Don't Think About Tiger

“Don’t focus on finding a man,” old self-help books used to advise husband-hunting women. “Instead, get involved in something: take an evening course, join a bird watchers group, volunteer. And when you least expect it, the love of your life will appear.”

Lately I’ve been coming across similar advice, albeit on topics other than finding a man.

Like everyone I know who has tried to meditate, I often feel frustrated at my seeming failure to get anywhere. What is the point, I wonder, of sitting day after day with aching hips and knees while my mind compiles grocery lists and resurrects old forgotten gripes? When will I finally see results, find peace of mind, achieve even a dumbed-down version of enlightenment?

 Here is Thomas Merton on how to approach meditation (which he refers to as contemplation): “[A] law of the contemplative life is that if you enter it with the set purpose of seeking contemplation, or worse still, happiness, you will find neither. For neither can be found unless it is first in some sense renounced.” (Thomas Merton, The Inner Experience, p. 2)

As with finding a mate, it looks like the only way to reach a meditative or contemplative state is not to go at it head-on, with focus and singleness of purpose--not, in other words, in the way that we were taught at school. Rather the trick seems to be in a sideways approach, not looking the thing directly in the eye but waiting quietly for it to come to you, sort of how you might entice a wild animal.

Speaking of wild animals, I found an astounding example of this “pursuit by indirection” in a Nature documentary about the rare, elusive, and endangered Siberian tiger.

Sooyong Park, a Korean photographer, lived five years in the far eastern forests of Russia filming the tigers. He spent as long as seven months at a time in complete solitude, hunkered in a four-foot hole he had dug in the ground and roofed with planks, or up on a tree blind. He subsisted on rice, nuts and salt, in -30F temperatures, as he waited endlessly for the tigers to appear.

At one point, having gone eighty days without even a glimpse of a tiger, he became entranced with the beauty of the falling snow and started filming that instead. And that is when not one but three tigers—a mother and her cubs--appeared.

Towards the end of the video, a biologist who is also hoping to film the tigers asks Sooyong Park for advice.  Here is Park’s response:

“Don’t think about tiger!

 Only hear,

 see,

feel the Nature.

And then maybe tiger come….”

We each long for our own tiger. But perhaps, instead of crashing through the forest after it in the time-honored American way, we could try waiting patiently, focusing on our daily tasks, and paying attention to what is before us.

And then maybe tiger come.

(Park’s five years in the forest, which left him so weak and wasted that he could barely walk, yielded unprecedented footage of Siberian tigers in the wild. You can see it here.)

There Be Dragons, Continued: It's Not the Weather

"Wait until spring to decide!  You'll feel differently about everything then.  It's been a terrible winter..."

This is what people have been saying when they hear that my spouse and I are planning to move to a retirement community.  And the weather probably does have something to do with precipitating this  decision, but only a very little something.

I was already thinking about it a year ago, when I wrote a post in which I wondered how much longer I would be able to keep up my fantasy of the self-sufficient life.  I thought about it last fall, when I was incapacitated for weeks with shingles, and again in December, when my husband and I both came down with epic colds.  And I first thought about it two years ago, on the January night when  my husband developed severe chest pains.  It wasn't a heart attack--he's fine--but we didn't know that as we waited an hour for the ambulance to reach us, and then raced forty-five-minutes to the hospital.

The fact is, we're isolated on our little hill, and not just from services and stores (I once drove forty-five minutes to buy a spool of brown thread).  When you don't have a job or a child or a church to jump-start your social life, it takes more energy than I have to manufacture one from scratch. The last nine years have offered me a solitude that Thomas Merton would have envied.  But despite my eremitic tendencies, I am no Thomas Merton.

Of course the prospect of disposing of tables and chairs and file cabinets and my beloved old canning jars so that we and the dogs can fit into a two-bedroom cottage makes me groan, but waiting another five years wouldn't make the task more palatable.  And it would be downright awful to have to do it under pressure of illness.  Since it's clear that we cannot remain on our hilltop forever, it makes sense to do it while it's easier than it will ever be.

As for where we'll end up, we'd like it to be in Vermont.  We're far too fond of its fields and woods and calmly grazing cows;  its billboard-free, mostly empty roads;  its herbalists and bee-keepers and philosopher-farmers; its unapologetic granola attitude.

We'd hate to leave all that behind--not to mention the good friends we've made.  And we'd miss the winters.

(To be continued.)

My Kindle And Other Miracles

Thanks to all of you who sent good wishes both here and by e-mail.  It worked:   my survival now appears inevitable.

Two days ago I left the house on non-medical business (lunch with a friend) for the first time in a month, and was amazed to see that, while I was suffering my attack of shingles, fall had arrived in Vermont--the time of year when the drive to the post office is so beautiful it hurts.

Between the pain and the pain meds, my memories of the last few weeks are hazy, but I do know I could not have survived without my Kindle.  In the days before the diagnosis, when the pain at night would keep me pacing, trying to hold out for another hour before waking up my spouse to take me to the ER, I slogged through a big chunk of the Journals of Thomas Merton.   I was unable to follow a plot or a line of argument, but Merton's oscillations from self-doubt to elation fit the rhythms of my mind as it was brought to focus, over and over, on the physical pain.

After Merton, when my brain started to clear a bit, there was a Trollope novel.  I don't know what I'm going to do when I run out of Trollope novels--I'm almost through his entire oeuvre.  Perhaps I should start saving them for emergencies.  Finally I read a hugely entertaining biography of the six Mitford sisters (Love in a Cold Climate, by Nancy Mitford, is one of my favorite novels).  Compared to what their mother had to endure, having shingles seemed a piece of cake.

Thanks to my beloved Kindle I could, in the middle of the night, my breath sour and my hair unwashed, press a few keys and have a book come winging to me out of the ether, as precious and consoling as a percocet.

But the shingles wasn't all bad, and in fact it worked a small miracle:  I lost ten pounds in two weeks, literally without lifting a finger (I didn't have the strength to lift a finger).  As someone who can go whole decades without losing her appetite, when it went away and stayed away I was filled with curiosity.  Why wasn't I hungry?  Why was I, a lifetime member of the clean-plate club, now pushing away most of my dinner untouched?  Why did nothing--not a ripe tomato still warm from the sun, or an apple from my tree, or a slice of home-made bread--hold the slightest appeal?

Then a couple of days ago, as I was sprinkling blueberries on a small dish of yoghurt---drearily thinking protein, antioxidants, acidophilus--I suddenly noticed a wet sensation in my mouth.  I was salivating!

Since that moment I've been thinking about food a lot, and wondering how I might recapture that elegant standoffishness towards meals that I enjoyed so briefly.  How can I hang on to that viral windfall, those vanished pounds?  I have no idea, but I suspect it will require lifting a finger or two every once in a while.

A Message From The Universe, Via Facebook

Does it ever happen to you that a message arrives from the outer galaxies just when you really need it?

I won't speculate about who sends these messages, but today mine came through Facebook by way of Bridgett (http://south-city-musings.blogspot.com/).  It's a quote from Thomas Merton:

(Here is the quote if you can't read it in the illustration:  "You do not need to know precisely what is happening, or exactly where it is all going.  What you need is to recognize the possibilities and challenges offered by the present moment, and to embrace them with courage, faith and hope.")

Is this not the ultimate prescription for sanity and happiness?

I think it's even a prescription for productivity, and here's why.  We've all been hammered by success gurus with the need to focus constantly on our desired outcomes, to ask of even the most mundane act, how does this relate to my goal?  With the result that we are always thinking about that other thing, the thing that we want and do not yet have, instead of concentrating on the water on our face or the soup in our bowl.

And if one does too much of this, as I am prone to, first anxiety and then paralysis set in, followed by the loss of courage, faith and hope.

On the other hand,  how relaxing, how energizing and inspiring and ultimately productive to embrace the possibilities of the present moment with courage, faith and hope.  And to just do what needs to be done, right now.

For me, the hard part is faith and hope.  I read Sartre at an impressionable age, and I can imagine his Gallic pout at those words.  But the time has come to adopt a more pragmatic stance.  Is existential anguish, the nausea caused by the absurdity of the human condition, going to make me a kinder, happier, more useful person?  It hasn't so far...

But with a bit of faith and hope--both of which take courage--I could sink into the embrace of the present moment, get stuff done, and have some peace.

Thank you, Unknown Sender of Messages,Thomas Merton, and Bridgett...and you too, Facebook.