practice of Buddhism, and Nichiren reminded him that difficulties were predicted in the Lotus Sutra – that he must bear this firmly in mind and remain steadfast.

Although this letter is about maintaining faith in Buddhism, the encouragement is applicable to anyone. Victory lies in never giving up. It requires one to be relentless in her commitment to a task.

How many times do we start something – anything – with energy and verve, only to be to swayed when difficulty comes along? For instance, let’s say your goal is to run a marathon. You’ve found a training plan that makes sense for your level of fitness. You’ve chosen the perfect marathon, one that is bound to have great weather and a relatively flat course.

After a few weeks of training, you need new shoes, but your funds are low. You simply can’t run another mile in your current kicks, and you must put off training until you can get a new pair. Obstacle? Or maybe your training isn’t progressing as planned. You can’t seem to break 10 miles without hitting a wall. Obstacle. Or here it is, a couple of weeks away, and you sustain an injury that will force you to miss your race. Obstacle!

These obstacles must be signs, right? You think to yourself, Maybe marathons are for other people.

Maybe. But the obstacles don’t decide that. You do.

To accept is easy; to continue is difficult.
But Buddhahood lies in continuing faith.

As human beings, we can’t control our environment, our circumstances or the timing of things. The only thing we can control in a given moment is our ichinen – our single-minded determination. For various reasons we might not be able to run the marathon we intended. But we can still run a marathon.

Choosing to strive again another day, even to start all over if circumstances warrant – that’s continuing faith. It may seem more than merely difficult – it may seem Herculean. But the decision to keep moving toward your goal, undaunted by the inevitable setbacks; to keep believing in yourself even in dark times, that, that is enlightenment.

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Nuance and Gray Areas

I appreciate this piece from Linda on The Feminist Wire. Especially this section where she rejects the rape/not rape binary to make room for complexity:

Dear President Obama,

I appreciate your statement that rape is rape. I really do. Your intent, I am sure, is to reject the idea that there might be legitimate rapes and illegitimate rapes. But, alas, there are complexities to rape, just as there are complexities to life. There are (sometimes) gradations, ambiguities, complications, and varied amounts and forms of culpability. My boyfriend was not a monster. I know what monsters are, having unfortunately been trapped and caught by one when I was nine. That sort of thing changes your sense of humanity, the world, your future, your life. But at 16, I was not attracted to monsters. Alas, I was attracted to assholes. My boyfriend at the time was an asshole. He might have initiated sex with me when I was awake, after all. He could have tried for a two-way encounter, an embrace, the physical correlate to a conversation between equals, but that is not what he desired, apparently. He wanted to have sex with a jellyfish. I have never understood the attraction of this.

But I would not actually call it a rape, straight up.

While I personally would not categorize perpetrators as assholes vs. monsters, I think it’s important for survivors of sexual assault to decide if their experience merits one label (rape) or another (something else).  And as she goes on to explain, this decision does not then make space to call some rapes legitimate and others illegitimate. It does make space to investigate the behavior of all parties, to understand intent, culpability, consent, or lack thereof.

So I am not suggesting we reintroduce the word “legitimate” in order to be able to characterize such complex forms of sexual violations.  That word adds nothing useful to our comprehension of coercion, manipulation, or the many forms that violation can take. But in order to begin to bring forward the experiences of sexual violence as victims experience them, we will need to allow for variable, even uncertain and ambiguous, formulations, and judgments that may not rise to the level of courtroom adjudication of guilt. If we want to listen to survivors, we will need to  prepare ourselves to hear about the gray areas.

Read the rest here.

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It Counts (TW Sexual Violence) | #30in30 #WriteLikeCrazy

So this happened:

And aside from the fact the man sounds ignorant – he wants to enact laws about pregnancy when he doesn’t know how it works – he qualifies rape. If there is legitimate rape, it must follow there’s such a thing as illegitimate rape. And one wonders what that might be, exactly?

Akin has issued an apology video, trying to make amends for his word choice, yet one wonders if he still believes that some rapes are real, while others, are somehow fake? If only he could express the concept more artfully?

Jezebel documents and simultaneously mocks this dangerous discourse here. Tanehisi unpacks the power and privilege underlying the claims here.

Rape is rape. Full stop.

It becomes a stranger invading. It becomes a thief stealing. That is not intimacy any more. You have changed it. It is something else. It is something brutal and violent and mean…

This is from a much longer work-in-progress. In it, I recount a dysfunctional relationship, echoes of which still reverberate in my consciousness decades later. It’s appalling, really. The idea that such an assault is subject to scrutiny – not on whether it happened, but on whether it was legitimate. Whether it matters. Whether it counts.

It counts.

It counts even though it was not with a stranger. It counts even though the perpetrator was my boyfriend, whom I loved at the time. It counts even though I only show up in the “underreported” statistics because I never reported him. I was too busy trying to convince myself that my feelings were legitimate. That I mattered. That I counted.

And I do.

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Stream of Consciousness Monday | #30in30 #WriteLikeCrazy

  • I’m writing for 5 minutes.
  • I’m fixing it up for 5 minutes.
  • I’m posting it.
  • I have no topic in mind yet. I’m just going to start. Right. Now!

This weekend, someone asked me if I were a dancer. I responded yes, but I realized after the fact that I’d misheard the question. I figured it out after I asked her how she knew. “Your physique, and the way you carry yourself. You just look like a dancer.”

I get told that on occasion, but usually during a danceless stretch of time. This is one of those times. I haven’t danced in weeks. I take it as a nudge from the universe I should dance more. So noted.

The first time I was called a dancer, I was stretched out on my living room floor. Friends were sitting around, talking about nothing much, when Iyabo asked, “Are you a dancer?” I found the question strange given my reclined state. “No, but I dance all the time in my head.”

It was true. Over the years I’ve spent what must be hours performing ballet, modern, jazz, or some combination thereof on the stage in my head. I always knew it was “too late” to start dancing professionally, but it didn’t stop me from dancing full-out in my imagination. I vowed to return as a dancer the next lifetime.

“You should dance. It’s written all over you,” she said.

Shortly after that I discovered casino salsa, quite by happenstance. I am not a modern dancer, a jazz dancer, or a ballerina, but I am a casinera!

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Heading Home: A Freewrite. | #30in30 #WriteLikeCrazy

Between Dallas and Tampa.

I’m a rebel. I took out my approved electronics before the flight attendant told me I could. Mainly because we had been cruising above 10,000 feet for several minutes and she was past due with the announcement.

As timing would have it, as soon as I began typing, she gave me the official okay.

A baby’s laugh is the best sound known to humankind. Seriously. I challenge you to tell me a better sound. I’m not sure there’s a runner-up either.

Speaking of babies, I love to see men holding them. I’ve witnessed that often in recent months. Sometimes man and baby are with a partner, and sometimes not. I spy them cradling, caressing, tickling, kissing, feeding the little one. I credit feminism (smile).

This weekend has been a long slog in over-air conditioned spaces. Seriously. No, I’m not anemic, but when I’m too cold my fingers turn purple. And it wasn’t just me! Numerous people were hidden beneath fall layers in summertime, shivering all along. Many of us reside in warm climates. We like a bit of cool to temper the heat, but there’s no need to engage in refrigerator mimicry!

My friend told me she juices. No big deal until the bit about not using a centrifugal juicer. She presses her juices and this is, apparently, a superior way of going about it. It is also an expensive way of going about it. An investment, she explained.

I would like a glass of fresh juice right now (and not just because I’m writing about it). Unfortunately, there’s the small, yet inescapable matter of being mid-flight with no juice bar! Shady. I’m all about utopian thinking. I say we imagine airlines with juice bars and see what happens. If Whole Foods begins partnering with airlines, I expect a generous cut of the profits.

When I get home, it’ll be too late to visit a juice bar, and I do not own a juicer, centrifugal, presser, or otherwise. Tragic.

The best thing about being on the west coast was jet lag. It was so easy to wake up at 5 a.m.! My hotel had a comfortable bed, and I enjoyed talking with my roommate about Buddhism and fitness and safe spaces and life, but I am so excited to be on a plane headed home. Tomorrow I shall pick up my cat. I’m sure she will catch me up on all that went on while I was away.

5:49 PT. Midair.

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Treasures of the Heart | #30in30 #WriteLikeCrazy.

The treasures of the heart can never be destroyed.

Daisaku Ikeda wrote a message to fellow Buddhists and other Tohoku residents whose surroundings were decimated in the 2011 earthquake and tsunami. His message included these words, which were meant as both solace and inspiration.

I’m attending a Buddhist lecture this weekend, and the members of Tohoku were used as an example of maintaining faith – the spirit to remain hopeful and cheerful – in the most dire circumstances. Ikeda wrote to encourage them to remain undefeated, even in face of devastation. Now, over a year later, many people have temporary housing and still don’t have jobs, yet they maintain high spirits.

Ikeda’s encouragement was based on this well-known passage from the gosho:

More valuable than treasures in a storehouse are the treasures of the body, and the treasures of the heart are the most valuable of all. From the time you read this letter on, strive to accumulate the treasures of the heart!

Nichiren, Three Kinds of Treasure

As noted above, there are three kinds of treasure elucidated in Buddhism:

“Treasures of the storehouse” are material treasures. They include such things as property and financial wealth.

“Treasures of the body” are attributes that endow our person, such as skills, knowledge, educational background, etc. They also include perceptions that are attached to or associated with us, such as social standing, reputation, position and fame.

We can define “treasures of the heart” as the mental and spiritual capacities to achieve mastery over oneself and to have genuine concern for others. This equates to such attributes as a solid sense of fulfillment, a brightness of spirit, a warm and attractive personality, self-control, conviction, a sense of justice, courage, empathy and compassion.

In the course of daily life, tragedies and mishaps occur, each with the power to demolish material treasures. With financial crises, natural disasters, and the like, houses, cars, clothes can disappear, almost without warning.

When it comes to the treasures of the body, these are more stable, but still susceptible to outside influences. A careless word or action by another can ruin our reputation. An accident, illness, or other obstacles can diminish the functioning of our bodies.

But the most durable, and according to Nichiren, the most crucial treasures, are those of the heart.  In other words, your determination to continue in adversity. Your capacity to care for others in need. Your ability to nurture hope even when situations seem hopeless.

Each of us has the capacity to develop a strong state of life – one that can withstand difficulties with composure and good cheer. I pray that we all strive to amass treasures of the heart. They are the most valuable and indestructible of all.