Being here now gratefull for you all today!  Let's Dance!

This is my 85 year old mother Gloria and my 19 year old daughter Kelsey on Thanksgiving.  It was a relitively good day for my mom who is now experiencing significant episodes of memory loss, confusion,  weakness, impariment of mental and physical performance, anxiety , fear, psychic dependence and mood changes.  I am posting this story because this is the most amazing community I am a part of.   Conscious intention and LOVE are our most powerful gifts as humans and there is a lot of this flowing here in Zaadzland.  There are also many healers and medical intuitives here and a lot of medical knowlegde. 

It is hard to decipher what exactly is going on.  A little more than a week ago there was only some seemingly mild memory loss.  Then she started having severe back pain and was not able to sleep.  Doctors gave her a shot for pain but the pain got worse the next day and she was admitted to the hospital.  In the hospital she was given morphine, which none of us were aware of until days after her release.  She was also given hydrocodone.  She was in the hospital for 4 days.  During that time she was mostly incoherent and alseep.  Understandable with the drugs.   She perked up and was more alert and her normal feisty self in the last day and a half.  It is likely this followed decreased dosage of medication.   When she arrived home she again felt weak and went to bed.  When I first saw her the next day she was slightly dis-oriented, weak, afraid,  emotionally frail, confused, and could not remember what had happened over the past days or even what had happened 5 minutes ago.  Long term memory seems intact.   She seemed to improve over the next few days including Thanksiving then declined the following day - Friday.  During this time the back/leg pain that was the cause for admission was no longer present.  This pain was attributed to inflamation on the spine due to degenerative disc disease.  This morning early she awoke with the pain again.    I had her take one of the hydrocodone pills that she came home from the hospital with.  30 minutes later the pain was diminshed but along with this came all the symptoms mentioned earlier and that are in fact listed as adverse reactions of hydrocodone on the central nervious system.  This evening she seem to have more mental clarity and is better overall and the pain has not returned yet approximately 11 hours after 1 hydrocodone.

Even without the pain and the medication there have been significant times during the week when it was apparent she can not be left alone for long.  With the pain and medication she has to have someone around.   There are a lot of ways in which all of this can be approached and I will be looking into any viable possibilities.  I am holding open the possibility that it is primarily a side effect of the medications she has been given over the last week that have given rise to all of these symptoms.  Perhaps we can find and alleviate the source of the backpain and or different therapies can be used that will also alleviate or elminate all of the central nervous system symptoms that would allow her to continue to function normally.   And even if there are improvements it still may be time to move toward a different living situation and more readily available care. 

I would love to hear from anyone who feels they have something to offer or share whether specific to this situation or in general empathy and sharing with regard to the loving care or our elders. 

Namaste and love
Don

I have to re-post this from Michele's blog:
http://visionarywhites.zaadz.com/blog/2007/11/the_children_speak_-_are_we_listening

This needs to be on prime time even 15 years later.  Who can do this?  Who has the connections?  Where is Severn Suzuki today and what are she and her friends doing?

Quoted from her blog:
Thank you Praveer for guiding me to this touching video. From Praveer's blog…

“As a 9 year old, Severn started the Environmental Children's Organization (ECO). By the age of 12, in 1992, Severn and ECO raised their own money and attended the UN's Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro.

Here is her viewpoint, presented to influentials at the Summit. It is 'unconscious' of all the justifications, rationales, and theses and excuses about why the world is in the state it is in. It is passionate and a straightforward demand to stop being cynical, resigned and to pretend that something is actually being done that will transform a truly urgent environmental situation.

Al Gore called it the best speech of the convention. It shook me up, and moved me.”


…My dear friend, 15 years later, it moves me too.

I'm re-reading this lovely book which is chock full of sweet morsels.  Every paragraph I feel like sharing something, wishing you could join me for a little bedtime reading out loud.  Grab yer pillows and gather round.  I'll pass the book and we can share the reading.  Tomorrow we can read a different one if you like.  Invite us to your place.

From: 
After the Ecstasy, the Laundry
How the Heart Grows Wise on the Spiritual Path
by  Jack Kornfield
Author of Path of the Heart

Chapter 9:
No Enlightened Retirement
...
On the night of the Buddha's enlightenment, after vowing to awaken, he was attacked by the armies of Mara, the god of illusion and evil.   Seated under the Bodhi Tree, he was able  to meditate unmoved by Mara's strongest temptations of greed and pleasure.  Then wtih a heart of compassion he overcame the anger and agression unleashed by Mara, and Mara left, defeated.   After this the Enlightened One rose to teach throughout India for fourty-five years. 

In stories of the Buddha's later life, however, we learn that Mara's disappearance was only temporary.  Many times afterward Mara returned to fight or tempt or undermine the Buddha.  It is said teh Buddha recognized Mara each time he appeared and so was not caught by temptation, fear, or doubt.  "Is that you again, Mara?" the Buddha would ask, and being recognized, Mara would silp away, only to try again another time.

In other texts the Buddha and Mara actually become friendly.  In one version the Blessed One is seated in a cave when Mara reappears.   The disciples outside become frightened and try to get rid of Mara, calling him an enemy of  their teacher.  "Did the Buddha say he had enemies?"  counters Mara.  Seeing the untruth of their words, they reluctantly summon the Buddha who responds immediately with interest.
    "Oh, my old friend has come," says the Buddha, as he warmly greets Mara, inviting him in for tea.  "How have you been?" As they sit together, Matra complains how difficult it is to be an evil one all the time.  The  Buddha listens to Mara's stories sympathetically and then asks, "Do you think it is easy to be a Buddha? Do you know what they do to my teachings , what they do in the name of the Buddha at some of my temples?  There are difficulties being in either role, a Buddha or a Mara.  No one is exempt."   In one scripture the story ends when Mara becomes awakened as a Buddha himself.

Inevitable Transitions
No matter what version is read, Mara does not go away.  There is no state of enlightened retirement., no experience of awakening that places us outside the truth of change.  Everything breathes and turns in its cycles.  The moon,  the stock market, our hearts, the wheeling galaxies all expand and contract with the rhythm of life.   All spiritual life exists in an alteration of gain and loss, pleasure and pain.  For each of us, even the Buddha, it is only a letting go into this truth that we awaken to that which is timeless, the reality of freedom.

Chapter 8
Beyond Satori ...  Two Visions of Awakening
Whether we hold to a perfect ideal or to freedom within our humanity, awkening is a mystery with which each tradition and student has to grapple.  The resolution of this mystery will finally be answered in the heart.  It is here that the opposites can be held, understood, reconciled.   Only the heart can contain both our perfection and our humanity.

Leaving maps and expectations behind, in the end we must turn our hearts in the direction of love and awareness, come what may.   In living from this awakened heart we all become bodhisattvas, all servants of the Divine.  We replace any claims of levels of enlightenment with a vow to awaken each moment, together, with all beings.  This is the path of patience, compassion, wisdom, and generosity, the path of our willingness to live in the reality of the present.  Only here can we find freedom and rest in the timelessness of perfection.

As Suzuki Roshi put it: "Strickly speaking, there are no enlightened people, there is only enlightened activity."   If there is a self who claims enlightenment, that is not it.  Instead, he went on, "What we are speaking about is moment-to-moment enlightenment, one enlightenment after another."

More Poetry than Mapmaking
    The ultimate end of the  koans might be seen in the following story, a bit of modern Zen humor regarding  a disciple who sent his master faithful accounts of his spiritual progress.  In the first month, the student wrote, "I feel an expansion of consciousness and experience oneness with the universe."  The master glanced at the note and threw it away.  The following month, this is what the student had to say: "I finally discovered that the Divine is present in all things."   The master seemed disappointed.
    In his third letter the disciple enthusiastically explained, "The mystery of the One and the many has been revealed to my wondering gaze."  The master yawned.  The next letter said, "No one is born, no one lives, no one dies, for the self is not." The master threw up his hands in despair.
    After that a month passed, then two,then five, then a whole year.  The master thought it was time to remind his disciple  of his duty to keep him informed of his spiritual progress.  The disciple wrote back, "I am simply living my life.  And for spiritual practice, who cares?"  When the master read that he cried, "Thank God.  He's got it at last." 
    The story reflects the Zen teaching of the perfection of things as they are.  The white crane in the snow is a white crane standing in the snow, the black crow at midnight is trulyl itself.

Ideals Are Not Realities
What then are we to make of maps(paths to enlightenment) that do not inlcude poetry and humor, that seem literally to prescribe a steady linear, upward ascent?  The risk is that we may try to climb their stages only to become lost in a cloud of unreachable ideals.   It may be useful to examine how such a map can function in our actual life of practice, taking Tibetan Buddhism's Ten Bhumis as our example.
    Described as the ten stages of awakening the Buddha Nature, the Bhumis are called in sequence: Stage One, "Joyous"; Stage Two, "Immaculate"; Stage Three, "Luminous"; Stage Four, "Radiant"; and so forth.  The "Joyous" level begins after stream entry; though lofty and pure, it does not include some ordinary human practices, such as vows of great generosity and the wish to bring awakening to all sentient beings.  The pratitioner who has attained the second Bhumi, however, must be able to see clairvoyantly into the past and future, to enter a hundred forms of deep meditation, to make the body multiply and appear in many places and forms at once, to cause a hundred Buddhas and bodhisatttvas to appear around them wherever they go.  And the third through tenth stages speak of powers even more miraculous and remarkable than this.
    When I asked an old lama from Tibet about whether these ten stages are in fact part of the practice, he said, "Of course tehy really exist."  But when I inquired who in his tradition had attained them, he replied wistfully, "In these difficult times I can not name a single lama who has mastered even the second stage."
    Of course, there is an archetypal truth to these stages beyond what this exchange may acknowledge.   in moments of grace or illumination, we are indeed surrounded by Buddhas -- we see the Buddha Nature in every being we meet.  And we make our body multifold whenever we experience how every being is interconnected with our own body, how the web of life, of rain forest, redwood, mushroom,  and mitochondria is who we are.  In other words, even these ostensibly literal maps may be better read as if they were a kind of poem, rich in possible meanings.

...More later...