I love me some Halloween in NYC

As I was walking down Broadway to work this morning, I saw

• sexy nurse
• sexy Catholic schoolgirl
• sexy ballerina
• sexy Geisha (my favorite, she was Huh-AW-tuh!)
• sexy devil
• sexy policewoman
• sexy secretary
• sexy Wendy's girl (blue striped tunic/skirt, red yarn wig)
• sexy waitress
• sexy French maid

When I got to my desk, there was candy there.

We need to have Halloween more often.

Weight-loss: no gaining idea.

I have just noticed that I dropped about 10 pounds in the last month. Do not congratulate me for this, or offer any encouragement. Why? Because I realize that what has been different this last month is that I have not been trying to lose weight. Offering encouragement or congratulations would be inconsistent.

The teachings I follow in zen buddhism warn frequently and repeatedly of the pitfalls of "gaining ideas." Now, while this is a clever pun when writing about weight-loss, I don't intend it that way. Gaining ideas are those which assert that there is a self, separate from the world, which has something it can (or even more powerfully, needs to) gain, achieve or possess. These thoughts are the life-blood of the ego-self, that part of us that works in competition, that wants the nice car/house/job, the hot lover, the fast computer, and yes, this is the part of us that wants enlightenment. It is that which desires to be free of gaining ideas.

We can't rid ourselves of gaining ideas, life itself is a gaining idea. We can learn, through diligent practice, to not attach to them. We can watch them come and go, even act on them when that is the thing to do, but we do not have to get wrapped up in the notion that this is what life is about. Very closely related to this is the notion that we are not enough as we are, that there's something about us that needs to be fixed.

Whew! Is that ever a notion I have been fully invested in with regard to weight-loss! I have literally been waiting my entire life for a day when I could actually begin living, that day when I was thin enough to "fit in." That day when I could be accepted for "who I really am" and not be judged on the basis of my fat body, which I have always identified as "not me."

Folks, particularly those younger than I (47), hear this. I have wasted a lot of my life, that is, let opportunities pass, because of this notion. I can never recover my 20's, 30's. and most of my 40's. Whatever life I have yet to live will be lived as I am now. Waiting for a day to come when I could live the life I wanted robbed me of the life I had.

Yesterday I was walking down 14th street on my way to see a consulting client. Walking towards me in the other direction was a very attractive woman, walking with a man, who was talking to him with animated gestures. She than began to dance down the sidewalk in a very sexy manner, apparently in an attempt to convey something to him, and she saw that I was watching her move and smiling. She looked at me and continued to dance as we approached each other, when she was within ear-shot she said jokingly to me "yeah, I know, I have some great dance moves!"

I looked over at her and without thinking what came out of my mouth was "you're also very hot."

She laughed, stopped in her tracks and turned around and called after me "then why are you just passing me up?"

I stopped, turned around and said "you're with a guy."

She smiled and said "He's my brother."

Until this moment I had been operating with no gaining ideas, just acting out of attention to the world around me. Then it started, my ego jumped in, my heart starting racing, and I didn't know what to say or do. Well, that's not true, she was practically picking me up, I knew what someone who was thin and attractive should do, i.e., ask her for a phone number or something, but I was frozen in the midst of this flood of thoughts of "you're fat, she's going to reject you, you couldn't handle it if she said yes, women like this don't want anything to do with you," etc, etc, etc.

She rescued me with "I'm married, but you've got a great smile."

"Thanks," I said "you just made my day."

"That's Moo-chul" she said with a humorous and vaguely germanic accent, she then smiled again, turned around and kept walking with her brother, who was clearly impatient with her spontaneous exchange with me. There was a definite wiggle in her walk, she turned her head and made sure I was watching, and then she turned her attention away from me and walked on.

I just as well could have been wearing silk boxers.

This moment was made possible by my temporary inattention to my gaining ideas, that is, the idea that I need something, that I lack something, that there's something I can gain which will get me what I want in the *future.* I was, I realize now in retrospect, just living in that moment, seeing this vision of hotness dance on 14th street and simply letting the reaction seeing her do that caused in me, i.e., arousal, happiness and pleasure, arise on it's own, without plan or attachment to outcomes.

For as long as I could exist in that moment, things went swimmingly well, I was living the life I've been waiting all my life to live, enjoying myself, enjoying those around me, being in the fullness of every moment, fulfilling my desires as they arise without an agenda or a benchmark to achieve. I was everything I needed to be, I possessed all I wanted.

I have also been living that life with regard to eating for the last month. I had grown weary of all the struggle, so I just let myself be. I didn't indulge my cravings, don't get me wrong, this was not a month of pizza, cheeseburgers, chocolate and ice cream, though I have eaten each of those things in the last month on one occasion or another.

No, this was a month of using what Dogen calls "the parental mind" with regard to eating. That is, I let go of trying to eat in a way that would get me something I lack, weight-loss, and instead I lived just taking care of things in the moment. I ate what was in my best interests at the time, striking a balance between what was healthy for me, what I wanted, and what was available to me at the time. I let go of the notion that there were "right" and "wrong" things to eat, I just ate what seemed to be the best choice, I made choices as I would for myself if I was my own kind, compassionate and wise parent. I did not seek to deprive myself or indulge myself. I ate every meal as if it were my last.

In other words. When I was hungry, I ate. When I was thirsty, I drank.

I've had this notion for a very long time that there was something I needed to learn or get in order to finally lose weight. How interesting it will be if that was the problem all along.

Hello FDNY!

So, I'm home this evening and the landlord calls me and asks me to turn on the boiler. It is wet and cold enough here for the first time this winter to fire it up. I do, there's a little smoke, so I call her back and ask her what to do about it.

She calls the Boiler people and they tell her that it's fine, it's just burning off dust that's accumulated over the warm months and all is well. She calls me back and relays that information to me. I do my evening zazen (meditation) and sit down in my reading chair (by an open window, by the way) and apparently fall asleep.

The next thing I know I am awakened by the doorbell and I can see there are people out front with flashlights shining them in my window. That's a little disconcerting. I get up, I still have my zazen robes on, and I answer the door and there's half a dozen of New York City's Bravest (the FDNY), fully suited up, tools in hand, and one of them smiles at me and says "How ya doin'?"

"Fine." I reply "What's up?"

"We got a call about an odor in the building we need to come check it out." is the friendly, but firmly authoritative reply.

"Gee, I hope it's not my cat box" I say, which is received with a round of warm laughter from the group. "We just turned on the boiler, that's probably it, I can smell it now, the cellar door is down the hall and to the left" I tell them as 6-8 big burly firemen file past me standing there in bare feet and zazen robes. I'm sure I looked like an out-to-pasture Jedi or something to them. They all have big crowbar-looking things in their hands and oxygen tanks on their backs. Now that I'm really waking up it's all starting to make sense. I can smell an odor of burning home fuel oil in the hall (which I never noticed inside my apartment.

When we flip on the lights in the basement you san see a thin layer of smoke on the ceiling. They shut down the boiler, tell me it's "backed up" and instruct me to call for service and not turn it back on until it gets some attention from a repairman.

I tell them I have a CO detector inside my apartment and it didn't go off, so the oldest among them, the guy they all called "boss," comes inside my apartment with a device in his hand and says "Yeah, the CO readings in here are 0. They're about 20 in the hall, which is still safe, but leave the outside door open for a while and let it all air out."

And with that they radioed an "All clear" to dispatch and collected their tools and filed out. I felt like apologizing to them because I was the one to turn on the boiler, but they were very nice and friendly about it.

So, that's my Friday night excitement. I was supposed to go out tonight but my date called and cancelled this afternoon. Gee, I would have missed all this.

I do have to say these guys really have an altruistic air about them. I was truly comforted by their presence. I can see why women get all hot and bothered by them.

To my friends grieving Crash.

I am sorry for your loss. Loss hurts, loss threatens, loss betrays.

I didn't know him well, but he taught me about music and he very positively contributed to my ongoing exposure to a lot of the work of some of the truly great music artists of our time. I will miss that.

But I want those of us who can crack open an eye at this moment to see some things with me.

I have seen some mention of preserving his websites. Why? Think about this, you have an opportunity to see past a delusion here. Why is a copy of his web content now so important to you now? Particularly ponder why it is *more* important after his death. What is preserved that you were willing to lose before?

I heard others complain that his death was *wrong* because of his age. Death is never wrong. It isn't right, either. It is beyond right and wrong. We will all face it. Rain doesn't fall for the flowers, rain just falls.

How many children died the day Crash died simply as a consequence of the geography of their birth?

How many of us will see the death of every relationship we have? All of us.

Life is not a dress rehearsal, it contains no "building up period" to some retirement crescendo of leisure bliss (How successful was Crash's retirement fund?), it is happening right now, right here, to you, and it could be gone in an instant. Youth, health, wealth, religion, God, karma, whatever, believing that any of these will buy us time, or offers us any protection from the fact that things that change, is just the raving, confused, delusions of the human mind. Open your eyes. All that lives dies.

The truth is occupying the same space as your body right now, just as you are. Searching for a way to preserve Crash's memory is being like a fish who searches for water. This is all there is, you are in the middle of it, be quiet, see.

What is, is.

Be well, be happy, be free from confusions, delusions, longings, and loathings.

There is nowhere else but here, there is no time but now.

There is nothing to return to, nothing to wait for.

Life is what happens when you're busy making other plans.

If you can realize a bit of that from his passing, you pay him a profound respect.

Buddhism Without Bullshit: My sesshin at Dharma Field

or my experience at Sesshin at Dharma Field Zen Center, October 19-20th, 2007.

Long-time readers may remember my first sesshin at the San Francisco Zen Center City Center. It was ultimately good for my practice, but it was very emotionally difficult at the time. If you go back and read that essay, I have to say that my impressions of San Francisco Zen Center then were confirmed by my experience now at Dharma Field Zen Center in Minneapolis. That is, I had the kind of experience I think a newcomer should have at Dharma Field, and I was really, really, really, pleased to find out that they regard the same things as bullshit that I do.

First, when I walked up to the door to which I was instructed to arrive at the time I was asked to arrive, I was met by the person I was told would be there and he welcomed me with "You must be Richard, welcome." I was shown to the quarters I expected to have, given the assistance I expected to get and was otherwise left alone. Wow, what a joy.

When I showed up later that evening for orientation, the person who promised to greet me was there at the time and place I was promised and she also said "You must be Richard, welcome." Wow, real people being real nice. That midwestern charm is hard to beat, donchaknow?

Sesshin orientation was complete, thorough, un-rushed, friendly, and warm. I was told everything I needed to know to fit in, to follow the rules and to make it possible for me to concentrate on my practice instead of my embarrassment. The oryoki instruction I received was much easier to follow than any I've had before (I call it confus-y-oki for a reason), several bullshit steps I have been exposed to in other places were not a part of their ritual.

Saturday morning (I arrived Friday night and was afforded overnight accommodations gratis) things happened exactly as I was told they would, exactly on time, and in a way that really fully supported collecting my mind (which is what sesshin really means) without having to overcome hurdles of excessive self-doubt, self-consciousness or disorientation.

The center itself is exactly how I would comport such a place if I was in charge of it. Clean, simple, no ornamentation (I can't tell you how many ornaments are stuffed into the San Francisco Zen Center City Center, more buddha statues than I can count, that's for sure), not even a buddha figure or icon within sight, except on magazines (that come from somewhere else) and on the advertising leaflets for their classes. Everything is either natural wood or plain off-white semi-gloss finish. There is not a single unnecessary item in the entire place, and not a single item less than what is needed to support being a student.

Even the landscaping instructs, in a neighborhood full of tightly-controlled lawns, the yard at Dharma Field takes one back to the prairie land that was originally here. Indigenous plants (now dying, as they should be in October), flowing stone paths, really careful attention to letting things be as they really are. Nothing seems out of place or artificial.

At San Francisco Zen Center the rule seemed to be "if it moves, bow to it, and if it doesn't move, bow passing it in either direction." Now, I don't mean to single out San Francisco Zen Center, I think this bow-happy bullshit is not unusual, San Francisco is just the only other zen center with which I have personal experience. At Dharma Field, people bowed when I expected them to, when it seems actually useful for mindfulness practice, and I was never caught off guard by bowing nor was I asked to bow in a way that felt out of place or artificial.

Unlike my sesshin in San Francisco, the sigh-up list for Dokusan, or a private interview with the head teacher, was pointed out and easy to find. In San Francisco, I was never told how to sign up until opportunities for Dokusan had passed, and then I was told about it in a "Oh? You didn't know that?" sort of mock surprise. No opportunity was given to get Dokusan anyway, though I badly wanted it at the time, I had several burning questions about my practice back then.

I know this is starting to sound like a "let's bash San Francisco Zen Center" essay, and I don't mean it that way. I am deeply, deeply appreciative of what San Francisco Zen Center has made available to me and I'll always look back on my experience there with the fondness one has for an impossibly bad first date, I just think that old gray mare may have passed her prime. Something new needs to happen there. Now I am all the more curious why Katagiri Roshi did not become abbot when Suzuki Roshi passed, but I am grateful he didn't, because that's ultimately how Dharma Field came to pass.

Anyway, my Dokusan at Dharma Field was wonderful. I was very nervous, it was my first time and with a teacher I deeply admire and respect. He immediately put me at ease and we conversed in a warm and friendly matter. He immediately recognized things about me that others haven't figured out even after daily contact with me for a long time, and his comments on my practice revealed that he had been paying close attention to me even though I had little external reason to think he even noticed me. We even joked with each other about our mutual distaste for the concept of reincarnation and were mutually appreciative of each other's rational and scientific world-view. He gave me some pointers on my practice that were extremely useful and never made me feel stupid or inadequate for having these opportunities for improvement. He directed other questions properly to self-study and gave me all of the time I wanted. In fact, I brought the interview to a close on my own initiative.

I could go on and on, but you get the point. I had a great experience and I look forward to coming back, even though my teacher and I share the same concerns about excessive air travel vis-a-vis global heating. We'll just have to see how that goes. If you want to study Buddhism without the Bullshit, I recommend Steve Hagen as a teacher (he has several books) and Dharma Field as a center.

There's also an awesome collection of lectures on mp3.

RDeWald does Minneapolis

I am posting from a text memo I banged out with the thumb keyboard on my Treo during my flight from New York to Minneapolis St. Paul.

This is a first. There are 12 passengers on my flight on an American Airlines MD80, a full-size commercial airliner. Not only is there no one in my row, there is no one in the ten rows in front of me and no one behind me at all. There's a couple sitting across the aisle chatting about 15 rows in front of me, everyone else moved up to first class. I didn't because I am actually more comfortable in an open row back here and I am feeling misanthropic this AM.

I was served the first-class breakfast anyway, an egg and cheese quesodilla with fruit salad. They brought back the warm hand towels to me--I was offered all of the first class service perks except for the free booze.

I was offered an upgrade to first class when I checked in for $90. I pondered that for a moment. I'm glad I declined. Even I can't drink $90 worth of chardonnay in 3 hours. The nicest thing about being on this flight with only 11 other passengers is the peace and quiet. This must be what it is like to fly in a private jet. There's no one around me talking. No kids screaming. Nothing, just me, my thoughts and the quiet serenity of the passing scene out the window. My only ambition of wealth in life is to be able to afford a fractional lease on a G4. I am having a taste of that life on this flight.

I am going to Minneapolis-St Paul to attend a two-day "sesshin" at the Zen Center led by the person whom I regard as my teacher. A sesshin is a sort of Zen practice intensive, silent, lots of sitting in meditation, ritualistic meals, private interviews with the teachers, etc. I've been doing one about once a year since I took up the practice. This is the 2007 version.

If you're interested, here's the schedule.

They talk funny here, but it's completely charming.

Will you iPounce 10/26?

Leopard is out 10/26. 300 new features, many of them needing at least a 1.6 GHz processer and Intel architecture. 9GB Disk, at least 512GB RAM (ha ha ha ha ha!), Broadband, .mac for some stuff... What will you do?

The Four Problems

These musings borrow heavily from the work of Irvin D. Yalom.

There seem to be four problems, four things with which we struggle, that we can't do anything about. That is, there seem to be four conditions to which every unsolvable problem can be reduced. Their examination is useful because the task of human existence can be understood as a process of coming to terms with them.

There are different ways to put them, but I use the mnemonic "mipi" to remember them myself. They are meaninglessness, isolation, powerfulness/powerlessness, and impermanence.

Meaninglessness refers to the fact that there is no inherent meaning expressed for existence. That is, there's no declaration of what this is all about which is so obvious and clear to us all as to explain why we live. We have to find that meaning for ourselves and there's no way to confer the validity of what one person believes to another. I can't convince you of the meaning of life, you have to realize it. We may agree, but that's a choice we're making, not because of a self-evident Truth.

Isolation refers to the fact that we are all ultimately alone. No matter how close one becomes to another there is still the persistent reality that we remain ultimately alone. There is no bond between people that can't be lost, and any bond that exists still fails to close some small bit of the gap that keeps us aware that we are separate beings.

Powerlessness and Powerfulness are two sides of the same coin. On the one hand, we are free to do whatever we want to do with our lives. That sounds like a wonderfully liberating thing, and it is, but it also carries the responsibility. That is, if something is not working for us in our lives there's really no one else to blame for that, ultimately. No matter how put-upon one feels, the fact is that you can do what you want to do.

The flip side of this refers to other people. That is, they can do what they want to do, whether or not it is right, whether or not it is a good idea, whether or not it is going to help or hurt them. I used to experience this as the awareness that there is no "relationship court," that is, no where I could go and make my very cogent and powerful argument that another person had made the wrong decision by leaving me and getting married to someone else. I know she was wrong, but I couldn't do anything about it. It didn't matter that I was right, it didn't matter that she was wrong. I couldn't do anything about it.

Impermanence is the big one. This is the central teaching of my religious tradition. Things change. Anything that lives is going to die. You and everyone you love is going to die. Every relationship you have is going to end. Anything that exists will cease to exist. Everything, no exceptions. Nothing persists. Nothing.

So, now consider engaging in what I always find to be a helpful exercise. Think of each of the problems in your life. Start to examine them and figure out which of (or which combination of) the four problems this dilemma reduces to. That tells you what it is about that particular situation that you have to accept. You can't do anything about that fundamental fact, so your capacity for action is guided by this realization, you don't waste time and energy trying to change something that can't be changed.

Recovering alcoholics have a notion they call the Serenity prayer, it has various exact texts, but they all go like this: "Help me change things I can, accept the things I can't, and give me the wisdom to tell the difference." The four problems have given me a structure within which to do that work. Give it a try.

How to love another person.

It's really sort of simple, it's just not easy. One loves another person, gender doesn't matter, by accepting them as who they are.

Let's say for the sake of this discussion that there are three categories of things one is challenged to accept about any other person. First are the things one prefers. These are the things one is drawn to in the other, it may be their physical beauty, their wit, their empathy, their knowledge, their judgment, their background, whatever. These things are not the problem. We lean towards these things, they are usually the reasons that people give when reciting "this is why I love thee." The popular theory of love relationships is that we mate-up with people who have so many of these qualities that they sustain our desire to persist in the relationship when experiencing the other two categories. In the early part of a romance, the "in-love" part, these may be the only things one sees (or acknowledges as real) in the other person.

The second category contains things one is neutral about. These are the facts of the other person's life that don't really attract or repel at all. It may be their geographic origin, their preference of pain reliever, the way they fold laundry, their hobbies, their favorite sports team, whatever, it is just the category of stuff that has no weight emotionally. If one is "in-love," one may find these things interesting because one is gobbling up knowledge about the other, but really one is just filing this stuff away as bits of information, they don't change the mind either way about the dedication one wants to make to the other.

The third category contains the things that repel one about the other. Emotionally immature people, or those too deeply "in-love" to really see anything, will deny they exist, or they will minimize their number or importance with denial and willful ignorance. These things are where the work is. These things generally determine one's willingness to remain in the relationship, they confer boundaries to intimacy, and they are the keys to really being with another person.

It is with these things that one must work in order to love another person. That's right, that is what loving another is all about.

One may seem to have a choice here, but it's a straw-man choice. That is, one may think that one can either bring about a change in the other which eliminates or mitigates the repugnant quality or that one can change themselves to accept these repugnant qualities in the other.

If your experience is like mine, you've had enough trouble with changing something about yourself even though you really do have almost total power over that process. Imagine then the success one should expect to enjoy with changing something in someone else, where your power is non-existent.

So, there's no choice there. If you want to know how to love someone, the task is really straightforward, you have to accept what repels you about them. That's a really liberating realization when one finally reaches it. There's nothing that the other person has to do. This is completely under one's own control.

It also has nothing to do with having sex with them. I used to wonder what it meant to love another man. This is it. When you pare it down to these essentials, this is really the difference between a preference for another and loving another.

This is also a separate issue from intimacy. Love and intimacy go together, in fact intimacy depends upon loving and being loved as I define it here, but intimacy requires a mutual commitment to this process of handling one's own aversions regarding the other whereas love does not.

People I've seen go through a series of marriages, or serial commitments of equal magnitude, who come to believe that they kept picking the same kind of person over and over again, or that they had the same time of relationship over and over again, or that marriage is always this and husbands always do that, are really just seeing themselves in the mirror and marvelling at how the image is always the same.

The only way to really change one's experience of any relationship is to work on accepting the things that repel one about the other person. How does one do that?

First, it is very important to discern the difference between acceptance and approval. Acceptance is about detaching yourself from your own thoughts. For example, consider that I finding it highly irritating when another person drinks bottled water in New York City. We have the best municipal water supply in the world, so clean that filtering it does not improve it, and drinking bottled water means that one is wasting the resources required to manufacture the bottle, transport it, stock it, chill it, sell it, use it for 20 minutes and then dispose of it for tens of thousands of years, or to power the recycling apparatus that turns it into something else. I have a hard time thinking of something more thoughtless and selfish done for so little gain.

Those are all thoughts of mine. I have a right to them, I think I'm correct, but they are not real.

I used to buy bottled water by the case and drink it almost exclusively. What happened to my reality then? My thoughts then about how bottled water made me drink more of it and less of other less-healthy alternatives were just as persuasive. I believed that as adamantly as I believe what I do now.

Everything changes, particularly thoughts, so why have such respect for them? Drinking that bottled water may have made it possible for me to survive to reach the understanding that bottled water is a public menace and become the evangelist I am now for not abusing our landfills (or recycling infrastructure) with water bottles.

So, why should thoughts like that stand in the way of loving another person?

Approval is different. I do not have to approve of something in order to accept it. I simply have to realize that my thoughts are not reality. There's more under heaven and earth than can be explained by my philosophy.

Acceptance doesn't mean martyrdom. That doesn't mean I have to not take care of myself. I may have to figure out a way to co-exist with something that repels me in my loved one. If they insist on spending money mindlessly I may have to construct a personal financial model/method that protects my financial well-being from this. If another insists on being sexually unfaithful I may have to end the sexual partnership, and that may cost me the rest of the relationship, but it need not require that I stop loving them (I have, in fact, done this very thing. I broke up with her 20 years ago but I still love her as I did when we were engaged).


So, this is why love can be so confusing, I think. People use the word to describe too much. Love is the consequence of radical acceptance. You love someone when you honor them as being perfect as they are, in spite of your preferences, in spite of your disapproval, you accept that this is who they are and you regard them positively anyway. Your breaking free of the shackles of your own thoughts, of convention, of prejudice and of judgment.

It is at this point that love transcends attraction/repulsion and actually becomes a religious experience. This is when it causes us to come into contact with something that connects us all--the essence of the religious experience.

That's how you love someone.