Surviving Tough Times

A Collage of Voices

As those of you who read my last post know, over the next couple months, I’m going to be intermittently taking some time off from writing and holding zoom meetings. I took the whole last week off and it was great. I got a lot of errands and paperwork and housework done along with some quiet sitting, walking, working out, visiting with friends and watching a few favorite shows on Apple TV.

In addition, I’ve been reading Helen Tworkov’s memoir, Lotus Girl. Helen was the founding editor of Tricycle, the Buddhist magazine, and she’s had quite a life. And I’ve been revisiting a favorite book by the Tibetan Buddhist teacher Anam Thubten called The Magic of Awareness.

I’ve also discovered that Damien Echols writes a Substack, and I like what I’ve read there. For those who don’t know, Damien was one of three teenagers known as the West Memphis Three who were falsely convicted of a horrific triple murder back in 1994. Damien spent 18 years on death row before finally being released in 2011, and during those years he did a lot of meditation and studied Buddhism and magick (the alchemy kind of magick).

So, I thought I’d share a poem by Charles Bukowski, a few words from both Damien Echols and Anam Thubten, and finally some of my own writing. So here goes…

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Bukowski

As some of you know, I have a side of my persona that I call my Charles Bukowski side. It was strong during my wild drunken days in the lesbian bars back in the early 1970s, but has been much more in the background and subdued since I sobered up.

I first discovered Bukowski’s writing when I was in the MA Creative Writing program at SFSU. I wrote a novel (never published) based on my bar days, and one of my professors compared it to Bukowski and recommended that I read Bukowski’s memoir, Ham on Rye, which I did. I loved it, and I became a huge Bukowski fan.

Bukowski had an abusive father who beat him regularly. He had a chronic skin condition that during adolescence covered his face with boils and required hospital treatments. He drank heavily, worked as a mailman, wrote many books of poetry, that great memoir (Ham on Rye) and a few novels. He was a tough guy but a sensitive one, and he loved animals. I find myself moved to share one of his poems that I think maybe has something to say to us in these often troubling times.

The History Of One Tough Motherfucker

he came to the door one night wet thin beaten and
terrorized
a white cross-eyed tailless cat
I took him in and fed him and he stayed
grew to trust me until a friend drove up the driveway
and ran him over
I took what was left to a vet who said,”not much
chance…give him these pills…his backbone
is crushed, but is was crushed before and somehow
mended, if he lives he’ll never walk, look at
these x-rays, he’s been shot, look here, the pellets
are still there…also, he once had a tail, somebody
cut it off…”
I took the cat back, it was a hot summer, one of the
hottest in decades, I put him on the bathroom
floor, gave him water and pills, he wouldn’t eat, he
wouldn’t touch the water, I dipped my finger into it
and wet his mouth and I talked to him, I didn’t go any-
where, I put in a lot of bathroom time and talked to
him and gently touched him and he looked back at
me with those pale blue crossed eyes and as the days went
by he made his first move
dragging himself forward by his front legs
(the rear ones wouldn’t work)
he made it to the litter box
crawled over and in,
it was like the trumpet of possible victory
blowing in that bathroom and into the city, I
related to that cat-I’d had it bad, not that
bad but bad enough
one morning he got up, stood up, fell back down and
just looked at me.
“you can make it,” I said to him.
he kept trying, getting up falling down, finally
he walked a few steps, he was like a drunk, the
rear legs just didn’t want to do it and he fell again, rested,
then got up.
you know the rest: now he’s better than ever, cross-eyed
almost toothless, but the grace is back, and that look in
his eyes never left…
and now sometimes I’m interviewed, they want to hear about
life and literature and I get drunk and hold up my cross-eyed,
shot, runover de-tailed cat and I say,”look, look
at this!”
but they don’t understand, they say something like,”you
say you’ve been influenced by Celine?”
“no,” I hold the cat up,”by what happens, by
things like this, by this, by this!”
I shake the cat, hold him up in
the smoky and drunken light, he’s relaxed he knows…
it’s then that the interviews end
although I am proud sometimes when I see the pictures
later and there I am and there is the cat and we are photo-
graphed together.
he too knows it’s bullshit but that somehow it all helps.

— Charles Bukowski

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Excerpts from two articles by Damien Echols:

So many people think the road to realization is paved with more and more understanding, more and more mental sophistication, more and more intricate philosophies, systems, correspondences, and models. They think that if they can just take the mystery of existence and turn it into a perfectly coherent explanation, then they will finally be safe from confusion or uncertainty…

The mind is gluttonous for concepts because concepts are how the mind tries to own reality. The mind tries to replace direct experience with a story about experience. And then it confuses the story for the thing. This is how human beings end up fully convinced that their thoughts about life are more real than life itself…

We have come to believe that we can think our way to the present moment. But you cannot think your way into what is already here. The present moment is not something you reach through the mind. It is what remains when the mind ceases. The ego thinks presence is something it can conceptualize, like a philosophy or a state to be classified. But presence is not a state. Presence is not a category. Presence is not a mode of thinking. Presence is the emptiness that thinking floats in. The mind wants to locate presence in a model because the mind wants to turn presence into an object. If presence becomes an object, then the mind can claim it, own it, and manipulate it. But presence is not an object. Presence is the field in which all objects appear…

When I was on death row, I couldn’t afford to live in theory. Theory wasn’t going to keep me alive. What kept me alive was practice: sitting zazen three times a day, doing rituals at the same time every night, disciplining my body and mind into stillness. That wasn’t intellectual knowledge. That was survival.

And the same is true outside of prison. If all you do is read about enlightenment, you’ll never taste it. If all you do is study alchemy, you’ll never be transformed by it. The only path forward is practice.

— Damien Echols, from two articles, The Mind Is the Prison and Doing, Not Speaking

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A few words from Anam Thubten taken from different places:

Love is the ability to see every circumstance and every being as perfect just as they are.. .It is the total acceptance of all things… In every moment we are absolutely perfect... It’s okay to fail and to fail continuously, time after time... The heart of all spirituality is to love this life, to enjoy this life... Everything we want to transcend doesn’t really exist in the ultimate sense. It exists as our own mind’s display... Awareness is like a fire because it burns down all illusions right there on the spot... When we start inquiring into what is holding us back from realizing the truth, we come to the realization that there is really nothing there. There are no obstacles. Nothing is holding us back from awakening.

— Anam Thubten

Anam Thubten was born in Tibet and is currently the head teacher at the Dharmata Foundation, based in the California Bay Area. He gives talks and holds retreats all over the United States and the world. I’ve been on a few retreats with him and he’s great. He is the author of a number of books, my favorites being The Magic of Awareness and No Self, No Problem, both of which I very highly recommend.

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And finally, here’s something from me, first from a website outpouring and then from my last book, Death: The End of Self-Improvement. They both contain a prayer:

From an outpouring on my website:

This is my prayer: May we forgive ourselves and each other when we fall short, and may we all have the courage, faith and resolve to get up again and keep going, to once again ask the deeper questions and dare to touch that vulnerable place inside, to open the heart. May we have the courage to feel the human pain we all share. At the very heart of that pain is a jewel beyond all price. It is the bottomless presence at the heart of everything and the boundless awareness beholding it all, and it is the love that is trying to come forth even in the most broken and unskillful ways. Once we have discovered this jewel, this unconditional love, our work is in opening to it again and again, cultivating a growing faith in it and a faithfulness to it, and forgiving ourselves and others when we fail.

—from My Story of Rage and Healing, an outpouring on my website

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The final chapter from my book Death: The End of Self-Improvement:

The Freedom of the Elbow Not Bending Backwards

I found that things became a lot easier when I no longer expected to win. You abandon your masterpiece and you sink into the real Masterpiece. —Leonard Cohen

As I age, life has gotten simpler and quieter. I’m content with less. I appreciate ever more deeply the beauty of nothing, the beauty of not doing, the beauty of silence, stillness and emptiness. I get great joy from simple, ordinary, everyday things—the view out my window, the sounds of rain, the glowing light on a tree at sunrise or sunset, the pleasure of being with a friend, the enjoyment of a cup of coffee, sitting quietly doing nothing. I am more able to relax with the natural movements of life that bring an ever-changing mix of war and peace, sadness and joy, birth and death. This is the freedom of realizing that “nothing really matters,” as my mother so joyously expressed it, and the wonder of “everything falling away” that my first lover found so irresistibly interesting.

Again and again, I find liberation in the very places I thought it was not—in brokenness and imperfection, disappointment and disillusionment, limitation and death, failure and darkness, unresolvability and uncertainty, groundlessness and everything falling apart. This is “the freedom of the elbow not bending backwards,” as they say in Zen. Of course, the elbow can’t bend backwards without breaking. So this is not the freedom to do what I want, but the freedom to be as I am, and the freedom for everything to be as it is, which is no way and every way, and never the same way twice. This is the freedom of nothing to grasp.

There’s no one-size-fits-all path through life. Every one of us is unique. Each of us is a jewel with a particular gift to give that no one else can offer. Slowly, I am learning to be who I am in every sense—to be Joan and not somebody else, and to be no-thing at all—the open space of awareness, the undivided presence, the light, the germinal darkness, the unconditional love that is our essential nature. In one sense, I can’t possibly fail at either but, in another sense, I fail again and again. And yet, I feel deeply that there are no mistakes. We live in extraordinary times, facing the probable collapse of the civilization we’ve so innocently built on sand, with all the chaos and suffering this will likely entail, ending perhaps in the extinction of life on Earth. But whatever happens, I feel certain that there is something at the Heart of everything that cannot be destroyed; and that the deepest truth is love, not hate.

For me, the never-ending, always Now, pathless path of awakening boils down to simply being awake, being present, being truly alive—seeing the beauty in everything, living in gratitude and devotion, enjoying the dance of life, being just this moment, not knowing what anything is, clinging to nothing, recognizing—not in the head, but in the heart—that everything belongs, that nothing persists, that every moment is fresh and new.

The spiritual journey is about waking up again and again (Now) from the hypnotic trance of thought and belief. When upsets come, when there is a storm of me-centered emotion-thought, it is the willingness to allow the heart to break open—to see and feel those powerful urges to control, to defend, to win, to be right, to make myself and the world and everyone in it behave in the ways I think we all should—and to allow those hardened walls to melt and dissolve. This is both incredibly challenging and incredibly easy. The challenging part is getting to the place where there is the willingness to let go. Sometimes that takes a while. In the meantime, it is the willingness to simply be that tight, contracted energy, to feel the pain of it. The letting go is effortless and always such a huge relief once it happens. As Leonard says, you abandon your masterpiece, and you sink into the real Masterpiece, which is actually where you’ve always been and all there is.

May we all cherish the gift of life and, when the time comes, welcome the gift of death. If we’re lucky enough to reach old age, may we enjoy the adventure of falling apart and losing everything. May we meet this Kali Yuga, this planetary time of darkness and collapse, with an open heart, with tenderness, with love for all beings, with joy and not despair. May we discover the Holy Reality everywhere, in every breath, in every moment, even in the pain and the darkness. May we find the wisdom in no escape. That is my prayer for all of us, the One appearing as many in this dance of birth and death, coming and going, arriving and departing, always Here-Now.

— from Death: The End of Self-Improvement

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Love to all…