Four fragments

I'm just throwing these down here because I want to remember them ... I haven't spent any time cleaning up the writing.

1. Fear and fearlessness
From some recent reading:

In many spiritual paths we are encouraged to take consolation from a story about the world. While she does not reject the helpfulness of mythologies and great narratives "that attempt to give meaning to the deep experiences we have," she believes that if you "take up a radical process of inquiry as a way of life, you may give up some kinds of consolation and comfort, but you're going to have the deep and abiding consolation of not needing stories for things to be OK."

It has more to do with experience than belief ... these (Buddhist) traditions have very few belief structures. They're mostly practices: sit, pay attention ... count your breath ... and so on. These are much more like riding a bike than they are like believing in something. They are actual practices you do with your awareness and with your mind. They allow deeper experiences to come to the fore. It's all about experience, not rationality, not dogma, and certainly not about adhering to any sort of narrative.

This is how it feels to me. The more I practice, and the more I let go of the story and all its associated drama, the better I feel. My mind is learning how to relax and live my life, instead of constantly analyzing and labeling and trying to make my experiences conform to some official pronouncement about how the world is, or what everything means.

I keep thinking about this young woman I heard about in one of the bike forums I read, a bicyclist who decided to take a detour on her way home late one night last week to ride down a favorite wooded trail and walk out onto the frozen Mississippi River in the moonlight. Since she was alone nobody really knows exactly what happened, but at some point during her walk the ice broke and she fell through and died. What did her mind do when she heard the crack? When she realized?

I think at a moment like that you're not going to be "thinking" about what you "believe."

Last year or so Mr. A and I were having omelettes at our favorite breakfast place when a woman at another table collapsed and had to be taken to the hospital on a gurney. Everybody in the restaurant was watching, including us of course, and as she was rolled past our table I wanted to run alongside the gurney and hold her hand and reassure her in some way. After she was loaded into the ambulance I said to Mr. A, "I would hate to be carried out like that, with all these people looking at me."

He said, "If anything like that ever happens, just close your eyes and they'll all go away."

At the time that suggestion, which I interpreted as recommending denial, seemed like the epitome of the "wrong" way to deal with suffering – the "right" way being of course to Look at everything – and not only to look at it but to really look at it, intensely, to Really See ... or at least to be willing to see. We often have this argument about other things as well – me believing that all the gory details are crucial to his ability to understand some disturbing story I want to tell him, when all he really wants to know (reluctantly) is the basics of what happened. I feel driven to look at everything, even horrible things that I can never get out of my head forever afterward.

Why do I feel like it's better to look than to not look? I think for me, it comes down to what makes me feel safe. I want to know what I'm dealing with! If I know something scary is out there, I want to see exactly what it is so I can make a good decision about how to act. Looking away makes me feel more afraid, because how can I take care of myself if I don't even know what's really going on?

And even if there isn't anything I can do "about" whatever it is that is happening, I can still attend to and own my experience of it. That's all anyone can really own in life, after all.

I want to be able to keep my eyes open when the ice cracks.

2. First bath

Today I went to spend the afternoon with my friends whose baby was born at the end of the summer, so very much earlier than they had been expecting him. He's four months old now, eleven pounds, and, according to the relevant authorities, finally ready for his very first "real" bath, a bath not in mom's arms in the big tub, but all by himself in his very own little baby tub. And one reason they invited me over, as it turns out, was because they wanted me to help them do it.

I'm still somehow always surprised at how many new, older parents – people older than me, in other words – ask me for advice about how to take care of their babies. I like being asked. Not that I'm any kind of expert. But I'm comfortable doing those tasks, and it seems like seeing me feeling comfortable doing them helps the parents feel more comfortable, too.

3. Interspecies friendship

Last night I was snuggling with Tater and we were looking into each other's eyes and I found myself really enjoying the fact that trying to "know" each other is not part of our relationship. I don't know what he thinks or how he experiences the world as a dog, just like he doesn't know my life away from home – what it's like to use a computer or ride a bike or shop in a store. It made me realize how much I project myself onto other people, and appreciate how in my relationship with him, I don't do that. His mind is mostly a mystery to me. And yet I feel more sure of him than of almost any other relationship in my life.

4. Crash

I crashed my bike in the rain the other night and ripped up both hands and my left knee. I wasn't going fast, I just turned too sharply on a slick spot and laid it down in slow-motion ... no cars involved, not even any nearby, except the parked station wagon in which a woman sat watching me with a blank look on her face as I picked myself up, got back on and rode away. I didn't notice how messed up my hands were until I got where I was going – ironically, a community meeting about improving bicycling safety in our town.

The only reason I'm mentioning it is because it led me to rediscover an amazingly cool product that I want to recommend – Band-Aid advanced healing bandages, the large ones. Both of my hands have some pretty gnarly chunks gouged out of them, right in that line where the meaty part at the bottom of your thumb folds into the middle of your hand. It's probably one of the hardest parts of the body to stick anything to, but these things – wow! They're made of this cool waterproof rubbery-feeling stuff that stretches with your skin – very comfortable. And the adhesive is amazing. I've had the same bandages on for two days of dish-washing, rainy dog walking, muck shoveling (we've had a bit of mud here of late), baby bathing, pulling apart of roasted chickens to make stock, and all kinds of other messy, greasy and disruptive activities, and they're still securely in place. But when it's time to take the bandage off, it doesn't rip your skin and hair the way regular band-aids do. You just lift up an edge and give it a little pull, and it somehow just magically stretches away from your skin and peels off like nothing. Hooray!