Prescription Religion

An old boyfriend once had a T-shirt with a marvelous and pithy list that summarized the major world religions with a quick irreverent quote for each.

After being raised Catholic, I became a more generic Christian, moving eventually to Buddhism in my thirties.

How do these two things relate?

I sometimes think that Buddhism - for all it has kept me grounded, given me great insights, and meditation - might be the worst thing for me. Truth be told, I've always been a very compassionate person. (Look at my choice of career and political views.) Being able to put myself in another's shoes has never been something I've had to work particularly hard at. In fact, what I often think I need is assertiveness training - to get better at standing up for myself, recognizing when I am being taken advantage of, being firm and clear about what I want and need and will and won't accept.

Which has led me to the belief that what we may need, in place of this modern western ability to shop with impunity for pretty much any faith or spirituality that speaks to us, is someone ELSE to tell us what we need.

Prescription religion.

I look at myself lately - 40 years old and staring hard at my second divorce; glaring questions there about my judgement, at least in one major area! The last thing I need is to sit around thinking and talking about the need for compassion and emptiness! I need some stronger stuff....Wrath of God, chosen people. Maybe I need to ingest some a couple of shots of fundamentalism and start getting ready for the Rapture. Maybe I need to go back to confession, list sins and be absolved.

Sigh.

I am kidding, of course. Mostly. I am reading commentaries on the Diamond sutra lately. I was lucky enough to go to a daylong seminar on it, years ago, and have always loved the realization that only transcending emotions lets you see them; that "all form is emptiness, all emptiness is form," meaning that for all that they consume us at the moment, emotions are really only in us and don't exist otherwise or on their own. From there it's a short leap to being able to hold yourself above or apart from them to really see them.

(Except when you are consumed with primal tears at odd times. On hearing a song that hits you the wrong way. Driving home.)

I have asked the old boyfriend for the T-shirt and he doesn't have it anymore. Couldn't find it on line, either. I think I will spend some time on a comparative religious study, taking snippets as needed.

Later: Stepping in dogshit.

Garden Darwinism

It's that time of year when I long for the desert - when the lush, overwhelming greenness of New England threatens to overwhelm the senses, choke off paths and driveways when untended for a week. When I'm reminded how any bare patch of dirt in these parts, left untended, will be covered in a month with scrappy Queen Anne's lace, sumac trees, bright weedy wildflowers.

When my local walking trails seems sultry and overgrown, with a steamy, closed in feeling, that would render me unsurprised should a brontosaurus poke its head around the corner.

My vegetable garden goes through the same wild process every year around this time, and I am too weary to intervene. I go away or get busy for a week or so and return to find that the tomatoes are overtaking the squash, the oregano is totally out of control, and the sweet peas are staging an invasion again the neighboring asparagus with apparent success.

Garden Darwinism, I call it.

This year's vegetables have been haphazard. I planted all my tomatoes at once and am sure they will all come ripe at EXACTLY the same moment, when my car crosses the state line on my way out to vacation.

In the back row I whimsically planted come climbing moonflowers right in front of some lovely tall sunflower seeds. Unfortunately I did not also then install string for the moonflowers to climb, so as they came of age they lurched inexorably forward and established a mutually lethal stranglehold on the sunflowers. I finally ran some string and coaxed the resultant moonflower-sunflower conglomeration up the ropes, feeling vaguely like I was violating the Prime Directive.

If they survive, I thought, it'll be lovely, if odd. The moonflowers so far seem okay.

Who would think that the fragile, tapering leaves of the moonflower - blossoming only at night, slender trumpet blooms - would overpower the thicker and sturdy trunk of the sunflower? Yet that seems to be the case.

Sometimes at this time of year I feel sympathy for the Pilgrims, who, starving, must have looked around at all of this lush, fantastic growth - not much of which, occurring on its own, seems to have the nutrients to sustain human life...yet how accommodating the land, with just a little knowledge.

I am descended from some actual Pilgrims. Growing more and more allergic every year to poison ivy, I now think of it as nature's way of saving to my ancestors: get back on the boat and keep looking.

Like a Mole

Yesterday, standing the in the parking lot of the elementary school where my daughter and some other kids were sledding, I started to examine the growing rust spot above the wheel well of my car with a sense of detached fascination and dread. It was something like looking at a little noticed mole on your body. You only have to worry when it changes, right? I thought, peering at the growing dark center , the widening area of raised metal, what appeared to be layering near the center edge. I became afraid to poke it for fear of going right through.

My car is a 1994 Accord, making it older than my children. It was bought by me about three years ago in a period of financial distress, for $4,000 in cash, from a repair shop small enough and marginal enough that my car's true history and origins have always seemed vaguely murky to me. The title said one previous owner, but a series of random systems malfunctions (too expensive to correct, only intermittently inconvenient to live with) suggest otherwise: antenna doesn't work, gas gauge broken, odd leak into back seat area. On my frequent trips to the repair shop, I think I have a Katrina car. Otherwise I try to revel in not having a car payment.

I was standing next to my friend and neighbor, having just been admiring his new Toyota truck that seats six and had spaces for DVD players. We were chatting, leaving just enough free brain space for my eyes to return again and again to my small Rorschach test of rust. It looked definitely bigger than the last time.

I was a little on edge anyway. I was there with my older daughter, and my neighbor and his three kids. My younger daughter had been all set to go with us, but was home now, due to her soaking herself to the waist minutes before we were due to leave. I'd given her a hot bath, and some tea, and was anxious to get back to her.

How big can a rust spot get before your bumper will fall off driving over a bump, I wondered.

What are your views on television?

Here is a request for input from other parents.

What are your views on television?

The topic is becoming a battleground lately in our home. For a long time we had a no-TV-during-the-week rule, which has grown relaxed of late around others who like TV during the week. (And I must confess, the girls and I would often watch the Daily Show together even before then.) My 12-year-old has a seemingly insatiable apatite for all Disney Channel programming. Even as she is saying she realizes how inane it is, she is drawn to it like a moth to flame.

Some advocate letting her regulate her own TV as long as her chores and homework have been done. I resist this, not wanting her brain filled with the crap I know she will watch.

Disney and other shows seem to me to promote a wise- assed tween world where all adults are idiots, kids walk through life leaving a trail of soda cans that the maid picks up, and the prevailing attitude among kids is cliquey, know-it-all, preternaturally adult, snooty and condescending. When my kids spend hours sitting and consuming that carefully branded and marketed lifestyle, yeah, it rubs off. Don't tell me Disney and Diet Coke don't spend millions on the country's top child psychologists t figure out exactly how to motivate and sell to these kids, I told my husband. There are only 24 hours in every day, and I don't want to spend my time and my kids' s childhood fighting this.

I've always advocated watching TV with my kids. Early on we started talking about commercials, asking, What are they trying to sell us? I've always kept an eye on what they see (although lately they are trying to watch South Park with their cousins...not sure I am ready for that.) But now it just seems like trying to find the right balance of freedom and rules is like grasping a slippery pig.

I know every generation says this, but here it is for us: I remember going out and roaming the neighborhood for hours or days without adult supervision or knowledge. Now we live on a busy state road, and even if we didn't I'd hesitate to let my kids out entirely untended for that much time. More time outside would certainly be good for everyone. But it's not the panacea.

I also know I can't control their every wish or action. What I want is to teach them the habits and controls that will give them persistence and creativity. I am pretty sure that four hours a day of the Disney channel are not the way to go.

Has anyone else struggled with this?

Identifying the moment

They happen every day, these little moments where a spark of insight goes off in your head and you realize that this was a turning point: a marker has been passed, a shift has occurred.

Yesterday I was sitting at my desk working while my younger daughter puttered around, fulfilling the maternal mandate that she spend a half hour playing the violin and piano (to balance the hours of television she'd ingested over the holiday weekend.) She's had a great spurt of enthusiasm this year for violin this year, fueled I think by an energetic young teacher at school who's found the right way to motivate her. She also takes piano, and seems to delight in trying to stump her teacher with detailed questions about music theory: what happens if this or that occurs? Why is this like this, what would happen if that...? I secretly love it.

She was going back and forth between her instruments when she suddenly fixated on the violin and how to play different scales. She wanted to show me the fingering and how you had to turn the neck to play various notes. I turned to give her my full attention. (I am so happy at these moments to be home.)

As I was listening and watching, it occurred suddenly to me, with the force and clarity of absolute truth: She is so far ahead of me now in all her musical knowledge and abilities! She is 11 years old and she is miles and miles ahead of me and I will never catch up. There was an undertone of feeling just a little old within this realization - but also there was the certainty that she had diverted from me in this area, in this one fork of the many many roads of life. I could study music full time for years and likely never achieve the mastery she is beginning to show. And to think, I'll now spend consistent or even increasing energy to make sure that she continues to practice and learn.

I took piano lesson myself as a kid, but don't even remember how old I was or how far I got when my parents decided I didn't practice enough and the lessons were summarily discontinued. Not that I was a prodigy suddenly deprived of my passion; probably I was happy to have more time to watch television uninterrupted.

But I was very happy for my daughter yesterday. Even the distance I sensed opening up between us was a good thing, a natural thing, and the right thing. Hopefully she will continue to grow and surpass me in many ways. And I guess I'll also be grateful when she keeps coming back and wanting to show me what she's up to!

Sometimes anger is the only right response

Yesterday's front page story in my local paper was about Nataline Sarkesian, a 17-year-old girl who died last week after a long bout with cancer and her insurance company's refusal to cover a liver transplant. I read on line that the hospital had found a donor in mid-December but needed $75,000 in cash from the family to proceed. The insurance company reversed itself only after bloggers prompted hundreds of outraged calls and the family staged a rally late last week outside the company headquarters. Hours after the insurance company's decision she was dead.

Here is one of those times where I struggle with the Buddhist admonition to feel compassion even for those you don't like. Here is one of those times I feel that anger is the only appropriate response. I get limited satisfaction from saying to the Democratic presidential candidates, when they call asking for money: Talk to me when you support single-payer universal health care. I get limited satisfaction from talking to people individually as much as I can about the structural defects of our health care system.

Are these slow and small actions enough?

The bottom line is that our health care is driven by the profit motive. Individual and even collective care will always suffer in comparison, and it will be justified by corporate statements such as "people just don't want to pay for experimental care," as if they were to be faulted for that -- as if the could of course afford it if they wanted to and instead were off at the blackjack tables.

When I mentally plot the lines of each of these factors - the profit motive and entrenched corporate power on one axis, the growing outrage and ill health of the voting public on the other- it seems the intersection that will prompt change is just impossibly far away.

I'm not advocating pipe bombs or personal violence against anyone. But I'm afraid simply showing compassion and waiting for people to come around to your example simply doesn't work in the face of systemic greed and power. Of course mindfulness is always needed, to determine compassionate and effective action. But action is also needed.

Working Parent's Dilemma

Mornings for working parents are a tightrope walk at best. I have to say that this year is about the best it's ever been: both kids are in middle school, I am no longer scrambling to assemble healthy lunches and snacks before 8 am, and am even in the nice habit of making a hot breakfast and sitting down for a minute before the bus comes. On the perfect morning, we all sit together and look at the paper to see what's happening in the world.

But I was reminded this week how quickly family life can slide, any time, into stress that wants to break out of the nice little walls we try to build. Waking my oldest at 6:30 or so, she looked up at me sleepily, and with real and not manufactured pain, uttered the dreaded words: Mommy, I'm sick.

I am always vaguely ashamed of the first thought in my mind at this moment. Even as my hand reaches to feel the forehead, and one part of my mind inventories the kitchen to see what I have on hand for comfort foods, the rest of me is immediately thinking, What meetings do I have today? And when? And who with? Can they be cancelled? Postponed? Can she come with me? In the space of a minute my mental space goes from calm to

Within 5 minutes or so the parameters of the day had been established. Little response to the declaration that anyone staying home sick gets no tv or internet for the day. Slight fever. No meetings. A day of rest.

Fortunately, I was able to work from home the whole day. Actually I got to enjoy making her Ramen noodles and spending time together.

And I realize how lucky I am. I've got a good job that lets me be a mom. Parents who drive a bus or punch a clock face the same demands as parents and lose a day's pay or even their jobs. The way the US economy is going, more and more jobs are service jobs, and don't offer vacation or sick time.