This year has been a real exercise in patience and resolution for me.  Not only has the job situation been tenuous at times, it is has also repeatedly morphed, there has been stress between colleagues and myself on a level I haven't experienced before.

Nonetheless, I have a place to live and go home to at the end of the day.  I have a support network and friends.  Not so for so many others on this planet.  This is taken from an email I wrote yesterday to a friend:

This morning I was walking to work from a dental appointment and I passed
this woman, a young woman, with her grocery cart full of belongings on the
street.  There was fear, patience, pain and loneliness and most of all
> >> "how did this happen to me?" in her eyes, that were brimming.
You could tell from her demeanor and her cleanliness and the look in
her eyes that she was newly homeless.

I went to the bakery down the street and excused myself to a man who was
on a cell phone in a vestibule of the bakery and walked in. I bought an
apple turnover and came back to her and it turned out that the man on the
cell phone was doing business (or asking favors) on his cell phone and was
with her. He said "good morning" and I apologized for only buying one
turnover and gave it to her.  She blessed me.

It's all relative sometimes, isn't it?

After three hours of practice -- in a cemetary on the grounds, on a cemetary monument, moving to my house after several technological failures, lying on my back in pain, finishing up in a chair I realize:

There is no such thing as bad practice or good practice.  It's all practice when you decide to do it.  And as such, with the right motivation, it's all good.

Now, when I get to the point of realization that there is no duality between practice and non-practice I will REALLY think I'm a practitioner!

Until then, I will keep on keeping on.

Since my sessions retreat I've been listening to a series of meditations that help me deconstruct my conceptualization of myself as solid, singular or permanent.  One of them leads to an examination of grasping.

At the same time, I recently experienced a pre- root canal gum abcess which caused shooting pain and then dull pain in my upper left gum.  In refraining from fabrication -- stories, concepts, attachments -- to this pain, I noticed that it was stil there, but less present and dominating in my mind.  I played with this a bit, focus and grasp -- more pain -- experience it as phenomena which is empty -- it sometimes even disappeared.

While I have always worked with pain in meditation, breathing, focus, etc., this new way of handling it -- examining it's nature as empty -- was quite powerful.  Something that would really benefit other people to know.

Hmmmm.

After a hiatus on the hospice volunteer work, I returned in October.  Pretty soon I was asked if I would take a client who smoked occasionally.  With lung cancer.  Since they said few other volunteers would go to a smoking client I accepted the position knowing I was probably the only volunteer who would do it.  As an ex-smoker of about six years I no longer have that immediate revulsion towards smokers, although I still prefer not to have it in my life on a regular basis.

At any event, this represented a dharmic opportunity for me -- to avoid judging a person who had given herself lung cancer through addiction and was still using.  I went for it.

I met Aunt Dee Dee on Sunday.  What a pistol!  Skinny and sharp, she started cracking jokes with innuendos with me and we hit it off right away.  I fell in love with her interest in life and her family and left looking forward to the opportunity to be a small part of her care team with great pleasure.  In such a brief period of time my heart opened to her.  A blessing.

The next day in the afternoon I got a call from her nephew.  Dee Dee had died around 10:30 AM -- just slipped away in her sleep.  I had met her and her family once, but they invited me to the service.  And I decided to go.  Dee Dee had stolen my heart.

This briefest of meetings - like a dream or an illusion.  Deep with suffering and love.  My training in the dharma allowed me to open to it and accept all of it, without even able to grasp at it as it slipped away. 

And that seemed pretty easy, just a step to the next level of wakefulness.

In September I made another big step in my spiritual path and went to sessions in Boulder.  Sessions consists of a set of specific instructions given throughout a period of intense practice focussing on nature of mind.  Although I would refrain from explaining it to avoid putting concepts into other's heads, I will admit that I came back with some realization of nature of mind and phenomenal reality. 

Since then I've been trying to practice my post-sessions and having a bit of an obstacle with regard to the amount of time I need to devote to it, and my grasping to the sessions realizations.  Of couse, well, duh, not supposed to grasp at the experience.

Considering the amount of chaos I walked back into at UC Berkeley, however, I don't really blame my mind for searching backwards towards that island of stability and discovery. 

Yet there is understanding that the grasping and comparison of past and present conditions particularly for me causes samsaric unhappiness.  It's breeds unhappiness to dwell on only the "happy"  or "pleasant" or "meaningful" experiences.  But I grasp, oh how do I grasp . . . .

This week posed one of those all-too-familiar instances where my nature ran smack into my sister's forlorn hopes to turn back the tide of Lois on the verge of yet another change.

These moments are never easy -- first was vegetarianism at her house (a simple request for a few meals that I could eat non-meat food products) -- and immediate resistance.  I was silently crushed and mystified, since vegetarianism is not one of biggest, newest, most threatening things I could have done.  There was far more radical stuff going on in fact -- polyamory and coming out of the closet.  But she chose at that time to make a stand about meat products.  

But we got through that, and, in fact she now explores non-meat meals with some curiousity.  We got through the coming out and polyamory phase by only later hearing that this was "my choice" and something I could cognitively do something about. -- as in -- go back into the closet and lead a nice heterosexual life.  I went home from the visit where that occurred hurt and distant but I did not non-consensually subscribe her to a lifetime of PFLAG magazines.  Although the thought did cross my mind.  Frequently.  But I let it go.

Zoom to this week.  We are talking about celebrations and I mention that I might give up liquor, which is basically a long-term resolve to fulfill that vow I took in November 2008.  I no longer abuse liquor, far from it, but I'd just like to get it to not at all.  Well, again incredible resistance.  I'm somewhat used to this dance by now, but it doesn't mean I enjoy it.  I would like to be awake to parry but usually I just sort of roll over and then wait, in a passive-aggressive haze to fantasize about retribution.  And don't do anything.

However, unlike in the past, I do NOT let it pass.  It's part of my religious commitment and it's my life and I am, for once and on this particular issue, at the end of letting it pass.  And it is at this point that I realize that I am in so deep into my spiritual path that it is the primary thing in my life.  It is my home, my refuge, my commitment.  It is my life more than my life. 

And I am surprised by the ferocity that arises in me in response to this attempt to modulate or suppress this commitment.  I am far from passive in my devotion to the Three Jewels.

And while I would certainly have liked to had a more skillful response to my sister's fear of this change, the devotion that was behind this response is a realization that I am happy to have.

A couple of nights ago I perused the obituaries in a couple of online newspapers for the Bay Area.  I don't know what made me do it, other than the fact that since turning 50 I've been more aware of life's passing.

I found a large obituary about someone in the Bay Area that I have known practically since moving here in 1996.  He died at 47 of multiple mylenoma.  

We were not close friends, but members of some of the same communities that inhabit the Bay Area.  Would run into each other from time to time.  He was always polite and friendly.

What struck me, other than the loss to these communities, was the briefness of his life.  Someone whom I always thought of as robust and healthy died at an age younger than me and many of my peers.

In the sometimes malaise I find myself in as a result of uncertainty at UC, it seems pretty important to remember to wake up and prepare for whatever could happen in my life.  Not to take life for granted or indulge too much in thinking about the future. 

Because it may not be there.

Be well, happy and safe.

Had a dream this weekend, either last night or Friday night.    There wasn't much visual scenery, much action, or well, much of anything.  I was sitting on a bench, trying to figure out what to do with my life in times like these and what to do in response to rapidly changing circumstances at UC Berkeley and in the State of California.

In the dream I was sitting next to a roundish man, not flabby, but with a round chest.  I don't remember this person having appeared before in any dreams, and he didn't look like anyone I know in waking life.  So I think he might have been sent to me.

He had only one message with regard to what I was supposed to do now and in the future.  And that was "remain open."  This is pretty much the bullet point summary of what I was told by in a dharma conversation about fear.  I've been pretty shut down this year because of fear and longing to be somewhere else.  And I've been recently exploring new options for living.  But no decisions forthcoming at the moment, and I've even begun to get tired of thinking about it. 

So this seems like a real answer for right now, and I'm going to follow it.

Let go of outcome.  Wow, so easy to say and so hard to do.  The last seven months have been a roller coaster at UC Berkeley, reflective of the state economy.   The new job is what it is and could morph at any minute based on layoffs which are yet to come.  Or the new job could disappear entirely.

How my mind dances trying to figure out what is inevitably out of my control.  And yet underneath some important spiritual steps have taken place.  Not accomplishments, yet steps.

In February I became a sangha member of Dzigar Kongtrul Rinpoche's Mangala Shri Bhuti sangha.  I wept with relief at being accepted at my spiritual home, and had not realized how much I had been holding my breath until I landed from my long flight between Rigpa and Mangala Shri Bhuti. 

In June I went to Rangjung Yeshe Gomde and took my formal bodhisattva vow.  Personally this was even more important than my joining the sangha. 

After six years of intense investigation into death and impermanence, I took a break from hospice work.   But investigation into the path of a contemplative has begun in a more serious way,  There would be many steps on that path, but the intention and understanding behind it is developing.   The outcome is still unknown. 

And the expression of right livelihood still remains.  Maybe that won't get settled until I retire?  Possible.  There is a part of me that is really unlikely to embrace a life where my sustenance is entirely dependent on the dharma.  Unfortunately that's just a part of my hard wiring and always has been.  I'm not sure that that is a problem in the West, since there are no mechanisms here for the completely support of full-time contemplatives.

Anyway, this year rolls on and like much of the rest of the world, life for me in 2009 has been unsettling.  I hope for everyone's sake that the recession ends soon, although I am not at all certain that it will happen.  That's an attachment to an outcome I can embrace.