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Walking the Way

Walking the Way

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I picked up Walking the Way, by Robert Meikyo Rosenbaum, because I was browsing the library and liked the title. (It was no doubt the word “walking” that did it.) I almost didn’t check it out when I saw the subtitle, 81 Zen Encounters with the Tao Te Ching, which sounded too esoteric for me. But I brought it home anyway — and now may have to buy it, so wise and calming do I find its words.

Walking the Way is a series of reflections on 81 poems from the Tao Te Ching, a book of wisdom and fundamental text for the Chinese religious and philosophical system of Taoism. It is, as the foreword describes, like an “ancient, weathered, solitary pine that exists above the tree line that whistles the tunes of the wind on a high mountain.” Reading these words reawakens my desire to meditate, or at least to sit quietly for a while each day.

Here’s a passage that speaks to me:

It is easy to fall into the tyranny of doing. The feeling that you should do more is a tyrant worse than any dictator. It will wear you out and bring not just an early demise but the daily death of a thousand stressful cuts. If you do not free yourself from this tyranny you’ll die early, or daily, or both.



(Illustration, Wikipedia: Laozi, reputed author of the Tao Te Ching.) 

Gibbet Hill

Gibbet Hill

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Many years ago I lived across from a small hill in Massachusetts. Gibbet Hill, it’s called, a great New England name with character and more than a whiff of dastardly deeds. Men were once hung there, according to local legend.

But the hill was for me a great source of inspiration and beauty, especially in the winter. In the summer the hill was obscured by tall trees and a tangle of underbrush along the road. But in the fall it revealed itself like a puzzle in reverse, each tumbling leaf making room for a view of the slope beyond.

It was more than just a scene. It was the promise of winter wisdom buried beneath the snow drifts. It was earth, tree and sky — all stripped down to their barest and most essential, the outline of life laid open to all.

I haven’t lived near it in decades but the hill is clear in my mind’s eye. It has come to stand for the beauty of winter and all the lessons it holds.

(Photo: Gibbet Hill Grill. It’s not winter, but it’s the hill I remember.)

Life Preserver

Life Preserver

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If all birthdays should hold within them some memento mori, some reflections on our own mortality, then my recent one was complete even in that way, with the funeral of an acquaintance, a woman my age (too young to die!) held Saturday in a local cemetery.

Attending this funeral brought many thoughts to mind: Sadness for the family, especially the two twenty-something children who now must make their way without their mom; gratitude for my own health and family, for everything I have; and relief that I’ve escaped a trap that suburban living makes women especially prone to.

It isn’t always easy to schlep to the office, but the suburbs have a way of sucking women in and making everything about the kids. While I made sure I was home with the girls as much as possible when they were young, and I look back on those years as some of the most precious and happiest of my life, I tried always to have a separate self, a career (writing) self — an Anne that is not also Mom.

Now I tell my girls to do this, to keep themselves alive. The childrearing years only seem like they’ll last forever. In truth, they’re over in a flash.  When they are, you want a self to go back to.

Cats and Dogs and Beauty

Cats and Dogs and Beauty

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Dancers are satisfied in a way that dieters and exercisers are not, writes Ursula Le Guin in her essay, “Dogs, Cats and Dancers: Thoughts About Beauty,” which was summarized in the latest Brain Pickings.

Dogs don’t know what they look like, where their bodies are in space. Cats do. Le Guin describes a pair of Siamese, one black, one white. The white one always lay on the black cushion and the black one on the white cushion. “t wasn’t just that they wanted to leave cat hair where it showed up
best,” Le Guin writes, “though cats are always thoughtful about that. They knew where they
looked best.”

Dancers, too, are exquisitely aware of where they are in space, she says. And I think about my tap teacher, Candy, still jaunty and perky in her 60s, knowing exactly how to move her arms, to hold her shoulders, so that every angle and line was a pleasing one.

From these observations, Le Guin takes us to a place of pathos and love. She talks about aging, that it’s not just the loss of beauty that dismays her (“I never had enough to carry on about”), but the loss of identity. It’s that the person she sees looking at her in the mirror isn’t her — it’s an old woman.

Death, though it is the great equalizer, can also illuminate the essential beauty of a person. Le Guin uses her mother for illustration here, and I will use mine. Because even in death Mom was beautiful: the essential beauty, which lives in the bones, never left her.

Wearing Purple

Wearing Purple

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This morning on Metro I realized I was wearing a purple jacket, holding a phone with a purple cover and wearing glasses with a purple frame.

It’s just a coincidence, I told myself. I’m not turning into one of those old women who wears purple. Not that there’s anything wrong with the color. But I’d rather not wait till I’m old to wear it — and, more to the point, I’d rather not wait till I’m old to be a free spirit.

Yes, there’s something to be said for how years lessen the esteem with which we hold the opinions of others. Maybe that’s because we’ve seen more foolishness. But I hope it’s because we’re more tolerant of ourselves and others, that we’ve grown in compassion as well as nerve. If that’s what frees us … then bring it on.

Radical Love

Radical Love

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Usually on Valentine’s Day I write about personal love. And I’m certainly thinking of it today, feeling grateful for my family and friends, all those I hold dear. But these are extraordinary times, and they call for the most radical and extreme of actions.

They call for love.

“If we are stretching to live wiser and not just smarter,” says Krista Tippett in her book Becoming Wise, “we will aspire to learn what love means, how it arises and deepens, how it withers and revives, what it looks like as a private good but also a common good.”

Tippett, the host of NPR’s “On Being,” describes the love shown by 1960s civil rights workers, their belief in the “beloved community” that meant they were fighting for equality with courtesy and kindness.  “This was love as a way of being, not a feeling, which transcended grievance and painstakingly transformed violence,” Tippett writes.

Though her book was published just last year, it already seems to hail from another era, a time when were not yet as deeply divided as we are now. Tippett doesn’t address the division as much as she would had she been writing a year later, but reading her book makes me think about how much further we’d be if treated each other with courtesy and kindness.

Maybe love is what we need, love translated into forbearance and understanding, into biting our tongues and holding our applause. Divisiveness got us into this mess. Maybe love can get us out.

Oldest Living Albatross Lays Egg

Oldest Living Albatross Lays Egg

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It’s been hard lately to make my way through the national and political news sections of the newspaper. Which is why I’ve been open to other, more offbeat stories. Like Wisdom, the 66-year-old albatross who is still laying an egg every year. Just laid one a few days ago, in fact.

Wisdom was banded on the Midway Atoll in 1956, so scientists are pretty sure that she’s truly a (late) middle-aged gal.

What an inspiration! Here she is at a time when many human females might be slowing down. Instead, she’s adding to her brood.

Is she worrying about her children? Heck no, she’s too busy having ’em.

And as for her appearance, she’s smooth of feather and sleek of bill. No tummy tuck or chin lifts for her.

(Photo: courtesy Smithsonian.com)

First Walk

First Walk

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Yesterday, the walk came first. I strolled out into the morning, the first day of my new year, and felt a sort of awe.

The headphones, they would remain in my hand. There were birds to listen to, morning music free for the taking. There was a bird that seemed to be saying “Judy, Judy, Judy,” a poor imitation of Cary Grant. There were crickets in the woods, chirping as if it were still night.

And then there were sights that made sounds unnecessary: banked clouds that seemed lit from inside, a wind stirring the high oak branches. Most of all there was a hush to the morning, a holding of breath.

I felt a sort of wonder at this new day, at the sheer gift of existence, of being alive. Beyond people and expectations. Part of the natural world for which we surely were made.

Remembering Dad

Remembering Dad

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Today would have been Dad’s 91st birthday. And I’ve been seeing him everywhere. In the graduation celebration we just had. In the new spring leaves. In the finally warm, “not-a-cloud-in-the-sky” day.

Where I’ve not been seeing him is in the arm chair where he used to read. Or the corner of the couch where he sat to watch TV. Or the McDonald’s where he hung out with his coffee buddies. It’s still a shock that he’s not in all those places, not alive and laughing in the world.

“Come on, Annie,” he’d say to me during episodes of childhood drama. “You’re living your life like it’s a Greek tragedy.” At the time it bothered me. Did he not appreciate the full implication of having bad hair on picture day?

Somewhere along the way, of course, I realized that he did. But he also knew how to swallow hard and move through life’s sorrows and disappointments. He knew how to make the best of things. It’s a valuable skill. One I’m nowhere near mastering.

Luckily I have his words and his example.  And I think of them often — especially today.

Epiphanies

Epiphanies

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Yesterday was the Feast of the Epiphany, a day I’ve always liked, though not so much for its liturgical meaning as for its philosophical one: “a sudden, intuitive perception; an insight into the reality or essential meaning of something.”

When I was younger I considered epiphanies the “ah hah” moments in life, grandiose and breath-taking. But as I’ve grown older I’ve realized they are more common than I once thought. They are part of the wisdom that comes with age. They are moments when I say to myself, “Oh, so that’s what it’s all about.” They are not always pleasant, but they are always true.