Sweet Not Always

Busted

2012-01-24T13:25:00.005-05:00

In November I noticed that my blog template seems to have spontaneously collapsed. I have no idea what happened. It's worked for nearly 3 years. I don't know how to fix it, short of reloading the entire template-- a huge job. If anyone knows how to repair it please let me know. If you're new to my blog, I assure you that it doesn't look anything like this squished mess. It's supposed to look like this!

What We Want

2011-11-13T10:54:00.000-05:00

9/11: Real Homeland Security

2011-09-11T17:55:00.006-04:00

In the media today there was a lot of talk about how much we've learned since 9/11. All of it is about our "security." It seems we missed the point.

If we help feed, clothe and care for countries in need without expecting anything in return, I think that would be the end of terrorism.

If we persist in propping up dictators and maintaining troops against the will of the people, then terrorist acts against us are a given.

If we continue to use food as a weapon of coercion by creating embargoes, then we shouldn't be surprised that terrorism thrives.

We aren't at the mercy of the meanies out there. What did we do (or fail to do) to allow a bin Laden to develop? That's the question.

As a nation we had a great opportunity to talk about that question. We chose instead to funnel our pain into hatred and go to war. Twice.

I pray that those of us who believe in peace will speak up again and take back the reins.

No More War. Food Not Bombs.

9/11 Morning Prayers

2011-09-11T09:46:00.002-04:00

May all those who were killed on 9/11 have an auspicious rebirth. May they benefit beings wherever they are.

May all those who survived 9/11 be cleansed of their fear & sorrow. May they dedicate their lives to benefiting others.

May those who celebrated the killings on 9/11 be cleansed of their anger & and feel remorse. May they think only of benefiting others.

May our nation "Never Forget" that all nations have experienced sorrow equal to ours at some time in their history.

May people of all faiths unite to bring an era of harmony, respect, acceptance & loving-kindness to our nation.

For Every Stupid There Is A Season

2011-09-06T16:44:00.004-04:00

It's been a long time since I did something overtly stupid. I don't mean things that turn out to be stupid. I do those on a regular basis. I mean something that--given 10 seconds of thought ahead of time-- you'd never even think of doing. When I was about 5 I cut off most of the middle of one eyebrow. Like that.

Today I did something just as stupid.

I put artichoke leaves down the garbage disposal. Now that is just nuts. I know you can't do that. If you can't chew it you can't stick it down the disposal. I had a very quick inner conversation about it that went something like, "I wonder if I can put these down the disposal. Hmm, I don't remember doing it before, but I bet I can. The garbage disposal can take it. Here we go!"

And there they went. All at once, mind you. Because it was just that stupid. As it churned and gagged, I said out loud to the disposal, "Oh come on, you can take it!" I don't know why, but for some reason I turned into a high school football coach and started barking orders at the thing. When the water started backing up into the sink I knew that--despite my excellent coaching advice-- the disposal actually couldn't take it.

I spent the next 30 minutes jamming my hand in the drain and digging out artichoke fibers. I still don't know if I got it all out. Water isn't backing up any more but you know, it sounds a little funny. Incredibly, part of me wants to put something else down there to see if it's working.

Mostly, I'm wondering how many calories I expended with all that. Certainly I must have blown through the 50 or so calories I consumed by eating the crummy artichoke. That bathroom scale better have something good to say about it tomorrow or it might wind up in the disposal, too. The disposal can take it, I'm sure.

"Why the Buddha Touched the Earth"

2011-08-14T15:32:00.006-04:00

This is a great article from The Huffington Post. A must-read. Here's the original link from Huff-Po if you wish to read it there.

Why the Buddha Touched the Earth
by John Stanley and David Loy
"The entire cosmos is a cooperative. The sun, the moon, and the stars live together as a cooperative. The same is true for humans and animals, trees, and the Earth. When we realize that the world is a mutual, interdependent, cooperative enterprise -- then we can build a noble environment. If our lives are not based on this truth, then we shall perish." --Buddhadasa Bhikkhu
"The term 'engaged Buddhism' was created to restore the true meaning of Buddhism. Engaged Buddhism is simply Buddhism applied in our daily lives. If it's not engaged, it can't be called Buddhism. Buddhist practice takes place not only in monasteries, meditation halls and Buddhist institutes, but in whatever situation we find ourselves. Engaged Buddhism means the activities of daily life combined with the practice of mindfulness. --Thich Nhat Hanh
In one of Buddhism's iconic images, Gautama Buddha sits in meditation with his left palm upright on his lap, while his right hand touches the earth. Demonic forces have tried to unseat him, because their king, Mara, claims that place under the bodhi tree. As they proclaim their leader's powers, Mara demands that Gautama produce a witness to confirm his spiritual awakening. The Buddha simply touches the earth with his right hand, and the Earth itself immediately responds: "I am your witness." Mara and his minions vanish. The morning star appears in the sky. This moment of supreme enlightenment is the central experience from which the whole of the Buddhist tradition unfolds.
The great 20th-century Vedantin, Ramana Maharshi said that the Earth is in a constant state ofdhyana. The Buddha's earth-witness mudra (hand position) is a beautiful example of "embodied cognition." His posture and gesture embody unshakeable self-realization. He does not ask heavenly beings for assistance. Instead, without using any words, the Buddha calls on the Earth to bear witness.
The Earth has observed much more than the Buddha's awakening. For the last 3 billion years the Earth has borne witness to the evolution of its innumerable life-forms, from unicellular creatures to the extraordinary diversity and complexity of plant and animal life that flourishes today. We not only observe this multiplicity, we are part of it -- even as our species continues to damage it. Many biologists predict that half the Earth's plant and animal species could disappear by the end of this century, on the current growth trajectories of human population, economy and pollution. This sobering fact reminds us that global warming is the primary, but not the only, extraordinary ecological crisis confronting us today.
Has Mara taken a new form today -- as our own species? Just as Mara claimed the Buddha's sitting-place as his own, Homo sapiens today claims, in effect, that the only really important species is itself. All other species have meaning and value only insofar as they serve our purposes. Indeed, powerful elements of our economic system (notably Big Oil and its enablers) seem to have relocated to the state of "zero empathy," a characteristic of psychopathic or narcissistic personalities.
The Earth community has a self-emergent, interdependent, cooperative nature. We humans have no substance or reality that is separate from this community. Thich Nhat Hanh refers to this as our "inter-being": we and other species "inter-are." If we base our life and conduct on this truth, we transcend the notion that Buddhist practice takes place within a religious framework that promotes only our own individual awakening. We realize the importance of integrating the practice of mindfulness into the activities of daily life. And if we really consider Mother Earth as an integral community and a witness of enlightenment, don't we have a responsibility to protect her through mindful "sacred activism"?
This year the U.S. president will determine whether or not to approve a proposed pipeline, which will extend from the "great American carbon bomb" of the Alberta Tar Sands to the Texas oil refineries. The implications are enormous. The devastation that would result from processing and burning even half the Tar Sands oil is literally incalculable: the resulting increase in atmospheric carbon would trigger "tipping points" for runaway global warming. Our best climate scientist, NASA's James Hansen, states that if this project alone goes ahead, it will be "game over" for the Earth's climate. This is a challenge we cannot evade. It is crucial for Buddhists to join forces with other concerned people in creative and resolute opposition to this potentially fatal new folly.
As the Buddha's enlightenment reminds us, our awakening too is linked to the Earth. The Earth bore witness to the Buddha, and now the Earth needs us to bear witness -- to its dhyana, its steadfastness, the matrix of support it continually provides for living beings. New types of bodhisattvas -- "ecosattvas" -- are needed, who combine the practice of self-transformation with devotion to social and ecological transformation. Yes, we need to write letters and emails to the President, hopefully to influence his decision. But we may also need to consider other strategies if such appeals are ignored, such as nonviolent civil disobedience. That's because this decision isn't just about a financial debt ceiling. This is about the Earth's carbon ceiling. This is about humanity's survival ceiling. As the Earth is our witness.

Save the Parrots of Troy

2011-08-09T20:37:00.004-04:00

Yesterday our parrot rescue (Garuda Aviary) became aware of this horrific situation in Troy, Ohio.

Watch the coverage provided by WHIOTV.

Then please sign our petition and share it widely.

Buddha of Compassion

2011-07-16T11:26:00.003-04:00

I spent most of the past week traveling to Washington, DC, to receive teachings and the Kalachakra empowerment from His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama. While it was extremely difficult physically and it will take many days to recover, the blessings will remain for countless lifetimes. Innumerable beings will benefit from the merit dedicated to them. So today while my body rests, my mind rejoices.

Here is a sweet video that exemplifies the love, unity and respect His Holiness brings to the world. I'll post more in the coming days.

600 Ways to Heal

2011-06-26T08:46:00.002-04:00

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Saga Dawa Dog

2011-06-15T10:40:00.010-04:00

I call Patch my Saga Dawa Dog because I adopted him on Saga Dawa Duchen in 2003, amidst a stream of miracles.(Saga Dawa Duchen is a Buddhist holy day that marks the Buddha's enlightenment and parinirvana.)

I had connected to KPC through Ani Pema 6 months before, when my dog Laika was struggling with a horrific, undiagnosable condition. By May, it became apparent that Laika was dying. I’d rescued her from the dog-unfriendly streets of Spain 10 years before. She was my heart and joy, and my sorrow grew daily. Because she was unable to support her own wasting body, I kept her with me and carried her everywhere—to work, to prayer shifts, etc….

We were in the early phases of building the Amitabha Stupa in Sedona, Arizona, under the guidance of stupa expert Tulku Sang Ngag Rinpoche. He was giving a public talk on stupas at Sedona Creative Life Center. Though I had mixed feelings about going, the life of the Buddha taught me I would ultimately be of greater benefit to Laika if I accomplished the Path.

So Laika laid limp and blind in the back seat of my car that evening, as I filled my eyes and ears with Dharma, praying it would benefit her. At the end, Ani Pema came running up and said, “Bring your car to the exit right away. Tulku wants to bless Laika!” She had told Tulku about Laika’s desperate condition. We drove up just as Tulku emerged. I opened the back door of the car, and Tulku gave Laika a very long blessing. Through my tears of joy, I could see Laika do what she had not been able to do for weeks—lift her head towards Tulku, as if she were receiving the blessing. “Look, look at Laika!” Pema said with equal delight.

Two weeks later, with “Invocation” playing in the room, Laika died peacefully in my arms as I tapped the crown of her head. I got a message through to Jetsunma right away. I felt surprisingly joyful. Laika had burned up so much negative karma, and she’d had a good death, with so many blessings. That afternoon, I drove to Sedona for a Shower of Blessings tsog to be with sangha and dedicate merit to Laika. I was winding through Oak Creek Canyon, when all of a sudden I “felt” Laika everywhere, in everything. I don’t know how to describe it. I certainly wasn’t expecting it. It was as if I could feel her joyful presence in every living cell around me, buzzing, sparkling.

Within another 2 weeks on Saga Dawa, I adopted Patch in Prescott, got him acquainted with my foster dog Lucy, and we hurried to KPC. As we arrived, I learned that Jetsunma was teaching. I had never seen her in person before! I tied the dogs on the shaded porch. The place was packed. I wedged myself into the little prayer room for the last 10 minutes. I could see Jetsunma’s right arm and was overjoyed to see my Lama for the first time. The dogs waited quietly outside. Jetsunma stopped abruptly and said, “Someone bring those dogs inside. It’s too hot.” There was no way she could have known there were dogs out there!

I marvel at this string of miracles, and at the miracle Jetsunma displayed for me within minutes of seeing her. I rejoice in Patch’s excellent karma—on his first day as a sangha member, he got to hear his Lama speak.

United States v. William Cassidy

2011-06-11T20:05:00.002-04:00

Here is an update on William Cassidy, aka "Tenpa Rinpoche." The original copy of this legal statement appears on our temple's website and on Jetsunma's blog.

United States v. William Cassidy 8:11-cr-00091

Dialogue and critical thinking are valuable gifts we share as sentient beings. Freedom of belief and freedom of expression are valuable rights we cherish in our democracy. Hatred and violent threats, however, are neither valuable nor right. In recent years, Jetsunma and KPC have been threatened repeatedly and made the target of hateful, homophobic and misogynistic epithets. These threats were reported to law enforcement and, following a full investigation conducted by FBI and U.S. Department of Justice, federal criminal charges were filed in the case of United States v. William Cassidy, 8:11-cr-00091 and he has been charged with cyberstalking.

We understand from law enforcement that, as part of that criminal investigation, search warrants were executed upon the residences of both William Cassidy and an individual named Andrew Wilson. KPC has no comment on these matters and possesses no authority over the ultimate outcome of this criminal case. The matter now is up to the courts and our criminal justice system. KPC has cooperated fully with law enforcement requests and will continue to do so.

What matters remain in our hands and in the hands of all responsible, peace-seeking and law abiding citizens is our own behavior. Persons seeking the path of truth do not taunt and seek to hurt others through hateful and demeaning epithets directed at women and sexual orientation. That is not an esoteric concept but common decency. Hatred and fear wear many masks in our world but their true face is eventually revealed. We call upon all to engage in healthy dialogue and critical thinking free of hatred and fear. Love, forgiveness and acceptance are the way of peace and enlightenment.

And Another

2011-05-20T11:50:00.002-04:00

I saw this today on Tsem Tulku Rinpoche's blog and thought I'd post it here, too. Please visit his blog and enjoy all the treasures there.

Untitled

2011-05-11T09:32:00.005-04:00

Bring tissues.

"Robin Hood In Reverse"

2011-04-14T11:29:00.003-04:00

Senator Bernie Sanders-- one of my personal heroes--on the Senate floor, April 12, 2011.

May compassion and respect for all people arise in the hearts and minds of all Americans.

Karma

2011-01-15T11:51:00.003-05:00

The Masses

2011-01-08T09:00:00.008-05:00

I came across this Google map of worldwide mass animal deaths since December and decided to list them here, not to entertain conspiracy theories but to shine a bit of light on the terrible suffering in the world.

Though I only listed the deaths due to unknown or suspicious causes, the Google map also includes a few events listed with known causes-- the 100 pelicans mutilated and intentionally killed in North Carolina , the 10 tons of fish trapped in a broken fishing net in New Zealand, the 150 tons of farmed fish who died as a result of overcrowding in Cambodia, and the mass die-offs of penguins and sea birds due to climate change in New Zealand.

Whatever the cause of their deaths, it's heartbreaking to see so many precious beings suffer and die.

Too many fish to count: Florida, Dec 15

Thousands of fish: Philippines, Dec 18

Hundreds of starfish and jellyfish: South Carolina, Dec 23

Scores of fish: Haiti, Dec 27

70 Bats: Arizona, Dec 28

Dozens of fish: Texas, Dec 29

5,000+ blackbirds : Arkansas, Dec 31

500+ blackbirds: Louisiana, Jan 3

Dozens of blackbirds: Kentucky, Jan 3

100,000 fish: Arkansas, Jan 3

2 million fish: Maryland, Jan 3

Thousands of fish: Florida, Jan 4

50-100 Jackdaw birds: Sweden, Jan 4

Hundreds of fish: United Kingdom, Jan 4

Scores of fish: United Kingdom, Jan 4

Hundreds of fish: Ontario, Jan 4

300 Doves: Italy, Jan 6

Tons of fish: Brazil, Jan 6

Hundreds of fish: New Zealand, Jan 6

If you are so inclined, please join me in praying that all these creatures have an auspicious rebirth.

For The Babies

2011-01-03T17:02:00.005-05:00

It isn't often that you can do big things with just a little effort.

Our dog rescue Tara's Babies is competing in the Pepsi Refresh Project during the month of January to win a $250,000 grant. The Pepsi Refresh Project is an online contest--whoever gets the most votes wins the big bucks. We need people to vote for Tara's Babies every day throughout January, and to vote both online and via text if possible. That's right, each person can vote TWICE each day.

Here's how:

1. Watch this video to see Tara's Babies in action and learn what they will do with the grant.

2. This page tells you how to create an account before voting and also explains how to vote. (Your account info is safe. I voted throughout September for another project and assure you they will not use your email or personal info.)

3. Optional: Go to Tara's Babies website and sign up to receive a daily email reminder to vote.

4. To vote by text: Text 105549 to 73774 (that spells "PEPSI")

5. Vote online AND via text EVERY DAY in January.

Please participate in this project. The Babies need you and deserve every good thing we can provide for them.

Dragging in the New Year

2011-01-01T12:17:00.023-05:00

I won't sugarcoat it-- last night was tough. For the past several weeks the Wegener's has been slowly waking up-- not enough to re-treat yet but enough to make my life increasingly difficult. The pain is back and building. The fatigue is increasing. On top of that, I've been sick with a cold that not only ran amok but sent out last-minute invitations to its bacterial buddies for a year-end party. You know how some plants completely wilt when they need watering? That's how I feel-- no reserves at all. Try as I might to stop the chemical cascade, the energy being siphoned by the physical is taking its toll on me emotionally. It's pure biochemistry. And even though I can describe the endocrine feedback loops, knowing that fire is hot doesn't keep it from burning you.

Still, I love our temple's New Year's Eve tradition and wanted to participate. It meant making a deal with the endocrine devil as it were-- pouring in caffeine all afternoon, aware that I'd feel like a truck hit me the next day for the adrenal stress it would cause. (Dealing with chronic illness is like Sophie's Choice every day. Which child do you favor, the body or the mind, and can you ever restore a sense of wholeness once you've chosen one over the other?)

Unfortunately, the caffeine was enough to keep me awake but not enough to jolt me into a celebratory mood. After discovering-- for the zillionth time-- that my favorite coping mechanism of muscling through was not going to work, I finally gave myself permission to surrender. Well, sort of. Complete surrender would have brought me joy. The partial surrender I embraced was just enough to put the brakes on my thoughts that said, "It's New Year's Eve, why aren't you happy?" Or worse, "There's something wrong with you."

But some surrender is better than nothing. It creates spaciousness in the mind that isn't there otherwise. It was in those moments that I found bits of peace-- where I felt carried by the merit of eons of practitioners accomplishing their practice, and where I remembered that nothing is permanent, especially not an emotional state. As much as I wish those moments would have stretched into the entire night, they didn't. It was a struggle even at the end. But it was one night that doesn't--no matter what the Hallmark commercials want us to think-- seal my fate for the coming year. I'm not the same person who rejoiced in last year's New Year's Eve celebration. I'm the one who thinks that's okay.

Peacocks and Prednisone

2010-12-30T12:25:00.004-05:00

Today I finally discovered one good thing about the steroids I have to take for Wegener's. A couple days ago the temperatures here dropped into the teens. Jetsunma asked the sangha to collect blankets and warm clothing and bring them to homeless people living on the streets of D.C. Everyone leaped into action and a couple of our Dharma warriors handed out the items that night.

We plan on collecting and distributing more so I looked to see if I had anything to offer. Actually, I already knew what was there--several pieces of clothing that didn't fit anymore. A winter coat I love. Clothes I wore for winter hiking, snowshoeing, cross-country skiing and bicycling. Brand new socks that don't accommodate the edema in my legs. Prednisone has caused so much weight gain and numerous other problems that I won't be using any of those clothes, at least not for the foreseeable future.

I hesitated, but finally began pulling them out of the closet. Normally when I give away clothing or other items I feel nothing but joy. I don't usually feel the "pull" of my possessions. But this was truly painful. I've held on to these particular things out of hope. They represent the life I had, the health and freedom and choices I enjoyed. I don't know what-- if any-- is coming back, and even though I'm leaving the door open in my mind it's getting harder and harder to imagine being strong again.

As I sorted the clothes, I began a little ritual I do when donating clothing. I clean them and fold them nicely. I remember the joy they brought me. I picture how they will bring joy and comfort to the next person who wears them. I imagine how, at some point when they are wearing these clothes, they will wonder who they came from. I think of the invisible karmic thread that connects us through a shared garment, and how they could only be wearing "my" clothes if in a past life they had provided clothes for me. Then I bless the clothes. I pray that the wearer will have excellent shelter, food and health--all that they need to be happy. I pray that they will never know suffering again.

While all this was going on today--while I was feeling grief alongside joy and trying not to get lost in either-- it struck me that if it weren't for prednisone I wouldn't have anything to donate. All my clothes would fit. I wouldn't be able to do anything at all about homeless people freezing on the streets of D.C. tonight.

At least for today the prednisone was the source of some joy in the world. In swallowing those pills I became like a peacock-- a symbol of transformation in Tibetan Buddhism. Peacocks eat poisonous creatures like snakes and scorpions and it results in spectacular plumage. They literally transform poison into beauty.

With that in mind, I pray that every bit of this disease and every bit of prednisone I take, results in benefit to all beings.

Tear It Down

2010-12-19T10:55:00.009-05:00

Americans have a habit of wanting to tear down structures and replace them. It can be an obsessive habit, really. It’s a frenetic desire to seek happiness from external sources, and if a structure is intact for awhile a kind of restless anxiety builds up. Some change is good of course, but often we want change just for the sake of change—a constant bright, shiny object to distract us from dealing with our own minds.

But before tearing something down, you have to consider what you’re going to replace it with. Would you tear down a hospital to build a strip joint?

There are some on Twitter who spend their days pontificating about how they want to tear down the "structure" known as Kunzang Palyul Choling (KPC), Palyul, all of Vajrayana in fact. They get very excited at the prospect of seeing this in their lifetimes, tweeting about it for days on end. They want destruction and they want it NOW. They need something to think about “out there,” because they lack the courage to think about their own mental poisons. So, they obsessively tweet about destroying the Dharma, Pure Lamas, Pure lineages, stupas, monks and nuns, temples, animal rescues, and anything else that exists in the world to benefit beings.

They want destruction but what do they propose as a replacement? They sure don’t like the idea of Bodhicitta. That word never falls from their lips. So far all they offer is hatred, gossip, slander, threats, divisiveness, harassment and unbelievably foul language,. They offer sticks of dynamite but nothing to fill the crater that would remain in the world if they had their way.

Completely absorbed in their obsession, they exist in an echo chamber of each others’ delusions of grandeur--as if they alone could destroy what Buddhas have created. As if anyone could destroy love and compassion.

Made It To 47

2010-12-11T12:12:00.003-05:00

Big Dogs and BINGO

2010-06-24T14:26:00.015-04:00

Yesterday my Wegener's specialist gave me a mix of good and bad news. The good news is that for the first time in 4 years, the disease is responding well to treatment. The fancy shmancy $10,000-a-dose drug that makes me feel like absolute death for six weeks is doing the trick. Go figure.

Apparently the Wegs dog that lives on this block likes to eat the expensive stuff. Neither cytoxan ($150 per month) nor CellCept ($900 per month) were able to lull the bad-tempered dog to sleep. But Rituxan, with a price tag of $40,000 for a month of treatment, has convinced the dog that a nice long nap is a great idea. (Before you start clicking away at your calculator, Rituxan is only given every 6 to 12 months.)

My doctor surprised me by saying that I don't need to go back on CellCept between Rituxan treatments, and that I don't need to do more Rituxan for a year. He also felt confident that I'd be able to work as a chiropractor again "at some point." Well Howdy Doody, that's good news.

The lousy news was that we lowered the prednisone too much a few weeks ago and it nearly shut down my adrenals. In order to fix it I have to raise the dose all the way back up for a whopping 6 months before trying to taper again. I was within a couple weeks of being off of it.

(For those who have never enjoyed prednisone, here's an analogy of what this news was like: Imagine that you are required to walk 100 miles without stopping. Hour after hour, day after day, you trudge on, stumbling with weakness and pain. Then you finally get within a few feet of the end and someone says, "Nope. Start all over. " And you don't get new shoes.)

All things considered, it's more good news than bad. I can't shout BINGO yet, but it's a pretty decent start.

Spectacular Beauty, Incredible Hate

2010-05-01T15:06:00.014-04:00

Well, I never thought I'd see the day where I would say "Arizona sucks." Arizona is the one place on earth I love with all my heart. Northern Arizona in particular is just spectacular--like walking right into a nature calendar with vast pine forests, mountain peaks, aspen trees, meadows, creeks, caves, rock formations, snow, sunshine and a sky that goes on forever. There is no place in northern Arizona that you can stand without seeing incredible views and mind-boggling beauty. I lived there for 11 years and every single day I rejoiced in my great fortune.

The state has been divided politically for some time now. The largest city in the north, Flagstaff, is undeniably Blue. One of my dear friends there calls Flagstaff "a Blue mountain in a Red state." Even during the Bush regime, when his opponents in the southern cities were afraid to put Gore or Kerry stickers on their cars for fear their tires would be slashed by those who supported "God and country," the Blue north kept things in check.

Janet Napolitano was governor for 6 years and left after accepting President Obama's appointment as Secretary of Homeland Security. Gov. Napolitano was popular with Democrats and Republicans and was able to maintain a lid on the rising tide of Republican hate-mongering. Clearly that has changed with Governor Jan Brewer's passage of Arizona Immigration Law SB1070.

Hate is oozing across this country like the Gulf oil spill-- poisoning everything in its way and threatening our union. Jetsunma has taught that those who live virtuous lives based in compassion and the wish to benefit beings must continue to "hold back the darkness." This appeal is not limited to Buddhists. One of my personal heroes--Archbishop Desmond Tutu-- does just that, and wrote an excellent piece for the Huffington Post arguing against the Arizona Immigration Law. (I'm copying it here in case the link expires.)

Arizona: The Wrong Answer
by Desmond Tutu
I am saddened today at the prospect of a young Hispanic immigrant in Arizona going to the grocery store and forgetting to bring her passport and immigration documents with her. I cannot be dispassionate about the fact that the very act of her being in the grocery store will soon be a crime in the state she lives in. Or that, should a policeman hear her accent and form a "reasonable suspicion" that she is an illegal immigrant, she can -- and will -- be taken into custody until someone sorts it out, while her children are at home waiting for their dinner.

Equally disturbing is what will happen in the mind of the policeman. The police talk today about how they do not wish to, and will not, engage in racial profiling. Yet faced with the option of using common sense and compassion, or harassing a person who has done nothing wrong, a particularly sinister aspect of Arizona's new immigration law will be hanging over his head. He can be personally sued, by anyone, for failing to enforce this inhumane new act.

I recognize that Arizona has become a widening entry point for illegal immigration from the South. The wave has brought with it rising violence and drug smuggling.

But a solution that degrades innocent people, or that makes anyone with broken English a suspect, is not a solution. A solution that fails to distinguish between a young child coming over the border in search of his mother and a drug smuggler is not a solution.

I am not speaking from an ivory tower. I lived in the South Africa that has now thankfully faded into history, where a black man or woman could be grabbed off the street and thrown in jail for not having his or her documents on their person.

How far can this go? We lived it -- police waking a man up in the middle of the night and hauling him off to jail for not having his documents on his person while he slept. The fact that they were in his nightstand near the bed was not good enough.

Of course if you suggested such a possibility today to an Arizona policeman he would be adamant that he would never do such a thing. And I would believe him. Arizona is a long way from apartheid South Africa.

The problem is, under the new law, the one or two who would do it are legitimized. All they have to say is that they believed that illegal immigrants were being harbored in the house. They would be protected and sanctioned by this law.

Abominations such as apartheid do not start with an entire population suddenly becoming inhumane. They start here. They start with generalizing unwanted characteristics across an entire segment of a population. They start with trying to solve a problem by asserting superior force over a population. They start with stripping people of rights and dignity - such as the right to be presumed innocent until proven guilty - that you yourself enjoy. Not because it is right, but because you can. And because somehow, you think this is going to solve a problem.

However, when you strip a man or a woman of their basic human rights, you strip them of their dignity in the eyes of their family and their community, and even in their own eyes. An immigrant who is charged with the crime of trespassing for simply being in a community without his papers on him is being told he is committing a crime by simply being. He or she feels degraded and feels they are of less worth than others of a different color skin. These are the seeds of resentment, hostilities and in extreme cases, conflict.

Such "solutions" solve nothing. As already pointed out, even by people on the police force, Arizona's new laws will split the communities, make it less likely that people in the immigrant communities will work with the police. They will create conditions favorable to the very criminals these laws are trying to disarm.

The Latinos in Arizona have not come to Arizona because they want to live in communities wracked with violence and crime. I would guess that the most recent arrivals have fled their border towns and the growing violence there as drug lords tightened their control of the communities. They want to live and raise their children in peace, just as you or I do.

I am certain that, given the chance, the leaders of the Latino immigrant communities in Arizona would enthusiastically work with the state to find constructive solutions to these problems. I am very sure that they would like, as much as others, to rid Arizona of the drug smugglers, human traffickers and other criminal elements infiltrating their communities.

We can only hope that this law will be thrown out of the courts in short order. I do not disagree with the calls to boycott the businesses in the state until it is turned around.

In the meantime, it has opened the door to some smart state leaders sitting down with the leaders of the Latino communities in Arizona and hammering out some solutions that actually work. Hopefully these solutions would recognize the difference between a drug smuggler and a man willing to stand outside a gas station in the hot sun for hours in the hopes that someone will give him some work for the day.

The problem of migrating populations is not going to go away any time soon. If anyone should know this, it should be Americans, many of whom landed here themselves to escape persecution, famine or conflict. With the eyes of the world now on them, Arizona has the opportunity to create a new model for dealing with the pitfalls, and help the nation as a whole find its way through the problems of illegal immigration. But to work, it must be a model that is based on a deep respect for the essential human rights Americans themselves have grown up enjoying.

Twenty Pens for The People

2010-03-23T19:39:00.003-04:00

Cancelation Notice

2010-03-01T15:20:00.003-05:00

("Why--Part 2" is still in the works.)

Today I canceled my private health insurance. I've held onto it since I stopped working in 2006, always expecting/hoping to be back to work within a few months. I'm glad I had it for the first 2.5 yrs, since I didn't qualify for Medicare until then and wouldn't have had any way to pay for my care. I have lived in constant fear of losing this policy, even though I've had Medicare for 1.5 yrs. (As soon as I go back to work I'll lose Medicare, and with our current disaster of a system, I'd be completely unable to get insurance at any price.)

When I bought the policy 6 yrs ago, the premiums were $143/month with a $2,500 annual deductible. It's gone up every year-- usually around 25% a year. I just got notice that it increased again to $725/mo with an annual deductible of $2,950. This represents a 400% in 6 yrs.

If I were still working as a chiropractor and raised my rates 400%, I'd be charging $1,000/hour. I could treat Oprah.

My insurance company (United Healthcare) was one of the top 3 companies reporting enormous profits in 2009. They gave their CEOs enormous bonuses, paid for by sick people living so far below the poverty line they can't even see it.

For the past year, my insurance has cost 84% of my Social Security Disability income--my only income. The stress of living like this has been crushing, to say the least. This weekend I conceded that there's no way I could afford such a monthly expense even if I were able to work.

I have Medicare and a Medicare assistance program called Qualified Medicare Beneficiary (QMB). (QMB is for low income people.) Between the two, I have 100% coverage and premiums, etc... are paid for.

It was terrifying to make the call to cancel it. But now I feel like a huge burden has been lifted. I can finally relax a little and focus on getting well. I have no doubt this stress has allowed the Wegs to dig its flinty heels into my body more easily.

Well Wegs, be warned: I get more Rituxan starting Wednesday. I might just call and cancel you, too.

Why-- Part 1

2010-02-17T20:54:00.004-05:00

Q : Why?

A : Karma Karma Karma Karma Karma Karma Karma Karma Karma Karma Karma Karma Karma Karma Karma Karma Karma Karma Karma Karma Karma Karma Karma Karma Karma Karma Karma Karma Karma Karma Karma Karma Karma Karma Karma Karma Karma Karma Karma Karma Karma Karma Karma Karma Karma Karma Karma Karma Karma Karma Karma Karma Karma Karma Karma Karma Karma Karma Karma Karma Karma Karma Karma Karma Karma Karma Karma Karma Karma Karma Karma Karma Karma Karma Karma Karma Karma Karma Karma Karma Karma Karma Karma Karma Karma Karma Karma Karma Karma Karma Karma Karma Karma Karma Karma Karma Karma Karma Karma Karma Karma Karma Karma Karma Karma Karma Karma Karma Karma Karma Karma Karma Karma Karma Karma Karma Karma Karma Karma Karma Karma Karma Karma Karma Karma Karma Karma Karma Karma Karma Karma Karma Karma Karma Karma Karma Karma Karma Karma Karma Karma Karma Karma Karma Karma Karma Karma Karma Karma Karma Karma Karma Karma Karma Karma Karma Karma Karma Karma Karma Karma Karma Karma Karma Karma Karma Karma Karma Karma Karma Karma Karma Karma Karma Karma Karma Karma Karma Karma Karma Karma Karma Karma Karma Karma Karma Karma Karma Karma Karma Karma Karma Karma Karma Karma Karma Karma Karma Karma Karma Karma Karma Karma Karma Karma Karma Karma Karma Karma Karma Karma Karma Karma Karma Karma Karma Karma Karma Karma Karma Karma Karma Karma Karma Karma Karma Karma Karma Karma Karma Karma Karma Karma Karma Karma Karma Karma Karma Karma Karma Karma Karma Karma Karma Karma Karma Karma Karma Karma Karma Karma Karma Karma Karma Karma Karma Karma Karma Karma Karma Karma Karma Karma Karma Karma Karma Karma Karma Karma Karma Karma Karma Karma Karma Karma Karma Karma Karma Karma Karma Karma Karma Karma Karma Karma Karma Karma Karma Karma Karma Karma Karma Karma Karma Karma Karma Karma Karma Karma Karma Karma Karma Karma Karma Karma Karma Karma Karma Karma Karma Karma Karma Karma Karma Karma Karma Karma Karma Karma Karma Karma Karma Karma Karma

For Dr. King, With Love

2010-01-18T18:16:00.007-05:00

Today we honor the life of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. If you're on Twitter, you've seen the outpouring of loving-kindness towards one another along with a feast of Dr. King quotes being circulated. It's quite beautiful. People from all over the world honor this man.

I've loved Dr. King since I was a child. I naturally gravitated to his message of hope and of peace obtained through non-violent means. I grew up in a military family, with the fallout of the Vietnam War evident all around me. I saw how war divides nations and makes enemies of friends. I saw how war leads to repeated conflict and inevitably, to more war. I saw how families lose loved ones to war and how that loss does not only take place through death. Even at a young age I understood the insanity of war and the reasonableness of peace.

Because of Dr. King, I grew up with deep faith in such things as peace and civil rights. I heard and read his speeches throughout my youth. Today I learned that Dr. King nominated the Vietnamese Buddhist monk and teacher Thich Nhat Hanh for the Nobel Peace Prize way back in 1967. What a testament to his belief in upholding compassion and non-violence no matter who or what the source.

As I write this, I'm moved to tears by the ceaseless waves of love that continue to wash over the people in all nations as a result of this one man. I pray for Dr. King's auspicious rebirth. May he return again and again to benefit beings.

Perspective

2010-01-06T21:23:00.001-05:00

While I'm working on my next post, please enjoy this wonderful piece by Carl Sagan.

First Words

2010-01-01T15:30:00.014-05:00

Wow, I am one stubborn nun. Our temple has a long-standing New Year's Eve tradition, but for one reason or another I've never been able to make it. Last year I was absolutely sure I'd get there, but I wound up in the hospital and got released late New Year's Eve. This year, there was a winter storm alert for New Year's Eve-- icy, windy, freezing rain. A great night to stay out late and drive down rural roads with deer leaping out, right?

Right! I may be in rough shape physically, but I can sure find the strength to dig my heels in when I want something. And it totally worked.

At ten o'clock the sangha gathered to do the Guru Rinpoche practice called "Shower of Blessings." It's a beautiful practice and accumulates great merit that is then offered to all beings. 2009 was a tough year for me. One of the toughest I've had, actually. Spending the last couple hours of it chanting the pure syllables of the 7-Line Prayer was enough to bring tears of joy to my eyes. It was delicious. Surrounded by our beautiful sangha, the precious altars and thangkas, all the blessings the walls of the temple have seen, I inwardly expressed deep gratitude to Jetsunma for making it all possible.

When we finished the practice, we spent awhile meditating and contemplating aspirational prayers for the new year. We meditated in silence until midnight. Then the first words we spoke were our Refuge and Bodhisattva Vows.

Refuge Vow
I take Refuge in the Lama.
I take Refuge in the Buddha.
I take Refuge in the Dharma.
I take Reguge in the Sangha.
(3x)

Bodhisattva Vow
I dedicate myself to the liberation and salvation of all sentient beings. I offer my body, speech and mind in order to accomplish the purpose of all sentient beings. I will return in whatever form necessary, under extraordinary circumstances, to end suffering. Let me be born in time unpredictable, in places unknown, until all sentient beings are liberated from the cycle of death and rebirth.

Taking no thought for my comfort or safety, precious Lama (Buddha), make of me a pure and perfect instrument by which the end of suffering and death in all forms might be realized. Let me achieve perfect enlightenment for the sake of all beings. And then, by my hand and heart alone, may all beings achieve full enlightenment and perfect liberation.
~ Jetsunma Ahkon Lhamo

We lit candles and offered them on the altars while making silent aspirational prayers. I offered mine at the "Twenty One Taras" altar. Tara is the mother of all Buddhas. She is active and powerful. She hears the cries of all beings and responds instantly when called on. Jetsunma was recognized as the emanation of White Tara, so praying to Tara has a special significance for her students.

Everywhere in the world there is suffering. I prayed for Tara to bring swift comfort to those who need it-- for miraculous cure of all disease, for an end to hunger, poverty and conflicts great and small. I have confidence that Tara heard my prayers and that there is less suffering in the world today as a result.

It was the best New Year's Eve I ever had. I pray that yours was, as well.

"Tenpa Rinpoche" and Other Urban Legends

2009-12-10T23:05:00.006-05:00

"If you do not tell the truth about yourself,
then you cannot tell it about other people."
~ Virginia Woolfe

In the 3.5 years since I was diagnosed with Wegener's Granulomatosis, I've seen more doctors than I can count. I've been hospitalized about 20 times and long ago lost count of my ER visits. Some of these doctors have been excellent-- truly exceptional in all ways. Others have ranged from great all the way to downright awful. That's to be expected with such a large sample size of physicians.

Treating a rare disease like Wegener's is unbelievably difficult, and I have a pretty tough case according to my doctors. Even my lousiest of lousy doctors from the past acknowledged the complexity of treating me.

All except one.

Ah, but that statement implies he was a doctor and not just someone pretending to be one, doesn't it?

I've kept a particular chapter of my life off this blog. The individual I'm about to discuss lives a dark, mean life-- one seeped in the cruel desire to knowingly inflict harm. I've wanted to protect my readers from his nastiness. I'm only posting it now because 1) I fear for others who are being deceived by him and 2) he's now decided to post lies about me on his blog and on Twitter.

I don't like bullies. Never have. I'm just not the cowering type. I have been known to be overly trusting, though, and have a very hard time believing that someone could actually want to hurt and deceive me. And due to that, I was totally blind-sided.

So (sigh) here goes... In late 2007, a man who calls himself Tenpa Rinpoche contacted one of our monks in Mongolia. He claimed to be a reincarnated lama-- a tulku-- who blogged about Jetsunma and our temple in a favorable way. (Red Flag #1--Hi, I'm a lama you've never heard of) In Tibetan Buddhism, tulkus are treated with great respect. "Tenpa Rinpoche" claimed that his recognition as an American tulku was kept secret. (Red Flag #2--We had never heard of any other Tulku whose recognition was kept secret) He told us which authentic Lamas recognized him, and we took him at his word. (Red Flag #3-- All the Lamas he listed were conveniently dead and couldn't attest to or deny his claim.) We didn't ask to see his credentials/ official recognition documents.

He also told us he was a physician trained as a Tibetan Medical Doctor-- a wholistic approach similar to Chinese Medicine. I have deep respect for Tibetan Medicine, knowing the complex training true practitioners must undergo, as well as its curative and restorative powers.

The man who calls himself Tenpa Rinpoche also told us he had Stage IV lung cancer and didn't have long to live. He claimed to be living alone in the California desert without proper medical care or the ability to care for himself. Jetsunma, with ceaseless compassion, invited him to join her at our Arizona retreat land called Dakini Valley.

While they were there, I had a dream about him in which he helped me. The next day I told another monk about the dream. He passed the letter on to "Tenpa Rinpoche," who said he could definitely help me, and I should come to Dakini Valley right away.

At that point in time, I had been on oxygen for 1.5 years and was extremely debilitated. The initial course of treatment had failed and I'd had a non-stop stream of complications-- some life-threatening. I had a couple of good doctors, but even they were stumped as to what to do next, as they were not specialists in treating Wegener's. I hadn't been able to return to work in 1.5 yrs and couldn't even walk my dogs. I was in despair. The idea of a Tibetan Medicine Doctor who was also a tulku treating me was a ray of hope.

I went to see him within a couple of days. Thankfully-- and I cannot say "thankfully" with enough emphasis-- Jetsunma was there with me the whole time. He pretended to read my pulses and scolded me quite harshly for taking chemo, even though it is the standard of care for treating Wegener's. He gave me traditional Tibetan medicine which is quite famous for clearing the subtle energies of the body. It is so powerful that even a dying person would feel better to some degree. He assured me that it wouldn't interfere with my medications, though he mocked me for continuing to take them.

I followed his instructions over the course of the next 3 weeks, and I did notice an improvement in my energy and strength. I had sat in the presence of my Lama that entire day-- at times enveloped in her arms as she consoled me. It is an immeasurable blessing to spend time with one's Lama. A pure Lama such as Jetsunma can remove many obstacles to one's health.

I believed "Tenpa Rinpoche's" claims to be a real Tulku and a real physician, so I wrote him and thanked him profusely for what I thought were his blessings.

Within a couple months however, it was clear that my health was seriously declining. I was extremely short of breath, weak and in excruciating pain. All the symptoms that indicated a major Wegener's flare. By then, our sangha had taken "Tenpa Rinpoche" into a sangha member's home and were providing him with 24-hour care. We thought he was dying. He heard that I was in bad shape and offered to treat me again.

I explained that the increased energy and strength had been temporary and that I was declining rapidly. He again pretended to read my pulses. Then he told me I was "perfectly healthy" and "cured." When I expressed my doubts, he made the remarkable claim that I was faking my illness and should be back at work instead of "wasting [his] time." I could barely walk 5 feet unassisted. He also told me to stop taking my medications-- that they were weakening me and convincing me I was still sick.

Even through the cloud of pain, I realized he was wrong. I knew I'd die if I went off the meds. I stood on the brink of death and had the good sense to take a step back.

Within a few weeks, "Tenpa Rinpoche" asked me to open a wholistic practice with him-- I as a chiropractor and he as a Tibetan Medical Doctor. Then he proceeded to explain what kind of a practice he envisioned, which is when I felt the floor fall out below me. He said we'd first find a lawyer who would agree to send us Personal Injury and Worker's Comp cases that we could "bilk for money." He explained that my Chiropractic license would allow us to bill insurance. He said, "I'll meet with the lawyer alone and we'll have us a talk. That's a conversation you don't want to know about, believe me." I told him that my office was a 100% cash practice (ie no insurance), a sweet family practice that specialized in prenatal and pediatric care. I never did PI or WC because I don't like it. (You often have to deal with sleazy lawyers, bought-off doctors and malingering patients.) He replied "Those days are over." I became nauseous, my knees felt weak and I felt faint. I have strong ethics and the thought of working like this was inconceivable to me.

I was nowhere near being able to work and he was (I believed) a dying man, so I allowed him to talk about this imaginary practice over the course of the next couple weeks. He told me my opposition to the idea was because I had "concepts" about the way I practiced, and those needed to be cut. This is another way he hooked me into believing him-- by preying on my desire to change.

Nothing came of it, and within a couple months the jig was up, as they say.

In that time, we discovered his real identity is William Cassidy. He's neither a tulku nor a physician, and he certainly doesn't have lung cancer. Actually, he's a convicted felon who was in violation of his probation at the time. Before he darkened our doorstep, William Cassidy had been charged with raping his wife, first-degree arson and attempted battery constituting domestic violence. He had pleaded guilty to arson and attempted battery and was released on probation after serving part of his sentence in Nevada. When it was discovered that he had violated the terms of his probation, it was revoked and he was returned to prison to serve out his remaining sentence.

By the time he was released, he was one angry guy. He had stolen financial records from our Buddhist organization while we were caring for him and didn't like that we called him on it. Because of all this, and because we had discovered his true identity, he began a campaign to defame my Lama, our organization, our practitioners, the monks and nuns, you name it. He has used his blog to spread hatred and lies. It's been a pretty ugly couple of years. You can read about the rest of it here.

Yesterday on Twitter someone referred to him as "Tenpa Rinpoche." They seemed to think he was really a tulku, so I told them about his real identity. Today he wrote a pretty horrific blog about me as a result.

He claims that I was "up and running in [my] medical practice" the last time he saw me (in early 2008). That's all news to me! For one, I'm not a medical doctor, I'm a chiropractor. So I had a Chiropractic practice, not a medical one. That's not just a technicality, it's a matter of training and licensing. Furthermore, all of my patients, friends, sangha members and physicians know that I haven't been able to return to work since I was diagnosed in June, 2006. I moved to Maryland a year ago and am still nowhere near being able to work.

He claims that I "gleefully explained all the ways it is possible to cheat insurance companies." I guess when he decided to lie, he forgot that I never dealt with insurance. I'd have no idea how to work with them, much less deceive them.

He claims that insurance companies are "cheating [me]" since I moved to Maryland. I have no idea what this means. My insurance is paying for my medical treatment with no arguments. I champion health care reform because everyone deserves the excellent coverage that I have.

He also spends a little time in familiar, cruel territory--telling me my Lama is harmful to me, that I've broken my vows, that my speaking the truth about him is "unseemly," that my lungs and kidneys are "collapsing," that I don't have long to live, and that I will be reborn as a two-headed snake.

Golly.

Though it feels like it's soiling my blog to post it, I'm copying his entire post here for you to read.

Holy (Sweet) Not Always

(The post begins with a giant picture of a real two-headed snake.)

Here is a letter that I received almost two years ago to the day:

Dear Tulku Tenpa Rinpoche,

I must apologize for interrupting what I hope is still a beautiful day in California. I hope you are doing well, finding restoration in the ocean air. I lived in southern California for some time, spent a lot of time on the beach. Even today I find that remembering the waves washing in and out-- the way they swell out of nowhere, crash thunderously, and the impossibly tiny fizzy sound produced as the last bit of water is drawn back from the sand--brings a cleansing kind of energy to my mind. And though your mind has no need of cleansing, may it be the perfect medicine for your body.

I am not a gifted writer, so I recognize a complete lack of segue here.... please forgive me. I wanted to give you an update on how I'm doing. With a few ups and downs, I feel just great! There was an immediate sparkle back in my eyes. I could call it "chi" or "life force" or my "giddy-up," but whatever it is, I feel alive again. I have been shedding the skin of a sick person-- most happy to be leaving it behind-- and remembering what vitality feels like. I've even had actual dreams of doing physical activities I used to enjoy. My mental clarity is coming back, too. In all, I feel quite like I'm rising out of a deep sleep (maybe more like a coma!).

I'm doing my best to receive your many blessings, to really work with what you told me and change. (While it can sometimes be a negative habitual tendency, I am quite tenacious when given a challenge!) Rinpoche, I am so grateful to have received such a blessing. Even my puny mind can recognize some part of the enormity of what you did for me. The tenderness with which you and Jetsunma cared for me still makes me cry. I am still with you, with Jetsunma, as though none of us have left that room. When you have a moment, please guide me as to where to go from here.

More importantly, though, please take care and nurture yourself back to excellent health. I make this plea to you on behalf of all sentient beings : Please stay. Please remain strong. Please hold back the darkness and help us find our way out.

Much love,

(signed)

Sedona, Arizona

With that thought in mind, it is of singular interest to me when I see that same individual -- now in Maryland -- tweeting and posting all sorts of ridiculous nonsense, hither and yon. So, since the above letter contains the specific request, "guide me as to where to go from here," I do believe I will respond.

Dear Suffering Human Being In Samsara:

The best place to go from here is examination of the completely developed result of the actions your cohort has ordered you to perform.

You have engaged in verbally abusing someone. "Verbal abuse" is defined by a specific person who is addressed, harsh speech to that person, and that person's resultant discomfort. The types of verbal abuse are described as (1) public speech that exposes someone's faults, (2) indirect speech that wounds someone, and (3) private speech that wounds someone. The completely developed result of verbal abuse is rebirth as a sentient being in hell. If born as a human, the result is to enjoy engaging in harsh speech. One will hear unpleasant words and sounds. One will be constantly criticized. Even if one tries to make amends, this will become the cause of further criticism. The environment will be hot and dry, with numerous diseases, and poor water.

You have also directly engaged in divisive speech, defined by two people who are either neutral or in harmony, speech intended to divide the parties, and actual discord between the parties because of said speech. Divisive speech is described as (1) public speech, directly addressed to the parties, (2) indirect speech, and (3) private speech. The completely developed result of divisive speech is rebirth as a sentient being in hell. If born as a human, the result will be to enjoy discord, and to live an exceedingly lonely life. There will be numerous family quarrels, and one's family will be broken. The environment will be inhospitable, and travel will be difficult.

Engaging in verbal abuse and divisive speech is unseemly conduct for someone who has taken vows as a nun. It is made even more unseemly when one has taken vows as a physician, and finally, it approaches the level of mindlessly reckless behavior when one is as close to death as you are.

Indeed, when I encounter someone who professes to keep the vows of a Buddhist nun, and those of a physician, who openly and notoriously engages in verbal abuse and divisive speech -- even to the extent of addressing such speech to the Nirmanakaya -- I am left with the impression that this person runs a very real danger of being reborn as a two-headed snake.

So, what to do? At this point, it is not enough to refrain from such unwholesome conduct, nor is it enough to practice the opposite, wholesome conduct. Even confession has its limitations -- after all, we are not Catholics here.

Permit me to suggest that what might be enough is to carefully examine the view that permits such speech to take place, albeit in a fashion that transcends care and examination.

It is an interesting situation, don't you think? Your precious teacher, incapable of fault, literally brings you to me. She tells you to believe one version of reality. You have one sort of view at this juncture, and with a kind of shorthand, we will call this your "positive" view. You believe you have been helped, and helped by a mighty power.

Subsequently, your precious teacher, incapable of fault, literally tears you away from me. She tells you to believe another, opposite version of reality. You have another sort of view at this juncture, which we will call your "negative" view. You believe you have been harmed, and harmed by a mighty power.

Lets take your precious teacher, incapable of fault, out of this equation for a moment, shall we? Lets concentrate on you.

What determines your "positive" and "negative" views? On what do you base your beliefs? If your views are based on the fallacy of whatever people tell you, and your beliefs based on your views, then your conduct, which is based on such beliefs, is also fallacious, is it not? What is the point in connecting view and conduct?

Speaking in terms of Wegener's granulomatosis, which will soon kill you unless you wake up, what determines your "hot" days and "cold" days? In strict Tibetan medical terms, the disease is said to have its ultimate origin in the nexus of attachment and aversion. If this disease arises in dualism, and your relationship with this disease is governed by dualism, then any reinforcement of dualistic thinking will accomplish precisely what?

Interesting to me that you were up and practicing medicine when last I saw you, gleefully explaining to me all the ways in which it is possible to cheat insurance companies. Interesting to me that when you moved back to Maryland, you were the one being practiced upon, and the insurance companies were cheating you.

Before your kidneys and lungs collapse, why not collapse the boundaries between your positives, negatives, help, harm, hot, and cold, and come to some understanding of the nature of your own mind?

If today, you tell the world that you love me, and that I have helped you, that is part of your affliction and has no effect upon me. If today, you tell the world that you hate me, and that I have harmed you, that is part of your affliction, and has no effect upon me. Fabrication has no effect on anything that just simply is.

This fabricated love and hate spring from the same fabricated water -- Lake Subject-Object -- that drowns you in fabricated samsara and drowns you in your fabricated illness. Many, many times I already tell you: don't swim in mirages!

Every day, since the day I first heard of you -- since your cohorts sent me your photograph, which I still have -- every single day since then, no matter where I was or what I was doing, I have dedicated twenty-one recitations of the Medicine Buddha mantra exclusively to your well-being.

This, I will continue to do... as you say... as though none of us have left that room.

Yours in the Dharma,

Tenpa

So there we have it. Rainstorms, and cyclones, and clouds come and go through the sky. Stars fall through the sky, and planets move through the sky, but the sky is always the sky. None of these things change or in any way alter the sky's essential nature. Ultimately, this is true, although conventionally speaking, it is best to discourage rebirth as a two-headed snake if at all possible. The opportunity to hear the dharma in such circumstances seems almost as rare as human rebirth.

Almost.

William Cassidy spends his days spewing hatred, venom and deceit into a world that is already overflowing with suffering. He creates and fights imaginary demons on his blog, convincing himself of his intellectual superiority.

It must consume hours of his life every single day. Maybe they don't have good tv reception where he lives?

For Kyler

2009-12-03T00:12:00.008-05:00

Forgive me if this post is choppy, poorly written or seems hastily put together. It's midnight and I've just learned about a 5 year-old boy in New Jersey named Kyler VanNocker who urgently needs your help.

When Kyler was 2-1/2 years old he was diagnosed with Neuroblastoma, a rare childhood cancer. He was in remission for roughly a year. Recently his parents learned that the cancer has returned with a vengeance. There's only one treatment option left for Kyler, but his insurance refuses to cover it, not because it's overly expensive, but because of a technicality-- it's in clinical trial. In fact, all the standard of care treatments for neuroblastoma are clinical trials. His insurance would rather let him die than pay for the only chance he has at survival.

Thankfully, the parents of kids with neuroblastoma watch over each other. A couple of the moms have taken the matter into their own hands and are asking everyone who learns about Kyler to send $1 to his family and spread the word.

If you'd like to help save Kyler's life, you can send your donation to :

Paul and Maria VanNocker
115 East Franklin Ave
Edgewater Park, New Jersey 08010

The Philadelphia Daily News did a story on Kyler. Here it is, in case the link expires.

Insurance vs. Kyler
By Ronnie Polaneczky
Philadelphia Daily News
Daily News Columnist

LOOKING at Kyler VanNocker, whose fifth birthday was Monday, it's impossible to fathom that he could die from the disease he's battling.

He's bright-eyed and energetic as he tears around the house he shares in Edgewater Park, N.J., with his parents, Paul and Maria, and siblings Kaden, 6, and Anelise, 3. He's just as active at pre-school, where he's learning his numbers and the alphabet.

But the truth is, Kyler has neuroblastoma, a rare and deadly form of childhood cancer that attacks the nervous system, creating tumors throughout the body. Diagnosed at 2 1/2, he endured more than a year of treatment at both St. Christopher's Hospital for Children and at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia.

His longest hospital stay lasted almost seven months, during which he nearly died twice from complications that caused kidney failure, as well as heart, lung and liver disease. Finally, he went into remission in September 2008 and reveled in a healthy year blessed with the mundane miracles of childhood.

And Paul and Maria allowed themselves to exhale.

Ten weeks ago, routine follow-up tests indicated that Kyler's cancer had returned. This time, his treatment options are few, since recurrent neuroblastoma brings with it an entirely different set of medical considerations than the ones associated with an initial diagnosis.

Kyler's CHOP oncologist, Stephan Grupp, says that Kyler needs a treatment called MIBG therapy, in which a radioactive drug, delivered intravenously, travels to tumor sites, slamming them with radiation.

Depending on how Kyler responds, he may need up to three rounds of MIBG to knock his cancer back into remission.

MIBG is "less toxic than chemotherapy, and is usually tolerated well by patients," says Grupp, a world expert in neuroblastoma, thanks to CHOP's status as a national referral center for kids with the rare disease. MIBG therapy is the only effective treatment available to Kyler at this stage of his illness. Without it, he won't live to see his sixth birthday.

Unbelievably, Kyler's insurance carrier, Harrisburg-based HealthAmerica, has denied coverage for the treatment, which it considers "investigational/experimental" because there is "inadequate evidence in the peer-reviewed published clinical literature regarding its effectiveness."

The therapy is not approved by the Food and Drug Administration, another criterion that HealthAmerica requires.

"It's considered experimental because not enough kids with recurring neuroblastoma live long enough" to become candidates for MIBG, says Paul VanNocker, 44, a heavy-industrial-equipment salesman (Maria, 37, is a homemaker). "So, really, all treatment at this stage of Kyler's disease is considered experimental."

Only about 650 children in the United States are diagnosed each year with neuroblastoma. Half of them, including Kyler, have the most lethal form of the disease. So it's tough to study a large enough cohort of patients like Kyler to yield research results that HealthAmerica might consider valid.

But that doesn't mean MIBG is ineffective.

"It's considered the standard of care in Europe and the United States for recurrent neuroblastoma," says Grupp. "It's not an unproven treatment with no basis in medical science. Actually, the results are often very good."

Paul VanNocker appealed HealthAmerica's decision, which once again denied MIBG.

"They have a plan for Kyler," says Paul angrily. "Their plan is for him to die."
HealthAmerica spokeswoman Kendall Marcocci told me that she was not permitted to divulge the amount of money the company has paid so far for Kyler's treatment, but Paul VanNocker says that the figure is between $1.6 million and $1.8 million. He was not sure what Kyler's MIBG therapy would cost, since it's unclear how many MIBG treatments Kyler might require, but Grupp says that the treatment is actually less expensive than other cancer therapies.
Which seems to support Marcocci's contention that HealthAmerica has declined Kyler's MIBG therapy not because of its cost, but because of its experimental nature. Marcocci wouldn't discuss specifics of Kyler's case but said the company isn't in the business of treating patients; it instead applies a "medical-based-evidence approach" to determining whether a requested treatment is a covered benefit. Except that, by denying the only effective treatment available to Kyler, HealthAmerica has usurped the opinion of the doctor who knows what Kyler needs to survive.

Sorry, but that absolutely puts the company in the business of treating patients.

I have to say, when I hear people fret that a public insurance option would take medical decisions out of doctors' hands and place them in the mitts of bloodless bureaucrats, I have to scratch my head.

Do they not understand that bloodless bureaucrats are already in control? And that the "death panels" everyone fears already exist in the insurance industry?

To deny Kyler coverage is to prescribe his death.
Last week, CHOP agreed to proceed with Kyler's first MIBG procedure, assuming that Medi-caid will pick up the tab. He withstood the procedure well and is back at school, happy to be among his playmates again.
If Medicaid doesn't come through, the VanNockers have no savings to pay for additional MIBG procedures that Kyler might need to stay alive, because the out-of-pocket costs associated with Kyler's illness have left them bankrupt. Paul estimates that he and Maria have spent "well over $60,000" of their own money - exhausting cash savings, IRAs and almost every asset but their home to pay expenses not covered by insurance.

"If Kyler can't have MIBG, he will have to enter hospice care," says Paul. "He'll have a good month, and then he will lose the ability to walk. Then he will become bedridden. And then he will die a slow, agonizing death."

MIBG is the only option to postpone that terrible possibility for as long as possible.

But the death panel's decision, it seems, is final.

Coming Home from the Graveyard

2009-11-30T10:22:00.005-05:00

This morning filmmaker and author Michael Moore wrote an Open Letter for President Obama regarding Afghanistan-- a brilliantly written piece that I've copied below. Increasing troops in Afghanistan is not what I voted for--not what any Obama supporter I know voted for. Please take action as he indicates at the end of his article.

November 30th, 2009 3:44 AM

An Open Letter to President Obama from Michael Moore

Dear President Obama,
Do you really want to be the new "war president"? If you go to West Point tomorrow night (Tuesday, 8pm) and announce that you are increasing, rather than withdrawing, the troops in Afghanistan, you are the new war president. Pure and simple. And with that you will do the worst possible thing you could do -- destroy the hopes and dreams so many millions have placed in you. With just one speech tomorrow night you will turn a multitude of young people who were the backbone of your campaign into disillusioned cynics. You will teach them what they've always heard is true -- that all politicians are alike. I simply can't believe you're about to do what they say you are going to do. Please say it isn't so.
It is not your job to do what the generals tell you to do. We are a civilian-run government. WE tell the Joint Chiefs what to do, not the other way around. That's the way General Washington insisted it must be. That's what President Truman told General MacArthur when MacArthur wanted to invade China. "You're fired!," said Truman, and that was that. And you should have fired Gen. McChrystal when he went to the press to preempt you, telling the press what YOU had to do. Let me be blunt: We love our kids in the armed services, but we f*#&in' hate these generals, from Westmoreland in Vietnam to, yes, even Colin Powell for lying to the UN with his made-up drawings of WMD (he has since sought redemption).
So now you feel backed into a corner. 30 years ago this past Thursday (Thanksgiving) the Soviet generals had a cool idea -- "Let's invade Afghanistan!" Well, that turned out to be the final nail in the USSR coffin.
There's a reason they don't call Afghanistan the "Garden State" (though they probably should, seeing how the corrupt President Karzai, whom we back, has his brother in the heroin trade raising poppies). Afghanistan's nickname is the "Graveyard of Empires." If you don't believe it, give the British a call. I'd have you call Genghis Khan but I lost his number. I do have Gorbachev's number though. It's + 41 22 789 1662. I'm sure he could give you an earful about the historic blunder you're about to commit.
With our economic collapse still in full swing and our precious young men and women being sacrificed on the altar of arrogance and greed, the breakdown of this great civilization we call America will head, full throttle, into oblivion if you become the "war president." Empires never think the end is near, until the end is here. Empires think that more evil will force the heathens to toe the line -- and yet it never works. The heathens usually tear them to shreds.
Choose carefully, President Obama. You of all people know that it doesn't have to be this way. You still have a few hours to listen to your heart, and your own clear thinking. You know that nothing good can come from sending more troops halfway around the world to a place neither you nor they understand, to achieve an objective that neither you nor they understand, in a country that does not want us there. You can feel it in your bones.
I know you know that there are LESS than a hundred al-Qaeda left in Afghanistan! A hundred thousand troops trying to crush a hundred guys living in caves? Are you serious? Have you drunk Bush's Kool-Aid? I refuse to believe it.
Your potential decision to expand the war (while saying that you're doing it so you can "end the war") will do more to set your legacy in stone than any of the great things you've said and done in your first year. One more throwing a bone from you to the Republicans and the coalition of the hopeful and the hopeless may be gone -- and this nation will be back in the hands of the haters quicker than you can shout "tea bag!"
Choose carefully, Mr. President. Your corporate backers are going to abandon you as soon as it is clear you are a one-term president and that the nation will be safely back in the hands of the usual idiots who do their bidding. That could be Wednesday morning.
We the people still love you. We the people still have a sliver of hope. But we the people can't take it anymore. We can't take your caving in, over and over, when we elected you by a big, wide margin of millions to get in there and get the job done. What part of "landslide victory" don't you understand?
Don't be deceived into thinking that sending a few more troops into Afghanistan will make a difference, or earn you the respect of the haters. They will not stop until this country is torn asunder and every last dollar is extracted from the poor and soon-to-be poor. You could send a million troops over there and the crazy Right still wouldn't be happy. You would still be the victim of their incessant venom on hate radio and television because no matter what you do, you can't change the one thing about yourself that sends them over the edge.
The haters were not the ones who elected you, and they can't be won over by abandoning the rest of us.
President Obama, it's time to come home. Ask your neighbors in Chicago and the parents of the young men and women doing the fighting and dying if they want more billions and more troops sent to Afghanistan. Do you think they will say, "No, we don't need health care, we don't need jobs, we don't need homes. You go on ahead, Mr. President, and send our wealth and our sons and daughters overseas, 'cause we don't need them, either."
What would Martin Luther King, Jr. do? What would your grandmother do? Not send more poor people to kill other poor people who pose no threat to them, that's what they'd do. Not spend billions and trillions to wage war while American children are sleeping on the streets and standing in bread lines.
All of us that voted and prayed for you and cried the night of your victory have endured an Orwellian hell of eight years of crimes committed in our name: torture, rendition, suspension of the bill of rights, invading nations who had not attacked us, blowing up neighborhoods that Saddam "might" be in (but never was), slaughtering wedding parties in Afghanistan. We watched as hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians were slaughtered and tens of thousands of our brave young men and women were killed, maimed, or endured mental anguish -- the full terror of which we scarcely know.
When we elected you we didn't expect miracles. We didn't even expect much change. But we expected some. We thought you would stop the madness. Stop the killing. Stop the insane idea that men with guns can reorganize a nation that doesn't even function as a nation and never, ever has.
Stop, stop, stop! For the sake of the lives of young Americans and Afghan civilians, stop. For the sake of your presidency, hope, and the future of our nation, stop. For God's sake, stop.
Tonight we still have hope.
Tomorrow, we shall see. The ball is in your court. You DON'T have to do this. You can be a profile in courage. You can be your mother's son.
We're counting on you.
Yours,
Michael Moore
MMFlint@aol.com
MichaelMoore.com
P.S. There's still time to have your voice heard. Call the White House at 202-456-1111 or email the President.

Bad Day at the Mall?

2009-11-28T20:11:00.004-05:00

I know, I know. You're slumped in your chair pouting because by the time you got there, all the really cool stuff had already been swooped up at the mall.

Well, here's something to take the slump away-- an amazing music video put together by sangha brother Chris (aka Bowdawg). The music is Jetsunma's, and the devotion and creativity is pure Chris.

Two Black Friday Gifts for You

2009-11-27T12:37:00.004-05:00

In the short time that I've used it, I've learned that Twitter is an amazing way to spread love and compassion throughout the world. Today I received two Tweets that I wanted to share with you.

The first is from Jetsunma-- a video of a guided meditation she taught in 1995.

Whenever we engage in meritorious activity such as meditation, it's appropriate to dedicate the merit to others. How perfect that Ani Palmo Tweeted a dedication prayer soon after!

Jetsunma taught this dedication prayer to the children at our temple many years ago, but like all her teachings to children, this one ain't just for the kiddies.

Children's Dedication Prayer

I dedicate this merit to the liberation and salvation of all sentient beings.
May I come to know them all as my family,
and may I save them from suffering in this
and every future lifetime.
May all sentient beings no longer suffer.
May I bring them food to eat,
clothing to keep them warm,
houses to make them safe,
and love to make them strong.
In this way, may all my mothers and fathers be happy
and practice Dharma until they are all free.
~ Jetsunma Ahkon Lhamo

Tears for Nepal

2009-11-24T10:13:00.042-05:00

(Photo copied from the Facebook page of Tibetan Volunteers for Animals)

The past couple days were especially dark days on our tiny planet. In southern Nepal a huge Hindu celebration took place, in which half a million animals were ritually slaughtered to appease the goddess Gadhimai.

People and organizations from all over the world tried in vain to stop the Gadhimai sacrifice, known as the largest animal sacrifice in the world. They begged and petitioned the Nepalese government to intervene. They suggested alternatives to the slaughter, like offering flowers, incense or even food. Anything but innocent lives. Not wanting to interfere with religious practices, the government allowed the sacrifice to proceed.

Though this enormous sacrifice occurs every 5 years, many are wondering why it never received such press before. It's doubtful that it will ever fall into anonymity again.

A Nepalese man named Jagdish Aarohi wrote this appeal in a Republica Op-ed piece :

Twenty years ago, I first visited Gadhimai Jatra, a festival that is held every five years in my native Bara district. I was interested in photography and wanted to take some good pictures of Nepal’s indigenous culture. I did not fulfill my mission. Instead, I became a tireless campaigner for the abolishment of animal sacrifice.

I was not born a campaigner. I was born in Kalaiya, headquarters of Bara, in a vegetarian, quiet, middle-class farming family. I mainly worked as a farmer but enjoyed doing a little bit of social work in my free time. I never thought I would be the one to carry placards and distribute leaflet to devotees at the world’s largest killing fields of sacrificial beasts.

The first thing I witnessed at Gadhimai was the killing of five different kinds of animals as in panchabali: Buffaloes, goats, pigs, roosters and rats. The animals’ throats are slit with a knife. It is not done quickly. The animals die a slow and extremely cruel, violent death while the priests sprinkle the blood across the image of the deity and its surroundings. Legend has it that the longer it takes for the animal to die, the happier the goddess will be.

The whole affair stunned and nauseated me. I never knew that such kind of cruelty existed. But the worst was yet to come. Right after the completion of panchabali sacrifice comes the buffaloes’ turn. Drunken slaughterers—they are made to drink as a sane person cannot do such a task—enter the fenced yard where around 20,000 buffaloes are kept. Wielding swords, axe and khukuris, the men start randomly hacking the buffaloes’ necks.

The sword-bearers cannot chop off the buffaloes´ heads at one go because of the thick size of its necks. To make their task easier, the hackers first cut the buffaloes’ hind legs after which the animal falls on the ground. They then start hacking the neck until the head is separated from the body. It takes 20 to 25 swing of the sword to annihilate a big buffalo. The suffering the animals go through is unimaginable.

After witnessing the Gadhimai carnage, I started having terrible nightmares. I would see blood wherever I turned to look.

After I regained my senses, I vowed to campaign against such killings at all cost. Come what may, I would not give up. True to my vow, I have been campaigning and voluntarily working to improve the conditions of animals for the past 15 years.

If the Gadhimai organizers have their way, one can encounter the horrendous scenes on November 24 and 25. This time, the organizers want to set a world record by killing half a million animals. The unfortunate animals will include 20,000 buffaloes, goats, pigs, chickens, ducks and pigeons as well as mice and rats. According to the rules of the Gadhimai festival, all creatures that are brought here must be killed within two days.

The last Gadhimai festival held in 2004 saw 20,000 buffaloes sacrificed. Interestingly, the Gadhimai committee keeps the record of the number of sacrificial buffaloes because the devotees have to pay to get their animals beheaded. This year, the committee expects this number to cross the 25,000 mark. The committee, however, does not keep records of other animals or birds because of the sheer overwhelming numbers.

No sane person can endure such barbaric killings. But that is not all. Three to four days after the massacre, people start fleeing the Gadhimai venue because of the nauseating smell that starts to emit. Cars, rickshaws and cyclist start taking alternative routes. It is the people living in nearby localities who suffer the most. While the temple area turns into a breeding ground for disease, many fall sick. It takes months for the smell to go away.

I think there is hardly any other country that can be compared with Nepal when it comes to gruesome killings and bloodshed of animals. The extreme cruelty has been going on unabated. There are many other smaller-scale festivals like Gadhimai where panchabali and mass sacrifice is practiced. These are not even reported in the media....

...Why is the civil society keeping mum about the issue? Where are the role models who stop animal sacrifice in their own family, clan or neighborhood? Should we let our leaders get away by letting them say: ‘Gadhimai is too sensitive an issue to address’?

Animals cannot speak for themselves. Until now, it has been the priests speaking for them: Bring more, kill more animals. Few seem to realize that the Gadhimai organizers plan to raise millions through tenders and beheading fees. Animal sacrifice is a big business. For how long will we remain mute and let this inhuman killings in the name of religion continue?

Some of you might know that Jetsunma is now on Twitter. As we learned about the sacrifice, she began a string of Tweets inviting everyone to join us in prayers and commenting on the utter cruelty of such a festival. Her last few Tweets about it yesterday :

Now that all the thousands of animals have been murdered in Nepal, do the people feel better? Happier? Blessed? What ever happened to Karma?

What about the terrible suffering of 500,000 animals! Does their suffering make anyone a better person? Will the people and the land benefit?

How can purposefully causing suffering help anyone? Here in US we have horrific animal suffering too. Neglected, abused;such suffering!

A reasonable or compassionate person of ANY faith must be appalled! I think the skies WEEP for sorrow at the sight of horror inflicted!

As Buddhists, we pray for all involved. Certainly the animals have suffered unimaginable pain and terror. We also consider the horrific karma created by the people involved--those who did the killing, those who encouraged or permitted it, those who used the killings to raise money, those who offered their animals, those who did not rise in opposition, those who enjoyed themselves, those who felt satisfaction. We consider the children who were permanently scarred by witnessing such atrocities.

Karma is exacting. To whatever degree they participated, they have created the karma to experience the same exact suffering as they inflicted. It may not be in this lifetime. And that is the biggest obstacle. For if any of us immediately experienced the karma we created, atrocities like this would never, ever take place. Ultimately this 2-day celebration will result in eons of suffering--- in the perpetuation of the karmic interplay between killer and victim. Just as war cannot bring about peace, neither can slaughter bring about blessings.

May all such karmic cycles end for all beings.

Wow!

2009-11-19T14:04:00.002-05:00

This is just hilarious.

Pea Soup for Brains

2009-11-18T14:17:00.008-05:00

I apologize for not having written much lately. I think the prednisone is affecting the part of my brain where creativity usually percolates. Lately it feels more like it's sputtering, like when you heat up split pea soup.

Brains are so...complicated. Only certain areas seem to be involved. I can focus fairly well and just finished reading a long novel (which kind of stunk but I hung in there for the absolute worst ending ever). But when it comes to creating something--gathering together the bits and pieces of a story I have in mind and stitching them together into sentences, paragraphs and a post-- it just isn't happening.

A few weeks ago when the prednisone dose was really high, my mind was like being in one of those game show booths filled with money when they turn on the fan. I couldn't grab hold of any thought for very long.

This is different. This is driving in the fog. You can see parts of the road, but it's the parts you can't see that unnerve you. (Wait a sec. "Unnerved" is too dramatic a word to describe how I feel. Something between "unnerved" and "unfazed" is what I'm looking for. Ugh, I'm just not finding the right word in my head. Where did all the words go?)

See what I mean?

Veteran's Day Prayer

2009-11-11T14:19:00.007-05:00

With gratitude for those who have risked their lives
hoping to protect others
I pray
for all existing wars to end
for all new wars to be averted
for all people to know peace
in their minds
in their hearts
and in every fiber of their being

There never was a good war or a bad peace.
~ Benjamin Franklin

Republicans on Charade

2009-11-07T15:16:00.019-05:00

Today I watched this MSNBC.com video of somber, "concerned" Republicans in the House of Representatives taking pot-shots at the Democrat's health care reform bill while trying to bolster support for the "Hey We Got One, Too!" Republican bill. They were unconvincing, to say the least.

Rep. Mike Pense tried his best to look gravely concerned. He was near tears as he described an upcoming meeting with WWII veterans, telling how he'd make sure to spend time shaking every hand and thank them for risking their lives for protecting our freedom. He tried to link that somehow to Democrats who might vote with Republicans. (I don't get the connection. And given their abysmal track record with veteran's affairs, I really don't think Republicans should be bringing up the subject.)

Rep John Boehner spent the most time talking. I was curious about his voting record on health issues and looked it up on Project Vote Smart :

2008 Supported the interests of the Academy of General Dentistry 0%
2007-2008 Supported the interests of the National Breast Cancer Coalition 25%
2007-2008 St. Joseph Health System gave Rep. Boehner a grade of 0.
2007-2008 Supported the interests of the The Children's Health Fund 20%
2007 Supported the interests of the Alliance for Headache Disorders Advocacy 50%
2007 Supported the interests of the American Academy of Family Physicians 0%
2007 Supported the interests of the American Society for Therapeutic Radiology and Oncology 0%
2007 Supported the interests of the Assoc. of University Centers on Disabilities 0%
2007 Depression and Bipolar Support Alliance gave Rep. Boehner a rating of 50.
2007 Supported the interests of the League of Women Voters 0%
2007 On the votes that The Children's Health Fund considered to be the most important, Rep. Boehner voted their preferred position 0% of the time.

OpenSecrets.org reports that in this last election cycle Rep. Boehner received $445,000 from the health care industry-- 88% of it from Health Insurance and Pharmaceutical Manufacturers. In fact, during this same period, Rep. Boehner was the #2 Top Recipient of Contributions from the Pharmaceutical Industry in the entire House of Representatives.

House Minority Whip Eric Cantor also chimed in, so I took a look at his voting record as well :

2008 Supported the interests of the Academy of General Dentistry 0%
2007-2008 Supported the interests of the National Breast Cancer Coalition 0%
2007-2008 St. Joseph Health System gave Rep. Cantor a grade of 8.
2007-2008 Supported the interests of the The Children's Health Fund 30%
2007 Supported the interests of the Academy of General Dentistry 0%
2007 Supported the interests of the Alliance for Headache Disorders Advocacy 100%
2007 Supported the interests of the American Academy of Family Physicians 0%
2007 Supported the interests of the American Society for Therapeutic Radiology and Oncology 0%
2007 Supported the interests of the Assoc. of University Centers on Disabilities 0%
2007 Depression and Bipolar Support Alliance gave Rep. Cantor a rating of 50.
2007 Supported the interests of the League of Women Voters 20%
2007 On the votes that The Children's Health Fund considered to be the most important, Rep. Cantor voted their preferred position 0% of the time.

Rep. Cantor accepted $341,000 from the health insurance industry for his last election--the second largest industry to support his campaign.

At the end of the charade, when they had grown tired of feigning outrage and promising to protect Americans, Rep. Boehner said, "The American people do not want this." Rep. Boehner, you are absolutely right. We don't.

Life at 30,000 Feet

2009-10-26T13:39:00.013-04:00

Wegener's and the drugs used to treat it are like flying into a big cloud. You lose all sense of direction, often not having any idea if you're getting better or worse. All the usual visual cues are gone, and it can be very disorienting. You have to rely on flight instruments-- diagnostic indicators in the case of Weg's-- knowing full well they're often not reliable. And you can be flying along just fine and suddenly hit turbulence. It's invisible-- no way to brace yourself ahead of time, no way to guess when it might end. Sometimes a suitcase falls out of the overhead bin and hits you on the head, too.

This is an ongoing issue with Wegener's. I've gotten better at being comfortable with uncertainty. Better. Not expert.

A few weeks ago I flew straight into a new cloud. The chemo I was on for four months failed to control the Weg's and almost killed me in the process. That was a cloud I've flown into before, though. (I knew it was weakening me. Thankfully my awesome Hopkins doc agreed and issued a parachute before the plane went into a tailspin.)

The new cloud is a new drug--Rituximab, for those in the know. It's a genetically-engineered antibody. Unlike all the other drugs I've been on, I have no idea how to work with this one. Symptoms (or side effects, who can tell?) flare up and recede without warning, and I generally feel like a pile of suitcases has fallen on top of me. I daydream about running for the emergency exit, sliding down the big, inflatable slidy thing and shouting, "I'm out! I'm out!"

I know so many Weggies and other people who also live in the clouds of incurable and/or unpredictable disease. So many of them have it far worse than me. Please say a prayer for them, that all may see sunny skies again.

Life and Death, Part 4

2009-10-09T11:32:00.000-04:00

The final part to Keith Olbermann's "Special Comment" :

So far we've covered our collective unwillingness to admit that this isn't a health care debate. We are talking, ultimately, about pain, and life and death. I've recapped my own father's trip through our health care system. And we've looked at the horrible statistics that this country is 19th world-wide in preventable deaths, worse than Portugal. And how, if the current gap between the insured and the uninsured continues to grow, at this pace, by the year 2020, the uninsured will be 53 percent more likely to die than will the insured, a number that matches exactly, the increased mortality rate for the poor in the England of Charles Dickens.

What do we do?

I do not know who the two women were, yet they are indelibly burned into my memory. They stood outside, on a crisp New York morning last week, middle-aged, short, looking more than a little weary. They were wearing lab coats, and they were leaning against what those coats told me was their place of employment, the Mortimer B. Zuckerman Research Center at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center.

The women in the cancer researcher's lab coats were smoking cigarettes. I have seen a lot of startling things in my more-than-40 days and 40 nights alongside my ailing father inside this nation's fractured health care system, but nothing seemed to better symbolize the futility, the ram-your-head-against-a-wall futility, of this gigantic medical entity that we have created, that seems to have not only broken free from human control, but has, to some great measure, enslaved us.

Twenty-three stories tall, built partly with a 100-million dollar gift from the publisher of the New York Daily News, and U-S News Magazine, and two of the cancer researchers are standing in front smoking. That isn't the only picture that haunts my dreams.

A man walking out of another hospital, casual, purposeful, in control. The red stitches on the left side of his shaved head outlining a space as big as a large potato and at least an inch higher than the rest of his skull. I don't know if he was getting better or he was getting worse. I don't know if he had gotten good news or bad. I don't know if tonight he's healthy, or he's dead.

Months ago I got in a line at a drug store here. A woman ahead of me, obviously a familiar figure to the young pharmacist behind the counter, trying with mixed success to take in the gentle explanation. "You've maxed out your prescriptions on that insurance," the professional said slowly, "I can't give it to you." The customer shook her head in resignation.

It was like the Medieval Courts of Chancery, where if you were poor, you could take your lawsuit against the rich or the government, and hope when they picked the handful of cases to be heard, they'd somehow pick yours. If they didn't, you could try again next year, or, in some cases, every year for twenty next years.

The woman who needed the prescription spoke even more slowly than the pharmacist had. She had almost no hope in her voice. "Try the Cigna. Please." Another drug store, late at night. The pharmacist was a friend of mine. "You have to do something about this," he said as he handed me my refill and then reached for somebody else's prescription. "You see this? Anti-fungal cream. I just filled this. You know what this costs wholesale? Four dollars. You know what I have to sell it for? Two hundred and sixty-three dollars. I sell it for less and I get fired and maybe we lose our license."

And last Saturday, I leave my father, 24 hours after serious surgery that probably saved his life, serious enough that he's still under sedation and it'd be another 24 hours before he knew where he was or who I was, and yet I know he's okay because I've gotten him the best care in the world.

Literally, his surgeon is considered one of the top five guys in his field alive today and even I can tell he absolutely nailed the operation. And I know that after my father wakes up, when post-operative fluids get into his lungs, and he has trouble breathing, and he has to inhale after every word, they have a drug called Lasix that will start to drain the fluids and within five minutes he'll be breathing easier and within fifteen it'll be like nothing was ever wrong and this is just one of twenty drugs they can use on him not just to make him better long-term, but just as importantly and twice as imperatively, to stop his pain short-term.

And I marvel that we have come so far that you can barely take care of your health, like he has for 80 years, you can even be as dumb as those two women outside the cancer research center, smoking away and there is still a kaleidoscope of drugs and therapies and nurses and diagnosticians and psychiatrists and x-ray techs and surgeons, and all of them are capable of undoing the pain and curing the sickness and forestalling death.

And as I walk down the hallway from my Dad's room I allow myself a brief moment of selfishness. I'm sorry. I'm sorry I'm happy that I can spend whatever it takes to help my Dad get better, to keep him around, but maybe I can atone for that selfishness by making this case, tonight, to you, to whoever sees this, that we have to make these wonders of life and health and peace of mind and the control of pain available to everybody. And this is boiling in my brain and I take the shortcut out to the street, through the Emergency Room, and that's when I hear my name called.

And it's a man, roughly my age, and he looks worried to death. And I haven't seen him in 32 years. He was the nephew of the two brothers from Brooklyn who used to run the baseball card shows when we were both kids, and his uncles were the businessmen but he, like me, collected mostly for the fun of it, and it's amazing to see him again, joyous almost, for the sake of the continuity that the accident of us running into each other provides to us both. And he asks what I'm doing there and I tell him and he smiles because my father used to go to those card shows with me and Mike remembers him. And then I ask Mike why he's there.

"My daughter's in ICU," he says. "Three weeks now." The worried look returns to his face. "Lyme Disease. It's one thing, they knock it down, then it's another." There's a brief pause.

"Tomorrow I have to sell my farm. Did you know I had a farm?" I don't have to ask him why he's selling it. He then goes the next step. "Hey, you wanna buy my card collection? I've got some great stuff."

We must reform a system that lets my father get better care than yours does, or better care than Mike's daughter does, because by the accident of life, I make more money than he does, or my checkbook can hold out longer than his does, or yours does, as the bills come endlessly like some evil version of the enchanted water buckets in Fantasia.

The resources exist for your father and mine to get the same treatment to have the same chance and to both not have to lie there worried about whether or not they can afford to live!

Afford to live? Are we at that point? Are we so heartless that we let the rich live and the poor die and everybody in between become wracked with fear — fear not of disease but of Deductibles? Right now, right now, somebody's father is dying because they don't have that dollar to spend. And the means by which the playing field is leveled, and the costs that are just as inflated to me as they are to you are reduced, and the money that I don't have to spend any more on saving my father can go instead to saving your father that's called health care reform!

Death is the issue! How can we not be unified against death? I want my government helping my father to fight death! I want my government to spend taxpayer money to help my father fight to live and I want my government to spend taxpayer money to help your father fight to live! I want it to spend my money first on fighting death. Not on war! Not on banks! Not on high speed rail!

Spend our money, spend my money, first: on the chance to live!

And we must be unanimous in this, not to achieve some political triumph for one side against the other, but to save the man or the woman or the child who will be dead by morning, in this country, in this century, on our watch, because we are not spending that money tonight. I will not settle for a compromise bill and I will extend my hand to those who are scared of the inevitability of death but have been told they are scared of reform, those who have been exploited by the others, paid, or forced, to defend the status quo.

And we must recognize the enemy here: an enemy capable of perverting reform meant for you and me, into its own ATM that mandates only that more of us become the slaves to the insurance companies. The monied interests that have bled their customers white, and used their customers' money to buy the system, to buy the politicians, to buy the press, cannot now even be checked by the government.

Ordinarily the solution would be obvious: we would have to do it for the government. We would have to bring the insurance companies to their knees to organize, to pick a date, to say enough to, at a given hour, on a given day, to stop paying the premiums. An insurance strike.

But the insurance companies' stranglehold on us is so complete that lives would be risked, lives would be lost by the very act of protest. What parent could risk the cancellation of their child's insurance? What adult could risk giving his insurer the chance to claim that everything wrong with him on the day of an Insurance Strike was suddenly a pre-existing condition?

Even as the pay-outs move inexorably downwards, to being less than what you have paid in over the years, we are such serfs to the insurance companies that just to invoke the true spirit of the founding of this nation, is to give them more power, not less.

So I propose tonight one act with two purposes. I propose we, all of us, embrace the selfless individuals at the National Association of Free Clinics. You know them, they conducted the mass health care free clinic in Houston that served 1,500 people. I want a mass health care free clinic every week in the principle cities of the states of the six senators key to defeating a filibuster against health care reform in the Senate.

I want Sens. Lincoln and Pryor to see what health care poverty is really like in Little Rock. I want Sen. Baucus to see it in Butte. I want Sen. Ben Nelson to see it in Lincoln. I want Sen. Landro to see it in Baton Rouge. I want Sen. Reid to see it in Las Vegas.

I'll donate. How much will you donate? We enable thousands of our neighbors to have just a portion of the bounty of good health, and we make a statement to the politicians, forgive me, William Jennings Bryan, "you shall not press down upon the brow of America this crown of insurance, you shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of blue."

We think these events will be firmed up presently. You will be able to link from our website.

Trust me, I'll remind you. Because in one party, in one demographic, in one protest movement, we are all brothers and sisters. We are united in membership in the party that insists that every chance at life be afforded to every American seeking that chance.

We are united in membership in the party that insists on the right of everyone to the startling, transcendent blessings of the technological advance of medical science. We are united in membership in the party that is for life, that is against death, that is for lower premiums, that is against higher deductibles, that is for the peace of mind that can be provided only by the elimination of the fear that cost will decide whether we live or we die!

Because that's the point, isn't it? It is hard enough to recover, to fight past pain and to stave off death, if just for a season or a week or a day. It is so hard, that eventually for you, for me, for this president, for these blue dogs, for these protesters it is so hard to recover, that for all of us there will come a time when we will not recover. So, why are we making it harder?

Life and Death, Part 3

2009-10-08T18:05:00.000-04:00

Keith Olbermann's "Special Comment" continues :

Dr. Albert Sabin was by his own description, pretty full of himself when he managed to temporarily stop the testing of the Salk Polio Vaccine after a bad batch sickened and killed some children early in the first tests in the 1950s. Sabin recounted this in a television interview in the '80s. He was weeping. He had believed he was doing right. He had convinced himself that the fact that Salk's vaccine, the so-called "inactivated polio vaccine," had been chosen for use instead of Sabin's own "live polio vaccine," was irrelevant to his efforts.

He was weeping as he recounted this, too. Ultimately there proved nothing wrong with Salk's vaccine, the one batch had been improperly handled and manufactured. But Sabin and others, delayed all further testing for weeks. Sabin was weeping as he remembered. In 1983, Sabin had contracted a rare disease of his own. Surgeons operated, relieved the intense pain and muscle weakness, and then ten days later it came back, ten times worse, enough for him to be yelling and crying, virtually all the time.

The pain, he said, "made me want to die." And Dr. Albert Sabin suddenly remembered that the stopping of the Salk Vaccine experiments had led to death. Death of children. More immediately, it had led to pain, physical and emotional, for the children, and the parents.

He said it had not occurred to him that the first thing doctors must do, the first thing a health care system must do, is stop pain. He vowed to spend the rest of his life relieving pain. His own searing agony, and paralysis, gradually, inexplicably, faded.

They moved my father this afternoon. I don't mean they moved him to another hospital. They moved him. In his bed. Into a different position. It was agony for him. Agony enough that he could barely see us. Agony enough that they had to give him all the pain-killer he could handle. Then he couldn't talk any more. Another moment when somebody like me wonders about what it would be like if he was going through that, and I was watching it, worrying about whether we could afford the pain-killers.

Or the doctors. Or that hospital. Or any treatment at all. And what kind of society we live in, where millions of us face questions like that, and politicians glibly talk about incremental improvements while they slowly re-shape new laws that are supposed to reduce the number of us faced with pain untreated due to money, into laws that take more money out of our pockets and give it to the corporations who are profiting off health care without contributing one second to the relief of pain or the curing of disease, the pimps of the equation, taking their 20 percent off the top the health insurance cartels.

How would our politicians react if there were millions Americans in pain, getting insufficient care to relieve that pain, because of interference from insurance corporations and those millions had just been injured in a natural disaster, or an attack on this country? How fast would they rush their portable podiums to the driveways outside the emergency rooms? How quickly would the money come?

You know the answer. And you know what the answer has been about rushing to help those millions of Americans in pain tonight attacked not by another country or a terrorist or even a flood but attacked merely by life. Half of the politicians are dedicated to protecting the corporations against having to help our relatives and neighbors in pain.

The other half are calculating how far they can anger our Insurance Over-lords before our Insurance Over-lords stop contributing to their campaigns. Might all their CEOs, might all the wavering political frauds, get ten minutes of Dr. Sabin's pain. Or my father's. That's another part of this story I just haven't seen. The doctors.

For all the jokes over all the years, these guys really are on our side in this, especially the ones in the hospitals, especially the ones without whose skills you'd heal up just as fast in a bowling alley as in the best of the medical centers. The man who took my appendix out two years ago, a messy, dangerous job that took more than two hours, from which I recovered fast enough that I only missed four days of work, and who left three little scars one of which I can't find any more, I wrote all the checks. I know how much he got out of the whole price. About ten percent.

A very good friend of mine is a doctor in California. He wrote me the other day. "You can see why doctors, who want to make a living or cover increasing costs, labor, overhead, etc., have only one choice: see more patients, spend less time, answer fewer calls, because there is no other way to increase revenue.

"Plus," he wrote, "if you order tests, patients think they are getting better care (and) doctors thinking that testing, saves them time in thinking or talking with people. 'You have chest pain?' Instead of asking you questions, why don't we go ahead and do this stress test - that I get paid much more than some little office visit to do - and make sure it's not your heart.'"

And so like us the doctors are slaves to insurance. And that's not even talking about malpractice. We have to help them on that. Maybe we do need to cap damages. But do it where everybody benefits. Set the cap wherever it works out to be now, then lower it each year by exactly how much the entire cost of a patient's health care is lowered in this country. Incentivize doctors to help make health care available to everybody.

We patients and the doctors have to be on the same side again to stop pain, to heal disease, not to be customers and salesmen. And to help, thinking long-term. "People do want to discuss their end-of-life preferences prospectively," my friend the doc says, "and doctors should be paid to have these discussions." And then he wrote something that hadn't occurred to me. "We spend a lot of money on doing things that people would not have wanted us... to do to them."

Oh, that hit home. My mother died in the spring. Bless her, she lived without symptoms till nearly two weeks before she went. And we had all talked about what to do, and when to do it, and what not to do. And so when they said there's breast cancer, and there's five lesions in her brain, and there's nothing we can do that will wake her, but we can do a lot to lessen her pain or we can do things that might extend her life but also won't cure her and also won't wake her, but might be hurting her, we can't tell.

It took five seconds to decide. And then I thought of all the people who never had that discussion with their mother or father, who don't know that those are the choices they might face. And how it might help to have a doctor who says, here it all is. And you say: Doc thanks, I've decided I still want you to keep me alive forever even if I'm suffering and comatose, and he says, you got it.

Only now he could send you a bill and you could have insurance pay you back for it, so your mother and you will know, when the time comes, exactly what each choice would bring. And some buffoon decided to call that a "death panel." On the list of preventable deaths diabetes, stroke, ulcers, appendix, pneumonia we are 19th. Canada is 6th, England 16th, we're 19th. Portugal is 18th. You're better off in Portugal.

Death panels? We have them now. They're called WellPoint and Cigna and United Health Care and all the rest. Ask not for whom the insurance company's cash register bell tolls. It tolls for thee. What you and I might able to do about all this, when my Special Comment continues.

To be continued....

Life and Death, Part 2

2009-10-08T10:17:00.003-04:00

Keith Olbermann's "Special Comment" continues :

Some time around one o'clock in the morning on Saturday the 22nd of August of this year, my father, struggling with knee problems, some generalized weakness, lack of appetite, and lethargy, tried to use the portable urinal he kept by his bed to limit those middle-of-the-night trips to the toilet. Sounds a little gross, but certainly not when the alternative is a 20-minute ordeal of struggling to the bathroom and wondering what in the hell you're going to do if you don't make it there in time.

But that night there was an additional problem. He was having trouble going. He tried to adjust his position sitting on the edge of the bed. Suddenly the mattress shifted underneath him and deposited him gently on the floor. He might have been in nothing more threatening than a seated position there, but with his knees as bad as they are, there was almost no chance he was going to get out of it without help. For reasons that would later become apparent, my father would pretend to himself that that wasn't true. He decided to believe that soon he'd feel better and be able to get up, on his own.

He thinks he dozed much of the night. As it got light, he realized his cell phone was within grasp and he called me, not to say he was in trouble, but only about the move we were planning for him, to his own place closer to me. He never mentioned the precariousness of his position. He had now been stuck on the floor around seven hours.

Some time in the afternoon, between the dehydration and the exhaustion, the hallucinations started. He heard my sister and her family in the hallway outside his bedroom. He could feel the vibration of the footsteps of his grand-kids running up and down. In a startling tribute to the imagination's ability to make a hallucination like this one completely self-contained and impervious, he heard his daughter say "don't bother Grandpa, he's resting." He thinks he smelled cooking. My sister and her kids were, in fact, in Rochester, New York at the time.

My Dad found himself increasingly angry and finally, sometime after midnight on the morning of Sunday August 23rd, he phoned her and demanded to know why she had been in the house without so much as giving him the courtesy of peeking her head in to see if he was all right. Only after her repeated insistences that she was 330 miles away and had been, all day, did reality regain control. My father apologized. My sister called his neighbor. The neighbor called the cops.

There was never an official diagnosis of just the one incident that night, but I have gone into such excruciating detail because of what I was told that night by the doctors at the ER at which I joined my father, and what I've been told by other health professionals since. The hallucinations almost certainly were provoked by dehydration and if not renal failure per se, then certainly a kind of temporary shut down. By the time he got there, it had been more than 24 hours since he had triggered this cascade of problems by trying to adjust the position of his body so he could urinate. And he still had not done so.

My father's kidneys were in trouble. Considering kidney disease was what killed his father, this was very bad news. We heard just yesterday about kidneys and insurance. The Waddington brothers, Travis of New York; Michael of Santa Fe. As the New York Times reported, their Dad, David, needed a kidney transplant because of a congenital renal disease.

Each of his sons was ready to donate. But they were warned not even to get tested to see if they matched. For if they did transplant or not they would conceivably be denied insurance for the rest of their lives, because they might test positive for that same congenital renal disease that threatened their father. And thus would they have a pre-existing condition.

And still the Waddingtons and their Dad and my Dad were all luckier than at least 45,000 Americans. Because as discovered in a new study conducted by Harvard University and the Cambridge Health Alliance, that's how many of us are dying, each year, because we don't have insurance.

The number is horrible. But when it is contrasted to what faced my father that night, it is unforgivable. Because as Cambridge's summary of the findings put it: "Deaths associated with lack of health insurance now exceed those caused by many common killers such as kidney disease." My father had less to fear that night from bad kidneys than he would have if he hadn't had insurance!

And yet we let this continue.You and I. This society. Our country. Democrats and Republicans.

This is the study Congressman Grayson of Florida quoted, about which the Republicans demanded an apology when they should have been standing there shrieking, demanding we fix this. "Uninsured, working-age Americans have a 40 percent higher risk of death than their privately insured counterparts."

People, in short, are dying for the lack… of money. Dying as surely as they did when Charles Dickens wrote about the exact same problem. Of a boy who couldn't get sufficient medical care for his affliction. Of the underprivileged, suffering not just privation but death, as the comfortable, moved silently and unseeingly through the streets of London.

The book was called "A Christmas Carol" and the boy Dickens imagined was called "Tiny Tim" and it was published on the 19th of December, 1843, and it is 166 years later and the problem is not only still with us, it is getting worse. The mortality rate among Americans under the age of 65 who are uninsured, is 40 percent higher than among those with insurance. In 1993 a similar study found the difference was only 25 percent.

We are moving backwards! We are letting people die because they do not have insurance.

What's worse is that barring meaningful health care reform, this will only grow. The difference between the surveys from 1993 and now suggest this fatal insurance gap is growing by about one percent, per year. Your chances of dying because you don't have insurance are now 40 percent higher than those who have it.

By extrapolation, three years from now your chances will be 43 percent higher. Your chances of dying because you used to smoke, compared to those who never smoked, only 42 percent higher. You heard that right. At the current rate, in 2012, you will be more fortunate, more secure, more long-lived, if you used to smoke, than if you don't have insurance. It is mind-boggling, and mind-less. This is the country you want? This is the country you will accept?

Do those other people in this country have meaning to you, or are they just extras in your movie, backgrounds in your painting, choruses in your solo? Without access to insurance for all of us and the only way we get it is with the government supplying the gaps, just like it does in flood insurance for God's sake that fatal gap will just keep growing.

A 45 percent higher likelihood of death for the uninsured compared to the insured by 2014.

By 2022, the figure will be 53 percent higher. Fifty-three percent! In the 1840s, as Dickens wrote a "Christmas Carol" - in a time at which we now look back with horror, the city of Manchester in England commissioned a crude study of mortality among its residents. A Doctor P.N. Holland categorized the sanitary conditions of the houses and streets of Manchester into three classes.

And when he compared the death rate in the First Class Houses in the First Class Streets, to the death rate in the Second Class Houses in the Third Class Streets, he found mortality in those worst locations was 53 percent higher. If we do not reverse this trend, in fourteen years' time we will not be living in the America of 2022. The shadows of the things that may be, tell us, that we will instead be living in an insurance-driven version, of the Dickensian England of 1843!

God Bless Us, everyone.

I told my father the other night that the insurance I really want to get for him and me is called Corporate-Owned-Life-Insurance. "COLI" — like in E. Coli. How fitting. With or without your consent, your employer is permitted by law to take out life insurance on you. It can, in fact, take out life insurance on everybody who works for it. Who gets the money when you die? Your employer does.

Dad pointed out that theoretically this would give them motivation to kill you. That, of course, would be for the same reason, as Michael Moore points out in his new movie "Capitalism: A Love Story," that you can't buy fire insurance on the house of the guy who lives next door to you. Golly gee, that's right, suddenly you'd have a motive to burn down his house and the world is already too much like that symbolically to make it like that in reality.

No, it's really unlikely that even the most evil corporation would think of killing you to get a payout from the COLI insurance plan. This exists for a much more mundane and passive reason. You're going to die anyway, and the tax laws of this country are such that if your company has a hundred thousand employees, it can take out small whole-life policies on everybody and just let the actuarial tables do the work for it. Ten thousand dollars here, $20,000 there, maybe $50,000 back here and all of it tax-exempt.

Oh and your employer can borrow the money to pay the premiums on the secret insurance it has on you. And the interest on that loan is tax-deductible. And your employer can, in essence, over-pay the premium it has on you and your fellow drones, and the extra money in the kitty is called "Cash Value," and it can be stuck into a pension-benefit plan or other product of the mad world of accounting. And "Cash Value" is also tax-deferred. It can be returned to your employer as a tax-free loan. And if your employer goes bankrupt, the Cash Value of those insurance policies is protected by the tax-laws - from creditors!

In short, your employer can get a tax-deductible loan to buy insurance on you that until this past June he didn't even have to tell you about, and the money is first tax-deferred and then tax-free, and when you die, the payoff it gets is tax-exempt, and when the company dies, the boss still gets to keep the money away from the creditors even if somehow you, the guy on whom your boss has surreptitiously taken an insurance policy - happen to be one of the creditors.

And even though it's based on insurance on your health and your life, all of that tax-free, tax-exempt, tax-deferred money not only doesn't go to you, it also doesn't go to the government. And so if we really are ever going to do anything about federally-supported health care as an alternative to these private insurers, there's that much less tax money to do it with.

And some of the money that isn't going to you, and isn't going to the government, is going to strengthen the already monolithic insurance companies!

And just in case this isn't a sweet enough deal, the government is almost silent about telling that employer of yours about what kind of health insurance it must give you. And year after year, the companies get smarter and more audacious about either cutting what your health insurance covers, or cutting the number of employees the health insurance covers, or both.

And if that still isn't enough, there is something called the National Association of Insurance and Financial Advisors. And it has a Political Action Committee, IFAPAC, and last year IFAPAC had one million, $492,000 worth of campaign money with which to buy politicians. And you'd be amazed how many of them you can buy with even one million, $492,000.

And these are the same people who are not only influencing the health care debate, spending more than a million dollars a day to defeat reform, they are also the same people, who by raising your premiums and cutting your reimbursements, who by manipulating prices at hospitals and doctor's offices for everything from tongue depressors to enemas, who by influencing health care in this country more effectively and more selfishly than a dictator could ever do these are the people who decide what kind of health care you get, how much you pay for it, and whether or not they'd rather not see you get it.

It is your skin. Literally. And it is in the hands of people, insurance companies, who can still make money by betting against your good health. There is only one comfort here and it is cold indeed. Profit while you can, insurers. Sickness and death wait not just for your customer. They also wait for you. And they are double-parked. The doctor who treats you and the pharmacist who makes you pay through your nose are not your enemies in this. It proves they are as much victims as you and I are. And the time has come to realign the battle here, so that it is not just us versus the entire medical and health care establishment, it is us, and the doctors, and the nurses, and the pharmacists, and maybe even some of the hospitals, against the real enemy: The insurance companies... the Insurance companies who are right now at war against America! That's where I'll pick it up when this Special Comment continues.

To be continued...

Tweachings

2009-10-07T20:26:00.015-04:00

I tend to be a few steps behind techie trends. Not trailing conspicuously, like people who refuse to own a computer or use the internet. Heavens no. I've had a real cell phone for a full year now. The fact that I haven't had a tv in two years has nothing to do with technology-aversion. I just don't like the noise in my house, or the fact that I instantly become addicted to having it on all the time.

So of course I've been pretty uninterested in the social network thing. I only recently joined Twitter. I thought reading an endless stream of minutiae about peoples' lives would be like plucking nose hairs. I anticipated reading stuff like "I'm eating a tootsie roll, yum!" or "Wondering what life would be like without fabric." Thankfully, there isn't a lot of that among the people I "follow." It was okay. Not wonderful, but not horrible, either.

And then, a message I never dreamed I'd see : Jetsunma is on Twitter.

Um, what??? I thought, okay, she's just reading other people's tweets or something. But just as the lotus unfolds its petals, she began to give teachings. Every day. Many times a day! She calls them "Tweachings."

If you'd like to follow Jetsunma on Twitter, you can search for "Jetsunma" and select "ahkonlhamo." Or if you're Twitter-savvy, she's @ahkonlhamo.

Life and Death, Part 1

2009-10-07T20:26:00.010-04:00

Tonight's "Special Comment" by Keith Olbermann of MSNBC was incredibly moving and powerful. It's long, so I will split it into four parts.

SPECIAL COMMENT
By Keith Olbermann, MSNBC

Since August 23rd of this year I have interacted daily with our American Health Care system and often done so to the exclusion of virtually all other business. It is not undercover reporting, and it is not an expert study of the field, but since that day, when my father slid, seemingly benignly, out of his bed and onto the floor of his home, I have experienced with growing amazement and with multiplying anger, the true state of our hospitals, our doctor's offices, our insurance businesses, our pharmacies.

My father's story as a patient and mine as a secondary participant and a primary witness has been eye-opening and jaw-dropping. And we are among the utterly lucky ones, a fact that, by itself, is terrifying and infuriating.

And thus tonight, for all those who we have met along the way, those with whom we have shared the last two months inside the belly of the beast, and for everyone in this country who will be here and right soon, tonight Countdown will be devoted entirely to a Special Comment on the subject of health care reform in this country.

I do not want to yell. I feel like screaming but everybody is screaming, everybody is screaming that this is about rights or freedom or socialism or the president or the future or the past or a political failure or a political success. We have all been screaming, I have been screaming.

And we have all been screaming because we do not want to face, we cannot face, what is at the heart of all of this, what is the unspoken essence of every moment of this debate; what, about which, we are truly driven to such intense ineffable inchoate emotions. Because ultimately, in screaming about health care reform, pro or con, we are screaming about death. This, ultimately, is about death.

About preventing it. About fighting it. About resisting it. About grabbing hold of anything and everything to forestall it and postpone it, even though we know that the force will overcome us all - always will, always has. Health care is, at its core, about improving the odds of life in its struggle against death. Of extending that game which we will all lose, each and every one of us unto eternity, extending it another year or month or second.

This is the primary directive of life, the essence of our will as human beings, all perhaps that is measurable of our souls, the will to live. And when we go to a doctor's office or a hospital or a storefront clinic in a ghetto we are expressing this fundamental cry of humanity: I want to live! I want my child to live! I want my wife to live! I want my father to live! I want my neighbor to live! I want this stranger I do not know and never will know to live! This is elemental stuff — our atoms in action, our survival mode in charge. Tamper with this and you are tampering with us.

And so we yell and scream and try to put it all in a political context or expand it to some great issue of societal freedom or dress it up in something that would be otherwise farcical, like a death panel. But this issue needs no expansion and no dressing up. The Democrats need draw no line in the sand, and the Republicans need calculate no seats to be gained, and the Blue Dogs need anticipate no campaign contributions lost. This issue is big enough as it is. This is already life and death. Of all the politicians of the previous century, none fought harder to prevent an administration that promised to involve itself in health care, from ever gaining power, than did England's Winston Churchill.

He equated his opponents, the party that sought to introduce "The National Health," to the Gestapo of the Germans that he and we had just beaten just as those opposing reform now have invoked Nazis as frequently and falsely as if they were invoking Zombies. Churchill cost himself the election because he didn't realize he was overplaying an issue that people were already damned serious about. Irony — this.

Because, a decade earlier, Churchill had made the greatest argument ever for government intervention in health care only he did not realize it. He was debating in Parliament the notion that the British government could not increase expenditures on military defense unless the voters specifically authorized it, just as today's opponents of reform are now claiming they speak for the voters of today, even though those voters spoke for themselves eleven months ago.

Churchill's argument was this"I have heard it said that the government had no mandate such a doctrine is wholly inadmissible. The responsibility for the public safety is absolute and requires no mandate!"

And there is the essence of what this is. What, on the eternal list of priorities, precedes health? What more obvious role could government have than the defense of the life, of each citizen? We cannot stop every germ that seeks to harm us any more than we can stop every person who seeks to harm us. But we can try dammit and government's essential role in that effort facilitate it, reduce its cost, broaden its availability, improve my health and yours, seems, ultimately, self-explanatory.

We want to live. What is government for if not to help us do so? Indeed Mr. Churchill, the responsibility for the public safety is absolute and requires no mandate! And yet today, at this hour, somebody somewhere in this country is arguing against, or protesting against, or yelling against health care reform, because the subject is really life and death, and they're scared, and they have been scared, and they have been mis-led by the overly-simple words of one side, and misinformed by the overly-complex words of the other side.

And that one person, at least that one person, who is tonight so scared that somehow sickness and pain and death will come sooner to them because of reform they do not understand - that one person, if his or her argument is successful and reform is again quashed, that one person arguing against health care reform will die sooner, because they argued against health care reform.

Just as you and I have largely failed to understand the terror, the fear of death, that underlies this debate in the minds of so many, the leadership of the reform effort has also failed to understand it, and failed to lead not just in practical terms, but in rhetorical ones. If you did not know what something called "The Public Option" was, you might instinctively oppose it.

Option? My health care is now optional? Doesn't that mean it can go away somehow? Doesn't that mean that when I need it, it won't be there? Doesn't that mean somebody is trying to take it away from me? And this insurance that might go away is public? I'm giving control to the government somehow? No "private?" Just "public?"

And so, in seconds, with mental reflexes as acute and natural as any mechanism of "fight-or-flight", something that will expand health care and reduce its cost, something that will help fight death and pain becomes misunderstood as exactly the opposite. You can blame the one doing the misunderstanding all you want. But the essence of communication is reducing the chance of misunderstanding. And the term "The Public Option" has been as useless and as full of holes and as self-defeating as has been the term "Global Warming." It is political-speak. It is legalese. It is designed not for the recipient but for the speaker. It is the ego of the informed, strutting down the street and saying "look at me, I talk smart."

Just as "global warming" is really "bad climate change," "The Public Option" is in broad essence "Medicare For Everybody." Frame it that way, sell it that way, and suddenly it doesn't sound like a threat, turning the seemingly solid insurance which people have now, into something "optional" and turning anything "private" into everything "public."

Once you said "Medicare For Everybody," there would be just as much to explain. If you were under 65 you'd be paying for it. You wouldn't have to buy it. You wouldn't have to change from whatever you have now. There are just as many caveats.

Still, the intent of all this would be clearer. Much of the criticism of health care reform is coming from those who have or are about to get Medicare and, in confusion, in fear, in the kind of indescribable realization that we are far closer to the end than to the beginning, they are suddenly mortally afraid that health care reform will take it away from them. "Medicare For Everybody," might not be literally true, but instead of terrifying, it would be reassuring. And the explanations and the caveats would be listened to, and not shouted down, as anger and fear -- fear, remember, of death - swell up inside.

This rhetorical ship, of course, has sailed, and frankly, those leading the effort to reform health care have been so out-flanked, out-argued, out-terrorized by its opponents, that their reflexes seem shot. They are, to use Mr. Lincoln's words about General Rosecrans, frozen in place, "like a duck hit on the head."

And yet even from the most insurrectionary of the infamous Town Halls of August, there came report after report of proponents of Health Care reform, responding to the tea-baggers and the genuinely confused, in voices calm, with genuine empathy and honest inquiry, by asking "what are you afraid of? What do you think we can do to improve health care?"

Setting aside the professional protesters, the shameless mercenaries of the equation, the LaRouchebags and the hired guns, the results were uniform and productive. Dialogue. Conversation. Admission of fear. Admission that we are indeed talking about pain and sickness, and life and death. Admission that we are seeking the same things and that this should not be left to the politicians who almost to a man reek of the corruption of campaign contributions from the very monopolies they are supposedly trying to control.

And something else would come up. Something that you never hear included in the debate over reform, in the debate about insurance and bankruptcy and even in the debate over the remorseless rapaciousness of companies that are forever increasing premiums and deductibles while reducing what they give back to the person who is sick. What you never hear about is the person who is sick.

Have you ever stayed overnight in a hospital? All data suggests that in a given year, only about one in ten of us do so it's not a universal experience. Could you sleep in a hospital? With constant noise, with sharing a room with strangers, with contemplating mortality and more immediately the fog of germs in the place? With staph infections and MRSA and nursing staffs cut to the minimum, and overworked doctors, and medical record-keeping so primitive it might as well be done on blackboards?

And the bills? What about the person who is sick and the bills? How are they supposed to get better, while they are sitting there inside a giant cash register? How do you heal, how do you kill a cancer, when the meter is running so loudly you can hear it?

When a system of health care has been so refined, so perfected, as to find a way to charge for almost everything, and to reimburse for almost nothing, how does the person who is sick, not worry, always, always, about where he is going to get the money?

And how is somebody worrying always about where he is going to get the money, supposed to also get better? Yet our neighbor, in that hospital bed, hoping half for health and half for the money to pay for it, is still in better shape than at least 122 Americans who might be watching this right now, and who will not be with us tomorrow, because they will die, because they do not have insurance. I will pick it up there and then move on to the question of whether, if health care is not reformed, we should force the issue, by bailing out of this stylized blackmail that is insurance.

To be continued...

Everywhere She Goes

2009-10-02T10:00:00.000-04:00

Every time I go to our temple, I find myself in complete awe that such a place exists in the Washington, D.C. suburbs. When I was a brand new student in Arizona and learned that our main temple was located just outside D.C., I winced. I couldn't imagine a temple where prayer was offered on a 24-hour basis and where people came for peace, existing so close to the nation's capitol.

I am what you'd call a slow learner. It wasn't until I actually moved here that I began to understand.

One of the main symbols in Buddhism is the lotus plant. It grows only in ponds with the muckiest mud at the bottom. It takes root there and the stem grows up through the murky water. Once it has grown several inches above the water, it blooms and the flower that emerges reveals nothing of its muddy origins--it is stainless, pristine, exquisite and perfect.

The lotus is used as a symbol to demonstrate how each of us-- trapped in the muck of our negative habitual tendencies-- can follow the path of compassion and wisdom and eventually purify our mindstreams of all non-virtue.

It's also a symbol of purity. When the Buddha walked, lotus flowers bloomed beneath his feet.

I think of the lotus when I consider what my lama, Jetsunma Ahkon Lhamo, has done in the world. On land where slavery once flourished and the Civil War once raged, she has placed a Buddhist temple. Adjacent to the chaos and frenzy of D.C., she opened a prayer center whose doors are never locked to the public, and which houses what is unheard of even in Buddhist temples in Asia-- a 24-hour prayer vigil dedicated to the end of suffering for all beings. In a nation that values skyscrapers and celebrity mansions, Jetsunma has built numerous precious stupas that freely offer infinite blessings to all beings. In the material insanity of Western culture, she teaches about living a life that is devoted to benefiting others.

Jetsunma's purity is evident in everything she does, even when it looks like ordinary activity. She plants foliage in her yard based on how many lives it will support and shelter. The branches of all her trees are laden with bird and squirrel feeders. When the flood waters of Katrina invaded New Orleans, she inspired a dog rescue that continues to pull dogs off death row in shelters all over the country. Her adoption of one neglected cockatoo began a parrot rescue sanctuary. She creates music that is fun to listen to and yet infused with the purest and most profound teachings of Buddhism.

Jetsunma's activity is an endless string of lotus after lotus growing, rising, blossoming. Everywhere she goes, compassionate activity appears in the world.

It is staggering to contemplate. It is the mind of a fully realized Bodhisattva on display.

Saving Dawn

2009-09-25T16:20:00.004-04:00

It's easy to feel overwhelmed by the endless suffering in the world and to feel powerless to make the smallest dent in it. But today we can each help to save one life.

Wegener's or Wendy's?

2009-09-19T10:22:00.008-04:00

When I read this article on CNN.com this morning, I couldn't help but wonder if ... well, you know.

Man's Lung Ailment Caused by Fragment of Fast Food Spoon

"I know I didn't chow down on a spoon!" declared John Manley, who recently discovered that an eating utensil was the source of his two years of ill health, coughing, vomiting and pain.
The Wilmington, North Carolina, resident had surgery last week to remove part of a plastic spoon from his lung. And it wasn't just any old plastic spoon; it came from the fast-food chain Wendy's, with the restaurant logo clearly visible on the handle.
"It must have been in the food or drink," Manley told CNN affiliate WECT.
His doctor found the spoon after looking into his lungs with an endoscope, a medical instrument with a long, thin tube containing a light and a video camera.
"He explained that there was an object down there, and it had writing on it," Manley said. "It spelled out 'Wendy's' on one side and 'hamburgers' on the other, and I was a little floored."
So were his relatives, who, when they were telephoned with the news, were eating ... Wendy's.

Even if I don't have a spoon in my lungs, this man's story perfectly illustrates the Buddha's teaching : Desire is the root of all suffering.

Come 'N Get It!

2009-09-18T10:23:00.010-04:00

I like to think of my blog as a kind of food bank. I scurry around and collect all the goodies and then open the doors and invite everyone in to take whatever they want. And if you find something a friend could use, you can take it and share.

Because I believe it's the most important issue in America right now, lately I've been filling the shelves with morsels about health care reform. Yesterday Harvard Medical School released a study showing that 45,000 people in the United States die every year because a lack of health insurance prevented them from accessing health care. That's one person every 12 minutes.

To help me catch my breath after reading such a statistic, today I'm going to pack the shelves with insights about health care reform from T.R Reid-- one of my favorite NPR guest speakers.

Here's a great Washington Post article from him. In case the link expires, I've included the entire article :

5 Myths About Health Care Around the World
By T.R. Reid
Sunday, August 23, 2009

As Americans search for the cure to what ails our health-care system, we've overlooked an invaluable source of ideas and solutions: the rest of the world. All the other industrialized democracies have faced problems like ours, yet they've found ways to cover everybody -- and still spend far less than we do.

I've traveled the world from Oslo to Osaka to see how other developed democracies provide health care. Instead of dismissing these models as "socialist," we could adapt their solutions to fix our problems. To do that, we first have to dispel a few myths about health care abroad:

1. It's all socialized medicine out there.

Not so. Some countries, such as Britain, New Zealand and Cuba, do provide health care in government hospitals, with the government paying the bills. Others -- for instance, Canada and Taiwan -- rely on private-sector providers, paid for by government-run insurance. But many wealthy countries -- including Germany, the Netherlands, Japan and Switzerland -- provide universal coverage using private doctors, private hospitals and private insurance plans.

In some ways, health care is less "socialized" overseas than in the United States. Almost all Americans sign up for government insurance (Medicare) at age 65. In Germany, Switzerland and the Netherlands, seniors stick with private insurance plans for life. Meanwhile, the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs is one of the planet's purest examples of government-run health care.

2. Overseas, care is rationed through limited choices or long lines.

Generally, no. Germans can sign up for any of the nation's 200 private health insurance plans -- a broader choice than any American has. If a German doesn't like her insurance company, she can switch to another, with no increase in premium. The Swiss, too, can choose any insurance plan in the country.

In France and Japan, you don't get a choice of insurance provider; you have to use the one designated for your company or your industry. But patients can go to any doctor, any hospital, any traditional healer. There are no U.S.-style limits such as "in-network" lists of doctors or "pre-authorization" for surgery. You pick any doctor, you get treatment -- and insurance has to pay.

Canadians have their choice of providers. In Austria and Germany, if a doctor diagnoses a person as "stressed," medical insurance pays for weekends at a health spa.

As for those notorious waiting lists, some countries are indeed plagued by them. Canada makes patients wait weeks or months for non-emergency care, as a way to keep costs down. But studies by the Commonwealth Fund and others report that many nations -- Germany, Britain, Austria -- outperform the United States on measures such as waiting times for appointments and for elective surgeries.

In Japan, waiting times are so short that most patients don't bother to make an appointment. One Thursday morning in Tokyo, I called the prestigious orthopedic clinic at Keio University Hospital to schedule a consultation about my aching shoulder. "Why don't you just drop by?" the receptionist said. That same afternoon, I was in the surgeon's office. Dr. Nakamichi recommended an operation. "When could we do it?" I asked. The doctor checked his computer and said, "Tomorrow would be pretty difficult. Perhaps some day next week?"

3. Foreign health-care systems are inefficient, bloated bureaucracies.

Much less so than here. It may seem to Americans that U.S.-style free enterprise -- private-sector, for-profit health insurance -- is naturally the most cost-effective way to pay for health care. But in fact, all the other payment systems are more efficient than ours.

U.S. health insurance companies have the highest administrative costs in the world; they spend roughly 20 cents of every dollar for nonmedical costs, such as paperwork, reviewing claims and marketing. France's health insurance industry, in contrast, covers everybody and spends about 4 percent on administration. Canada's universal insurance system, run by government bureaucrats, spends 6 percent on administration. In Taiwan, a leaner version of the Canadian model has administrative costs of 1.5 percent; one year, this figure ballooned to 2 percent, and the opposition parties savaged the government for wasting money.

The world champion at controlling medical costs is Japan, even though its aging population is a profligate consumer of medical care. On average, the Japanese go to the doctor 15 times a year, three times the U.S. rate. They have twice as many MRI scans and X-rays. Quality is high; life expectancy and recovery rates for major diseases are better than in the United States. And yet Japan spends about $3,400 per person annually on health care; the United States spends more than $7,000.

4. Cost controls stifle innovation.

False. The United States is home to groundbreaking medical research, but so are other countries with much lower cost structures. Any American who's had a hip or knee replacement is standing on French innovation. Deep-brain stimulation to treat depression is a Canadian breakthrough. Many of the wonder drugs promoted endlessly on American television, including Viagra, come from British, Swiss or Japanese labs.

Overseas, strict cost controls actually drive innovation. In the United States, an MRI scan of the neck region costs about $1,500. In Japan, the identical scan costs $98. Under the pressure of cost controls, Japanese researchers found ways to perform the same diagnostic technique for one-fifteenth the American price. (And Japanese labs still make a profit.)

5. Health insurance has to be cruel.

Not really. American health insurance companies routinely reject applicants with a "preexisting condition" -- precisely the people most likely to need the insurers' service. They employ armies of adjusters to deny claims. If a customer is hit by a truck and faces big medical bills, the insurer's "rescission department" digs through the records looking for grounds to cancel the policy, often while the victim is still in the hospital. The companies say they have to do this stuff to survive in a tough business.

Foreign health insurance companies, in contrast, must accept all applicants, and they can't cancel as long as you pay your premiums. The plans are required to pay any claim submitted by a doctor or hospital (or health spa), usually within tight time limits. The big Swiss insurer Groupe Mutuel promises to pay all claims within five days. "Our customers love it," the group's chief executive told me. The corollary is that everyone is mandated to buy insurance, to give the plans an adequate pool of rate-payers.

The key difference is that foreign health insurance plans exist only to pay people's medical bills, not to make a profit. The United States is the only developed country that lets insurance companies profit from basic health coverage.

In many ways, foreign health-care models are not really "foreign" to America, because our crazy-quilt health-care system uses elements of all of them. For Native Americans or veterans, we're Britain: The government provides health care, funding it through general taxes, and patients get no bills. For people who get insurance through their jobs, we're Germany: Premiums are split between workers and employers, and private insurance plans pay private doctors and hospitals. For people over 65, we're Canada: Everyone pays premiums for an insurance plan run by the government, and the public plan pays private doctors and hospitals according to a set fee schedule. And for the tens of millions without insurance coverage, we're Burundi or Burma: In the world's poor nations, sick people pay out of pocket for medical care; those who can't pay stay sick or die.

This fragmentation is another reason that we spend more than anybody else and still leave millions without coverage. All the other developed countries have settled on one model for health-care delivery and finance; we've blended them all into a costly, confusing bureaucratic mess.

Which, in turn, punctures the most persistent myth of all: that America has "the finest health care" in the world. We don't. In terms of results, almost all advanced countries have better national health statistics than the United States does. In terms of finance, we force 700,000 Americans into bankruptcy each year because of medical bills. In France, the number of medical bankruptcies is zero. Britain: zero. Japan: zero. Germany: zero.

Given our remarkable medical assets -- the best-educated doctors and nurses, the most advanced hospitals, world-class research -- the United States could be, and should be, the best in the world. To get there, though, we have to be willing to learn some lessons about health-care administration from the other industrialized democracies.

T.R. Reid, a former Washington Post reporter, is the author of "The Healing of America: A Global Quest for Better, Cheaper, and Fairer Health Care," to be published Monday.

A Proposal for the Proposals

2009-09-11T16:25:00.013-04:00

On June 17, Congress officially began to debate health care reform, with several proposals on the table. In the 86 days since, roughly 120,400 Americans have lost their health insurance.

I propose that every Congressman or woman who tries to sabotage, delay or postpone health care reform be required to carry a notebook with pictures of all those people wherever they go. They'd have to add 14,000 pictures each day until reform is passed.

This will surely speed things along. Their arms would lengthen as the notebook grows heavier each passing week, enabling them to reach their hands further across the aisle.

My plan also requires them to sing "He Ain't Heavy, He's My Brother" at break times.

The benefits of this plan would go beyond health care reform-- stimulating business for office supply stores, photo processing centers, tailors and... singing instructors.

Letter to Ted

2009-08-29T12:30:00.001-04:00

Dear Ted,
I never met you, but as someone whose life has been touched by a great deal of your work, I feel like I know you well. I am so very grateful for your service to this country and to countless people around the world.

It is a difficult thing to keep hope alive in the hearts of those who feel hopeless. You used your life to do that despite the many times when you yourself must have felt hopeless. Even the times when you helped a single individual gain freedom, it created a better world for all of us. You never once decided you had done enough for others and that now you could rest. I ponder the ripple effect of such kindness, courage and tireless effort. I rejoice in those decisions.

I know you didn't always make good decisions. I know sometimes you made downright horrendous ones. Though my mind is like a teeter-totter that wants to form a final conclusion about you, I make myself step back and look at the whole picture. In this lifetime, you did what we have all done in each of our countless lives-- created a mix of virtue and non-virtue.

Even though you were Catholic in this life, I believe you would have been fine with any manner of prayer sent your way---especially prayer that included everyone else-- so I offer this one on your behalf.

Dedication of Merit
by Jetsunma Ahkon Lhamo

By this effort, may all sentient beings be free of suffering
May their minds be filled with the nectar of virtue
In this way, may all causes of suffering be extinguished,
and only the Light of Compassion shine throughout all realms.

Love,
Ani Sangye

Health Care for Buddhas

2009-08-19T15:24:00.050-04:00

No matter which side one is on, we can all agree that the controversy about health care reform has sure gotten ugly. I make no secret about which side of the fence I'm on : I believe equal access to health care is a right, not a privilege. I base my beliefs not on any political platform but on the same principles and teachings that govern all my actions in life.

These are teachings born of the pristine blossom of Compassion and nurtured in the soil of understanding that all beings are exactly equal in their true Nature. They are the teachings that illustrate with perfect logic and reasoning that we are not separate from one another no matter what our senses tell us. We are interrelated, interconnected and interdependent. If we were ignorant of this fact before, haven't the poor economy, banking and housing crises been a clear demonstration of this principle, at least on an ordinary level?

The Buddha taught that we all suffer from self-absorption. Those who defend the status quo and protest the health care reform proposals so passionately are displaying the same habitual tendency we all have: Me first. We think that when we meet our own needs we'll be happy. We leave others to fend for themselves. We cloak our selfish tendencies in prideful talk of "pulling oneself up from the bootstraps," and perpetuate the myth that those of us who have things like health insurance have worked harder than those of us who don't. We feel entitled. Or perhaps special in the eyes of God.

All of which completely ignores cause and effect. Pull a single thread and the entire argument comes undone : If someone who has worked very hard to get a good job with good insurance suddenly loses that job and that insurance, what happened? Did they stop working hard? Did they stop being special? The Buddha taught that everything we experience is the result of our past actions. Things like good jobs and good insurance are the karmic result of having taken care of others-- of countless lifetimes of generosity and compassion for others.

We don't see those efforts of course. We see only the illusion of "I worked hard in this life and got this thing." And that very ignorance of cause and effect leads us to do terrible things. Like act without compassion. Deny health care to others. Keep our hands in our pockets when someone right next to us is drowning.

So in time we become the other, and the cycle continues.

We don't openly acknowledge it, but in denying others health care, we are consenting to deepening their suffering. The result is a rationing of health care and what underlies it--rationing of compassion. I'm convinced that even the angriest town hall crasher could not look a gravely ill person in the eye and tell them they're not worth the only drug or procedure that will save their life. It's like road rage-- anonymous, faceless, easier.

No one would dream of rallying to close fire or police departments even though they cost a lot of money. Why would we treat health care differently? We can do this. We can shake ourselves awake enough to see that millions and millions of people should not be abandoned, and that not a single one of us is safe unless we are all safe.

School Days and Uh-oh

2009-08-14T10:32:00.005-04:00

Hearing an awful lot of chirping, I looked out my window this morning and saw about 30 sparrows in my yard, pecking for food. They filled the entire ground---thirty of anything in this little yard is a lot of something.

Most were on the ground but others kept flying up and down from the fence. It took me a minute to realize that many of the birds were fledglings. The adults were going up and down to show them how to look for food. It was a sweet few minutes, then they were off to another classroom.

A moment after they left a robin arrived. Just one. A male. He sat on the fence and stared at the overhanging deck. I've learned that robins often nest twice in one year. "Oh-noes" if they like prefab houses....

Sweet Not Always (Truly)

2009-08-10T11:00:00.003-04:00

The other day, a bunch of us were eating lunch at the temple following our morning practice. Ani Pema-- one of our nuns who also happens to be a veterinarian-- was updating us on how her studies are going. She's in Acupuncture school. We offered all the standard jokes about how she'd better start sharpening up her needles, etc.... She laughed and began to describe a particular acupuncture technique where no needles are used.

That got everyone's attention.

Apparently, acupuncturists can assess one's dominant constitution by smelling the patient. You read that right. They SMELL you. In the technique she described, they can treat a patient according to that sniffed-out constitution just by talking with them. Of course, our conversation never even explored the treatment part of it, because we were all caught up in the "Smelling the Patient" part.

Now, because Ani Pema is also a vet, we (okay, I ) immediately accused her of being around dogs too much. To top it off, some of the constitutions are best detected by smelling the LOWER BACK. This was too much for us. I mean, that's just a few humiliating inches away from what happens at dog parks! Naturally, none of us was rude enough to get up and walk away, but I'm sure I wasn't the only one who was relieved to be sitting with my lower back conveniently inaccessible. I did not want to be sniffed. In public, no less.

Nevertheless, we pumped her for information--what kinds of smells, what is each constitution like? This information did not put us at ease. Here are the descriptions :

Water: Putrid. Smells like Bounce fabric sheets, the salty ocean or a dirty pond. Smell the lower back.

Wood: Rancid. Smells like mulch, fresh cut wood, pine needles or rancid oil. Smell lower back, neck or top of head.

Fire: Scorched. Smells like smoke, ashes. Smell top of head or neck.

Earth: Fragrant. Smells like flowers, perfume, ripe fruit. Smell lower back or neck.

Metal: Rotten. Smells like rubbed coins or compost. Smell lower back, neck or top of head.

So... unless you're Earth-dominant, do you have any self-esteem left?

I don't know my 5-element constitution, but in Ayurveda, I'm Earth/Water and secondarily Fire. That would make my smell fragrant, putrid and smoky. Huh.

In truth, I don't know what I smell like. My dogs seem to like my smell. They don't leap backwards when I walk in the room or anything. But Lotus likes to roll all over dead fish when I feed it to her, so maybe she's not a good judge. Patch--who is a bit more refined-- is probably just being polite. He does have good manners. But no one has ever told me I stink. No one has ever said, "Ani Sangye, you smell like putrid pond water."

Even Ani Pema didn't tell me that. When I asked what her GUESS was (ie, no sniffing involved) for my constitution, she grinned like the Cheshire Cat. Well, I may not be the sharpest tool in the box, but I know you don't grin like that if someone smells like rose petals.

Tibetan Buddhist Altar

2009-08-08T15:56:00.012-04:00

Today is my 4-year anniversary of being ordained as a nun by His Holiness Penor Rinpoche. To celebrate, I'm sharing a new website that has been created by my lama, Jetsunma Ahkon Lhamo.

With this website, as with all her miraculous activity, Jetsunma continues His Holiness' tireless efforts to dispel darkness and hopelessness from the world. It is her offering to people everywhere who wish to learn about Buddhism or even just take a peek. It is exquisite-- a pure offering born of love and compassion, and the wish to end suffering for all beings.

May all beings be happy and well.

Backyard Dharma

2009-08-07T12:46:00.020-04:00

To see me today, you'd never think I was capable of producing a blood-curdling scream first thing this morning. I even surprised myself.

Here's what happened. I woke up and let the dogs out into the yard. After doing their business, they both disappeared into the chest-high weeds for a few minutes. Neither dog likes to be in high weeds, so I wondered what they'd found. I was thinking cat poop. After several minutes, Lotus came running to the door, proudly carrying what she'd found. I thought it was a deflated basketball and bent forward to get a better look. That's when I screamed. It was a huge turtle.

In case it isn't clear at this point, to say that I'm afraid of turtles would be a ridiculous understatement. What I've got is a full-blown, sweaty-palmed, run-away-crying phobia, not some little Oh-I-just-don't-fancy-turtles thing.

I called my landlady upstairs and begged her to come take it away. She sent her teenage son, who showed up wearing neon pink dishwashing gloves and a look of complete terror on his face. I tried to be the adult and stay calm. Tried. He couldn't bring himself to pick it up, so I suggested he scoop it onto the snow shovel and carry it to the pond around the corner.

I had already done some mantra for the turtle and played Jetsunma's "Prayer to Be Reborn in Dewachen." So, despite being scared into his shell by two big dogs, carried in the mouth of one of them and set down in front of a screaming nun, this turtle actually had a pretty good day.

I, on the other hand, was emotionally spent. My body just can't sustain an adrenaline push like that without going awry. To see if I could stop the biochemical cascade before I crashed completely, I decided to meditate. This was a good decision. It's incredible to watch your mind when it's relatively calm-- thoughts continually arising, the mind wandering, and engaging in conversations, shopping and to-do lists. But it's really something to watch your mind when it's completely stirred up. It was like a cafeteria food-fight in there. There was fear, judgment about fear, anger, judgment about anger, sadness, remorse, guilt, curiosity and every other emotion possible, all battling with each other, shouting each other down, each one arising immediately on the heels of another. Some thoughts were connected to prior ones, and some just came out of nowhere.

I found myself constantly replaying the whole scene from the yard, like a printing press that keeps spitting out copies of the same story. It wasn't just the storyline, of course, but each emotion was reproduced as well, along with a corresponding physical reaction. After awhile, the story began to lose its grip on me. A little. Enough so that I became more of an observer of the rising and falling emotions.

I decided to contemplate the object of my fear-- the turtle. My fear of it is my fear. Someone who loves turtles would have reacted totally differently-- their heart instantly opening with love and compassion for the turtle, the way I would if Lotus had brought me a puppy instead. Other people are pretty neutral towards turtles, and might have gone on with their day without giving it another thought. So clearly there was nothing innately fear-producing about the turtle. It was just "turtle."

This helped me relax a little. I decided to take things one step further and see if I could dissolve my conceptual boundary that says "I am me, and turtle is other." This was pretty tough. I didn't make much progress-- maybe just punched some microscopic holes in it. My fear just had too much of a stranglehold over my mind to do much. I gave it a good try and let myself rest. It is a pretty tall order.

At the end, I contemplated where it had all come from. None of it-- the turtle, the scream, the meditation and contemplations-- was what I expected this morning. Certainly neither the turtle nor the dogs expected it. All that karma ripening for the four of us as swiftly and unpredictably as lightning in the sky. Incredible.

It took me awhile to find the courage to put the dogs out again. Both were repeatedly drawn back to where they found the turtle. They retraced the steps over and over. They'd pick up its scent, and I could see excitement rise in them. Then confusion, finding nothing there. Attachment that held them there. Desire, when something else caught their attention. Then the scent once again, leading them back into the loop. As animals, they have no way out of it. Their instincts and senses trap them, and they are incapable of observing their own minds.

Because of the large deck overhanging, the yard is the only thing I can see when I look outside. When I first moved here from the spaciousness of northern Arizona, this fact almost undid me. But now this little yard of mine is proving to be quite the arena for Dharma practice. In it are hopes and fears, beginnings and endings, mysteries and plainness, dramas and meditations. And every bit of it a perfect display of my own mind.

Homewrecker

2009-08-01T18:04:00.004-04:00

A few months ago, a guy started hanging out in my yard. He'd just stand there and stare for hours. I knew he was trouble. I even called my landlady and warned her, "This might become a problem." She replied, "Okay, but just keep me posted. I've never had anything like that happen before, and I'm not sure what to do." I knew what I had to do, I just didn't want to do it. But finally I decided it had gone too far and if I allowed it to continue, someone might get hurt.

So I let the dogs out.

Now, depending on your habitual tendencies, you might be coming to various conclusions about what this is all about.

Here's a clue :

Once Spring sprang, birds began flying all over the neighborhood looking for nesting sites. The large deck that overhangs my yard has a wide beam underneath. There's a particularly sweet spot right in the center that's nicely sheltered from rain. A male robin began scouting it out by sitting on my fence and just staring at it. For hours. Every day. He'd fly to it and sit there, then fly back to the same spot on the fence and stare at it.

(I understand this behavior. Anyone who's ever gone shoe shopping with me will never do it again. I'll try on the same pair over and over, then the same shoe in the same size, then another size, etc.... Sometimes I just sit there and stare at the shoe, too. Once I find a shoe that fits, I don't buy another pair of shoes until it is totally worn out. Even I can't stand myself.)

When I realized he was casing the place for a nest, I was thrilled. Then I realized the nest wouldn't be far from my door and not that high above where the dogs play outside. The dogs can't reach the nest, but their running around would definitely startle a mama bird off her eggs. I figured my coming and going would be enough to make him change his mind.

No. After about a week, he brought his wife to check out the 'hood. They flew back and forth, sat and stared, examined it from other angles. All day long for several days. I know nothing about robins, but I never would have guessed they were that picky.

About two weeks into this, I woke up and saw long pieces of dried grass hanging over the beam. They'd been hard at work since dawn. When they returned, she stood on the fence with her beak full of fluffy dried grass, looking like she was holding a pom-pom. I knew it was my last chance to take action. That's when I let the dogs out to play. The two birds watched at a safe distance. She held onto the pom-pom. It was heartbreaking. They had worked so hard, made so many plans. It took a long time to convince them to go. They couldn't relinquish it. I kept the dogs outside until the defeated pair finally flew away. Over the next few days I let the dogs spend more time in the yard. Bit by bit the long pieces of grass left hanging over the beam were stolen by other birds.

But then I let my guard down. Well, sort of. I spent a few days in the hospital, and when I got out I discovered that the persistent couple had taken advantage of my time away : the nest was complete.

Thankfully, she hadn't laid eggs in it. I stepped up my efforts of making the area undesirable for a young avian family. Not only did I let the dogs out more, but I spent more time out there brushing them and cutting their nails. After a few days, the birds gave up and never returned.

Their little nest is still there. I have mixed feelings when I look at it--I miss the babies that never got to use it, yet I know I did the right thing, albeit the difficult thing.

A few days ago, a small songbird began sitting on the fence and staring at the nest. I just hope he doesn't show up with a realtor.

Makeshift Medicine

2009-07-27T19:25:00.011-04:00

I heard this story on NPR today, as I drove home from my aquatic physical therapy session. These PT sessions--paid for by my health insurance--are restoring my strength and ultimately will enable me to return to work.

My health insurance monthly premium consumes 84% of my Disability income. (That doesn't count the enormous annual deductible of $3,000, or expenses that aren't covered.) But because I have this insurance, I have access to world experts in treating Wegener's, and I can get the drugs to treat it--some of which would cost several thousand dollars each month if I were to pay out of pocket. I can have necessary CT scans and other diagnostic tests when I need them. I am blessed beyond belief.

I am also doing everything in my power to ensure that every single person in this country has what I have, and that we all can have it for a reasonable price.

In case the link expires :

Rural Medical Camp Tackles Health Care Gaps

It was a Third World scene with an American setting. Hundreds of tired and desperate people crowded around an aid worker with a bullhorn, straining to hear the instructions and worried they might be left out.
Some had arrived at the Wise County Fairgrounds in Wise, Va., two days before. They slept in cars, tents and the beds of pickup trucks, hoping to be among the first in line when the gate opened Friday before dawn. They drove in from 16 states, anxious to relieve pain, diagnose aches and see and hear better.
"I came here because of health care — being able to get things that we can't afford to have ordinarily," explained 52-year-old Otis Reece of Gate City, Va., as he waited in a wheelchair beside his red F-150 pickup. "Being on a fixed income, this is a fantastic situation to have things done we ordinarily would put off."
For the past 10 years, during late weekends in July, the fairgrounds in Wise have been transformed into a mobile and makeshift field hospital providing free care for those in need. Sanitized horse stalls become draped examination rooms. A poultry barn is fixed with optometry equipment. And a vast, open-air pavilion is crammed with dozens of portable dental chairs and lamps.
A converted 18-wheeler with a mobile X-ray room makes chest X-rays possible. Technicians grind hundreds of lenses for new eyeglasses in two massive trailers. At a concession stand, dentures are molded and sculpted.
Desperate For Health Care
The 2009 Remote Area Medical (RAM) Expedition comes to the Virginia Appalachian mountains as Congress and President Obama wrestle with a health care overhaul. The event graphically illustrates gaps in the existing health care system.
"We're willing to sleep in pickup trucks or cars and deal with the elements to at least get some kind of health care," Reece adds. He earned a six-figure income working for an international industrial supply firm until an accident five years ago left him disabled. Joining him for dental, vision and medical checks are his wife, daughter, son-in-law and three grandchildren.
"Tomorrow, I'm going to see the doctor to get my ear and my nose fixed!" grandson Jacob shouts excitedly. His nose appears battered and his ear has an oozing scab.
Before the gate opened, Loretta Miller, 41, of Honaker, Va., got four hours' sleep behind the wheel of her parked minivan. She was No. 39 in line for her eighth RAM expedition. Her visit last year saved her life.
"They done an ultrasound and told me that my gallbladder was enlarged and was ready to burst and it could kill me," Miller recalls. "They told me if I hadn't got help when I did, literally I could have died."
Medical, dental and vision help is often elusive for the 2,700 people seeking treatment during the three-day RAM event. Just over half of the people attending this year have no insurance at all, according to a survey of the patients conducted by RAM. Forty-seven percent could be considered underinsured, given unaffordable copays or gaps in coverage provided by Medicare, Medicaid and conventional insurance plans. Only 11 patients have dental insurance, and just seven have vision coverage.
"There's no doubt about it. There is a Third World right here in the United States," concludes Stan Brock, RAM's founder. Brock has organized similar medical expeditions in Asia, Africa and South America. "Here in the world's richest country, you have this vast number of people, some say 47 million, 49 million, that don't have access to the system and that's why [this] is necessary."
About 1,800 volunteers provide the medical, dental and logistical help, including hundreds of doctors, dentists, nurses, assistants and technicians.
Almost 4,000 Teeth
Miller is ecstatic when her number is called. The divorced hairdresser and mother of two is uninsured and in pain. But she had taken the time, even with little sleep, to put on makeup, braid her blond hair and dress in a white lace tunic. She walked briskly through the gate for what would turn out to be five hours in dental chairs, given the extraction of an abscessed tooth, three fillings and a root canal.
More than half of those seeking help sign up for dental exams and procedures. They fill the more than 70 dental chairs while hundreds wait their turn under tents nearby. Hundreds more out in the grassy parking lot hope they'll get their teeth cleaned and fixed before the event ends.
Dental health greatly affects general health, says Dr. Terry Dickinson, who directs the Virginia Dental Association and the RAM dental effort at the Wise fairgrounds.
"The infection in the mouth certainly has been shown to have an effect on systemic diseases," Dickinson explains. "So it's really critical that these folks be able to get infected teeth out and infection treated in the mouth because it's going to help them with their overall health."
The extent of infections is staggering. Dickinson and his team pull 3,857 teeth in 30 hours of work spread over 2 1/2 days. Some patients lose all their teeth. A 4-year-old had cavities filled in every tooth.
Who Is Responsible For Health Care?
Terrible teeth, obesity, smoking, high blood pressure and diabetes are common among the people seeking help here. That raises an important question. Are they at fault for their poor health?
"There's enough blame to go around for everybody. I think patients certainly have to have personal responsibility for what they're putting in their mouth, but we are also trying to create a better access care system. How are you going to get providers, whether it be dentists or physicians or anybody else, into these areas where economically these communities are struggling?" Dickinson asks.
That's a reference to the costs of medical and dental schools and the debts that graduates incur, which can be $100,000 and more. There's pressure to practice in more lucrative places beyond rural regions like Appalachia.
"There are areas of the country, and certainly Wise County is one of them, where there just aren't [enough] physicians," says Dr. Susan Kirk, an endocrinologist and diabetes specialist with the University of Virginia Health System, which provides specialists for the Wise RAM event. "We provide indigent care at the University of Virginia, but that's six hours away."
RAM founder Stan Brock is impatient with those who suggest the people seeking help in Wise are somehow at fault and unworthy of care given poor health habits.
"The rest of the population is not exactly in the best of shape themselves," Brock asserts. "They're eating well and, therefore, they're putting on weight and, therefore, they've got heart disease and the rate of diabetes in this country is going up. But, in the case of the well-to-do and the well-insured, they can afford to take care of it."
At the end of her long day with dentists, Loretta Miller was still numb with Novocain but grateful for the care she could not otherwise afford.
"It's well worth the drive and the wait," Miller said, close to 12 hours after her number was called. "You get tired and stuff. But you think about all the trips and the money it would have cost to have all this done. I couldn't have had it done."
She then laughs about standing in line again at 5 a.m. the next day so she can get eyeglasses to "see what they've done."
RAM organizers say they spent about $250,000 providing care worth about $1.5 million. In 10 years in southwest Virginia, they say, they've treated more than 25,000 people. They have eight more expeditions planned this year, from Virginia to California.

It could be any one of us standing in such a line, praying for the chance to have dental surgery at a fairground or our eyes examined and treated in a poultry barn. We are all subject to old age and sickness.

Thankfully, we are also each capable of taking action when our hearts tell us we simply must.

A Fine Start

2009-07-26T17:30:00.001-04:00

I don't know these people, but this is one wedding I'm sorry I missed.

This Very Moment

2009-07-24T17:46:00.007-04:00

Some of you know the Wegener's has flared up again (D'oh!), and I'm back on the heavy-duty chemo I was first on in 2006. Both Wegener's and chemo can cause extreme weakness, so it's hard to tell which one is making me feel like a jellyfish washed up on the beach. At any rate, writing a blog post is just out of my reach until I can get my body and mind to cooperate.

I decided to post an excerpt from Jetsunma's most recent teaching. I hope you'll take 6 minutes and 39 seconds to enjoy it.

May you-- in this very moment--find peace, joy and comfort.

Thank You, Farrah Fawcett

2009-06-25T13:34:00.006-04:00

Even though the media followed every step of her journey with cancer for the past 3 years, it was still a shock to hear that Farrah Fawcett died today.

This woman whose beauty, fame and good fortune seemed limitless reminded me that all karma--positive and negative-- exhausts itself. She was the epitome of vibrant health for so many years. Like all beings, she probably never imagined how it would end. Even in the final months when she knew she was dying, she couldn't know exactly where and when it would occur, what it would be like. Would she die in her sleep? Would she slip into a coma, or be conscious and say her goodbyes?

A woman I spoke to last week just lost her father. He was elderly but had been in good health his entire life. Out of nowhere he developed Wegener's. It spread like wildfire, and he was gone within a month. The nine people killed in the D.C. train crash this week. Certainly every one of them expected to complete that commute like any other day. As I write this, it is announced that Michael Jackson has died of a heart attack. No warning, not one moment to say goodbye.

We are taught that contemplating the impermanence of all things is the most powerful meditation there is. So I take this gift from Farrah and share it with you. Be kind to someone--anyone-- today. Remember that the world is always full of last moments.

Time for Tights

2009-06-20T13:48:00.003-04:00

Today's the last day of Spring. Told ya....

(And good sport that he is, President Obama laughed all the way through it.)

Unniversary

2009-06-11T13:54:00.018-04:00

Today is not the anniversary of anything major in my personal life. I know that, because sometime during my 30's I began to mentally record important dates in my life. Not birthdays and things like that-- I'm still awful at remembering those-- but "anniversary" dates. The day I found my dog Laika living on the streets of Spain, and the date she died. The days I adopted Patch and Lotus. The day I became a chiropractor. The day I first saw my lama. The day I was ordained as a nun.

And then there are the Wegener's dates. The day I had to acknowledge that something was seriously wrong-- the first CT scan. The day I was diagnosed. And a boatload of other dates that make me shudder to remember.

The Wegener's dates are not all bad. The last day I had to be on oxygen. The last painful heparin shot. The day I got off chemo and steroids. The days I met my amazing doctors at Johns Hopkins, when each of them first told me, "I believe you" and "I can help you" and "Your life can be better than this."

My personal calendar is really filling up with all this. So I'm playing with this Anniversary Date Habit thing lately. Constantly counting the days "since" keeps me engaged with them as if they were the present. The past never gets to be "passed." At some point I'll be able to take a big pink eraser to all these mental dates and forget about them once and for all. But for starters, I'm just going to let myself ignore the big June dates this time around. They can come and go and if anyone asks "Wasn't it June when you ...?" I'll just look at them and say, "I have no idea. I'm just no good with dates."

One Simple Act

2009-06-04T10:46:00.020-04:00

I'm not really a writer, I just play one on the internet. So yesterday, when I decided to write a post about my sangha brother Sam and his encounter with a local snake, I couldn't figure out how to begin. Alas, this morning's Rigpa Glimpse of the Day fed me the opening :

What is compassion? It is not simply a sense of sympathy or caring for the person suffering, not simply a warmth of heart toward the person before you, or a sharp clarity of recognition of their needs and pain, it is also a sustained and practical determination to do whatever is possible and necessary to help alleviate their suffering.

Sam spent a lot of time living on our retreat land in rural Arizona and had met up with a few snakes before. So when he found a baby snake in his room at the temple on Sunday night, he picked it up. Unfortunately, the snake didn't know Sam to be the kind-hearted, gentle guy we all know him to be, so he bit Sam twice on his finger.

Sam's a long-time practitioner and a pretty cool customer. He put the snake into a flower vase and called a couple of sangha members to help identify it using the internet. They decided the snake was a poisonous copperhead, but before heading for the ER Sam circumambulated the Enlightenment Stupa three times carrying the vase full o' snake, making prayers for its auspicious rebirth. Then he walked out to the woods and set it free.

Not only was the snake's life saved, but it received rare and extraordinary blessings. Because of seeing and circumambulating the stupa, the little snake will attain enlightenment in some future life. Just from that one simple act.

The thing is, training one's mind to perform a "simple" act like that takes time and dedication. It takes consistent effort to counterbalance our conditioning. In this world we are taught that humans are superior life forms, and that among animals snakes are way down at the bottom. We are taught that animals live happy lives, even though the briefest observation would reveal that their lives are full of suffering. We are bombarded with societal norms that tell us there's only this one life, here and now. We are encouraged to act as if our actions--whether positive or negative-- only produce immediate results, or none at all. We just don't think long-term. And we really don't think about the distant, future lives of poisonous little snakes.

But on Sunday night as a result of his dedicated practice, Sam did. As our Aussie sangha would say, "Good on ya, Sam."

Boxing Gloves For Sale (Almost)

2009-05-24T15:55:00.016-04:00

...In the clearing stands a boxer
And a fighter by his trade
And he carries the reminders
Of ev'ry glove that laid him down
Or cut him till he cried out
In his anger and his shame
"I am leaving, I am leaving"
But the fighter still remains...
(The Boxer, by Simon and Garfunkel)

I was born fighting. I don't remember my birth of course, but knowing the surrounding circumstances I can say with complete confidence that I came out fighting. For a time, it was probably a good thing, since that very energy protected me from harm during my childhood. I was able to defend myself.

I was also able to defend others. I was unafraid to take on bullies and actually felt like it was my duty to do so. We moved a lot, and soon after starting 5th grade in a new school, I found myself protecting a 6th grader from playground bullies. Her last name resembled the Spanish word "feo" which means "ugly." She looked different from most kids-- very pale, dark glasses-- so you can imagine how they taunted her. I listened to it for about five minutes and realized she had no idea how to defend herself. I jumped in with a verbal assault that laid those kids low. I have no memory of what I said. I remember their mouths hung open like dead bass, so it must have been quite cutting.

There were many times like that where I felt the fighter in me did some good. But looking over the past 45 years, I see how it's made life difficult for me, too. The thing is, I never knew how to stop fighting.

When I got diagnosed with Wegener's, I did the only thing I knew to do-- I fought it. "The tests are wrong," I told my doctor. Okay, so the fact that I was laying there half-dead with hemorrhaging lungs helped convince me he was right, but I still fought it down deep. I fought that it was happening to me. I fought every new drug they put me on, every procedure, every complication. I always had good reasons-- a new drug was not necessary, a procedure was redundant, the doctors really did mess up, etc....

I couldn't see what was really going on : A fighter must always have a fight.

Having a serious illness means I get to meet a lot of fellow fighters. People with cancer often refer to their cancer as "The Beast" and use fighting words to talk about it. Some people with illnesses talk about beating their disease into submission, triumphing over it, slicing it out of their bodies, etc.... They describe dying from a disease as "losing the fight." It's a logical reaction. Fear makes us feel weak, and anger makes us feel strong. I have certainly done it myself.

And yet, it's so... violent. We are turning on our bodies at their most fragile time, assaulting them with aggressive images and harsh demands. We are propping them up for battle when they're trying to recuperate from disease and drugs and stress. It takes enormous energy to fight, and few of us have any to spare.

Little by little, Wegener's is taking the fight out of me-- not out of resignation, but out of surrender. It's showing me how I've engaged endlessly in this cycle, and how that will only lead to more of the same. Some days I can put down my boxing gloves altogether, and other days I put them down only to pick them right back up. It's slow going. that's for sure. But eventually the new habit will outweigh the old, and I will turn in these worn-out gloves for good.

Canidae Symbiosis

2009-05-14T16:27:00.019-04:00

This story was on CNN.com today. In case the link expires, here it is :

Dog dodges traffic to help fellow canine

BRONX (WABC) -- In the dog eat dog world of New York City rush hour driving, throw in an actual dog, two, really, and you have quite a tie-up.
Just before 6:30 a.m., a 9-year-old female yellow lab chow mix ran onto the Major Deegan Expressway and was hit by a car at exit 3. That's when another dog, her son, ran to the rescue, right there on the busy highway. The dog wouldn't let anyone near, barking at traffic and police officers, even as they tried to help.

At one point, police tried to coax the dog into a cruiser, and they got an earful.

The Deegan, normally buzzing at that hour, was slowed to a trickle. Drivers tried to maneuver around the scene, and the dog let them have it.

Finally, officers got close enough to lift the injured dog onto a sheet and place her gently inside a cruiser.

When police tried to get to the other dog, that's when the great pooch protector took off.

There was a slow-speed chase, then a high-speed chase. The dog dodged vehicles, changed direction and ran head-on into traffic.

Police backed up the highway, not sure which way the dog was going to break next.

Finally, after about 45-minutes, the dog was given a police escort onto an exit ramp, and traffic flowed again.

Meantime, the injured dog was on her way to help.

The dog was brought to animal care and control in East Harlem, where they gave her pain medication and made her comfortable. Then, a vet looked her over.

"She was alert," Lisa Ortiz said. "She picked up her head, she knew she was getting help."

She suffered a broken leg and is expected to recover. She also wore no ID, but her owner saw the drama on TV, went to the vet center and whisked her away to an animal hospital.

The owner told animal control that the other dog, who he also owns, is home now.

Ortiz says the relationship between the dogs explains a lot.

"It was heartwarming, they look out for each other," she said.

*

I adopted my dog Patch almost a year before I adopted Lotus. Patch is a highly sensitive dog who had lived in a violent home before finally running away. Outwardly he was social and affectionate. But after spending just a few hours with him, anyone could list his many fears. He was a real puzzle. He didn't have the typical slinking look of fear, but he'd sit there and just come unglued inside. It took me months to figure him out. He's tenderhearted and has the quiet, hard-won courage of a survivor.

Even as Patch shed countless fears, over time it became clear that as a submissive dog he'd never be happy without an alpha buddy. I prayed to find the perfect friend for him-- a leader, but not a dictator.

Within a couple weeks, Lotus appeared in a local shelter where I was volunteering. As is typical, most of the dogs were either barking, cowering or engaged in neurotic behavior. But there sat Lotus, perfectly still and perfectly calm. From the moment I brought Patch to the fence to meet her, they became inseparable.

As far as I can tell, Lotus has never known hard times. She's the least traumatized dog I've ever seen. Right out of the pound she was deeply affectionate and cuddly, and yet she had no idea humans were communicating when they made noise. She took 3 months to learn her name. The first time she came when I called her, she was as shocked as I was.

For a long time I believed Patch needed Lotus more than Lotus needed Patch. As the years go by and I watch her curl up into his belly or look for him when it's time to eat or go outside, I see that it's mutual. They have never once squabbled. They share everything--beds, bowls, me. She leads and he happily follows. She never abuses her power, and he always retains his dignity.

My kinda people.

East Coast Tents

2009-05-10T15:02:00.028-04:00

Yesterday afternoon I was looking out my window into my tiny backyard. There's a wooden deck and a large overhanging wooden deck above. Beyond the deck is a patch of muddy weeds fenced in by a 6-foot wooden fence. In case that all sounds nice to you, consider that yesterday it suddenly morphed into a scene from "Night of the Living Dead." Or something.

We just got through a long spell of rainy days. I lost count, as one rainy day rained into the next. After awhile, you start to measure time by how deep a puddle you have to stick your feet in to enter your house. Before the rain, we had one week of very high heat-- in the 90's, with East Coast humidity. (I was conveniently hospitalized the entire week, so my delicate constitution never experienced anything but purified, climate-controlled air.)

So combine record-breaking heat followed by enough water to ripen seeds from King Tut's tomb, and you have the perfect recipe for the scene that unfolded in my yard : hordes of caterpillars. At first I only saw a couple. I was intrigued and went out to take a peek. And then, while I was a very far 5 feet from the safety of my door, I noticed they were everywhere. Everywhere. On every surface. Dangling down from the deck above. FALLING DOWN from the deck above. Rising up from between the deck slats. There were parades of them all along the fence. They blended in with the wood and the mud so well, that just when I thought I could take a step, one appeared or dropped down. It...was...nightmarish.

I'm not afraid of caterpillars (though after this description you probably have serious doubts about that statement). I don't think they're cute as bunnies, either. Like artichokes, maybe. I'm not afraid of artichokes, but I think they're a little icky looking. So if I suddenly found myself surrounded by wiggling, creeping artichokes and they were popping out at me and falling on me, I might have the same reaction.

This morning, much to my relief, the caterpillars were gone. I figured they had marched on to another yard, having tasted the weeds in my yard and decided this restaurant was definitely "Two Thumbs Down." But on returning from the temple this afternoon, I discovered they had returned, too. And maybe brought friends.

Nevertheless, I am an intrepid blogger and felt obligated to get pictures to share. Please forgive my lousy camera phone :

This one reared its head up to me like a savage beast only moments after I snapped it :

Also participating in this adventure was my dog Lotus, who is not really wearing sneakers, but is being headlocked into observing "Do not kill."

And because the biologist in me insists on labeling them as something other than "icky," "nightmarish," or "artichoke-like," I felt obligated to determine what kind of caterpillar they are. I don't know how tricky caterpillar-typing is, but as near as I can tell, they are the Eastern Tent Caterpillar. ET's (oh for Pete's sake, how perfect is THAT) prefer cherry trees, and there's a nice big fat one just a few feet from my yard. If they all spin cocoons, this place is gonna look like a mummy crypt pretty fast.

Now, an interesting thing happened when I was trying to take the pictures. I had to get really close for my lousy camera to get any detail, and while I was nose to nose, I noticed that they have pretty cute, fuzzy little black faces. I thought, "Wow, I guess I've really been working on seeing the Buddha in all beings." And then, as if to smack me out of any hint of a prideful thought, a caterpillar that was dangling from the deck above came whizzing right by my ear and plopped down onto the deck. Cute and fuzzy-wuzzy maybe, but I ran back inside my house like a little sissy girl, making the kind of sound that comes out entirely involuntarily, "Eeaahhurrkkeeahh."

And inside is where I shall remain until they crawl away for good. It's cool-- I've got enough food for at least a week. Just enough time to figure out how to use Jedi Mind Tricks to say, "Go to the cherry tree next door. Nirvana awaits you, oh fuzzy-faced ones."

Unless of course that plan backfires, and the cherry tree ends up filled with escaped hamsters instead....

Lifeline

2009-05-09T12:30:00.022-04:00

I’ve always had a pretty good sense of humor. It’s been with me this entire life, along with the banana bread-shaped birthmark on my leg. Few people escape a conversation with me that doesn’t entail laughter at some point, even if it’s just a joke about how un-funny our conversation is.

One day Ani Alyce Louise and I were sitting in an ER discussing how I had just added to my list of diagnoses. I said, “Wouldn’t it be funny if I died from something that wasn’t even on the list? All this time spent worrying about this condition or that, and someday WHAM! A banana peel takes me out.” She hesitated for a moment—most people do when I joke about death—and then broke loose laughing.

Several weeks ago my doctors suspected I had new blood clots in my legs. The best way to tell is a leg ultrasound. During the test they use a lot more pressure than a typical ultrasound, since they have to compress the veins. For whatever reason, ever since I got the first clots in 2006, the test is excruciating—like my veins are filled with chopped glass. I can take the first compression or two, but as the test proceeds I squirm up higher and higher on the bed, feeling like I’m backing out of a shark’s jaws. This goes on for about 30 minutes and the whole time I’m usually seeing stars and begging to pass out.

And, I’m laughing. Because minus the pain, the whole scene is actually pretty funny. I mean, I walk in just fine, chatter back and forth with the tech, and then in the midst of our happy little conversation I’m suddenly begging for mercy. And once it‘s over, we’re back to chatting and off I go. Just like a little “Interlude from Hell” in an otherwise okay day.

The tech who did the test this time was so compassionate. She kept saying, “I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry.” I was laughing and screaming at the same time. At one point my “ha-ha’s” and “ow-ow’s” began to merge into a bizarre-sounding “Ha-eow Ha-eow Ha-eow Ha-eow Ha-eow.” Like a cat holding onto a ceiling fan.

When we could both form coherent sentences again, she explained how touched she was by my ability to laugh even while I was in so much pain. She asked if she could share it with her little girl as an example of how to cope with difficulties. I said "Of course," but I left there scratching my head as to why on earth my sense of humor was of any real value.

It wasn't until I began aquatic physical therapy a couple weeks ago that I started to really contemplate this little gift of mine. We're a mixed group of people in the pool-- everything ranging from mild to serious injuries or illnesses. I've discovered that it's impossible to guess the severity of anyone's condition just by their attitude. The least injured might be the most somber, while the critically ill might be the happiest. I can't help but think that those with a lighter attitude about their suffering probably feel less pain.

Splashing around in the pool has been a catalyst for me to understand what so many friends have told me my whole life. I see that I’ve completely taken this gift for granted, thinking of it as a nice little add-on, just good for entertaining others. I never thought of it as something that actually helped me. But seeing how life’s woes go all the way to the bone, I’m grateful that my sense of humor does, too. It has saved me from sinking into deep depression and has been a reliable reprieve from the “storm du jour.” As I wade through all the levels of chronic illness—crisis, recovery, rehab, rinse & repeat—I see that finding the humor in things is the lifeline I throw to myself. It keeps my head bobbing on top of the water, able to see that the waves are just waves (even when they're really really big), and that eventually I’ll wash up on the shore again.

And when I do, I sure hope I look better than this :

Logic in the Sky

2009-04-17T15:01:00.027-04:00

I don't know much about astrology other than it's always offered an accurate explanation for whatever is happening in my life. I haven't asked any astrology friends to take a peek, but for the past two or three weeks I would bet that some planet has moved into some weird alignment with some other celestial body. And I bet that bizarre partnership has glued itself right onto whatever piece of the sky governs bureaucracies.

At least in my sky. Lately, every single bureaucracy I deal with seems to have divorced itself from logic.

Case in point : One of my doctors wants to decrease the dosage of a drug from 25 mg to 2 mg. My insurance company required a pre-authorization for the 25 mg dose, so we figured it would certainly apply to the much lower dosage. Wrong! That would be the logical assumption, and that ain't the game this month.

In fact, they couldn't even authorize the lower dose because they didn't have that dose registered in their computer.

"It doesn't exist," they told me.
"Yes it does," I insisted. "I have seen it with my own eyes."

So they connected me to their pharmacist who said, "It does exist," while they remained on the line and listened.

"Okay, so everything's good, right?"
"No. It may exist in the pharmacy computer, but it doesn't exist in ours."
"But...aren't you at the same company?"
"Yes, but we are using different systems."
"But it's the same company."
"Using different systems."
"So the pharmacy computer knows something your computer doesn't?"
"That's right."
"How do I get the pharmacy's system to explain it to your system?"
"It can't be done. Your drug does not exist to us."
"Are you in a Black Hole?"
"What?"
"Never mind. How can I get my drug?"
"We have to send a request to the technical services department to have your drug entered into the system."
"Okay, that's great. So, what-- like a day or two?"
"No, it can take weeks."
"How many?"
"No one knows."
"But I need the drug."
"I'm sorry, but it doesn't exist."

Over the course of (I wish I were kidding) four hours, numerous supervisors and other departments were brought into the conversation. It was determined that the easiest solution was to get 5 mg pills and cut them in half, because they had those in their computer.

I paged my doctor for a new prescription. He was baffled, "Why can't they get the 2 mg?"
"They said it doesn't exist."
"Yes it does. "
"Are you sure?"
"I've seen it."

After getting the 5 mg prescription faxed to the insurance company, getting the pre-authorization, getting the Pre-authorization Department to speak to the Customer Service Department and getting everything faxed to the pharmacy, I arrived at the pharmacy.

"I'm sorry, we don't have that."
"Why not?"
"It doesn't exist."
"Yes it does. I have seen it with my own eyes. My doctor has seen it. The insurance company has it in their computer, and they even have a computer that lives in a Black Hole."
"Well, according to our computer it doesn't exist."
"According to the Buddha, neither do I."
"What?"

The Hitch

2009-04-07T18:16:00.075-04:00

Today's Rigpa Glimpse of the Day was :

Even Buddha died. His death was a teaching to shock the naive, the indolent, and the complacent, to wake us up to the truth that everything is impermanent and death an inescapable fact of life. As he was approaching death, Buddha said:

Of all footprints
That of the elephant is supreme.
Of all mindfulness meditations
That on death is supreme.

Like everyone else, when I first heard such teachings as a new student, I thought it was pretty depressing. Like, if death is inevitable, then what's the point of dwelling on it? Why not just live my life to the fullest each day and when time runs out, I'll just pack up and go quietly? The hitch is, that unless we keep death in mind we don't live each day to its fullest. We can't squeeze the joy out of every happy moment unless we are constantly aware that those moments won't last.

Without keeping death in mind, we'll never work diligently enough to uproot our negativities. We'll continue to allow ourselves hatred, greed and ignorance, harming ourselves and others, thinking we can take care of that icky stuff sometime in the future.

Before moving to Maryland I purged my possessions of anything excess, anything that felt heavy to me. Among those things were journals I had kept from age 13 to 32. For the first time ever I read them all the way through. It was utterly shocking to see that through all those years--my teens, my twenties and my early thirties-- I struggled with the same exact habitual tendencies that I do now and was completely unaware of it. Because the journals spanned so many years, I couldn't dismiss any of it as just a phase. It was like watching a bird fly into a window again and again.

Those habits are deeply ingrained and many days I wonder if I can really uproot them all in one lifetime. My Lama says it's possible, as does an unbroken lineage of fully enlightened beings stretching all the way back to Buddha. So I dig in and get to work while I still have this life. Meanwhile, she waves her arms, jumps in the way, shouts to get my attention-- whatever it takes to keep this bird from hitting the window again.

Final Meditation

2009-03-29T21:02:00.009-04:00

This is to formally announce that the 11th Throneholder of the Palyul Lineage of the Nyingma School of Tibetan Buddhism, His Holiness Pema Norbu Rinpoche entered the stage of Thugdam, the final stage of meditation, as of 8:20 PM on Friday, March 27, 2009, at the Namdroling Monastery in Bylakuppe, South India.

Earlier, at noon, His Holiness received offerings from many of the highest Nyingma Tulkus, Khenpos, and Lamas who had assembled to pay homage to him. Rinpoche left Columbia Asia Hospital at 3:30 PM with the help of the Bhutanese Government who provided an Indian police escort. He reached Palyul Namdroling at 6:40 PM and remained on his bed at the residence. Tulkus, Khenpos and Lamas did aspiration prayers together with His Holiness until 8:20 PM. At that time Rinpoche looked around and then closed his eyes and went into meditation.

Prayers continued for 5 minutes and then everyone remained in silence for the next two hours. His Holiness' meditation continues today, and is expected to continue for the next several days. When His Holiness releases his body from meditation, there will be an official acknowledgement of the final passing, allowing everyone to pay their respects according to tradition.

Kyabjé Drubwang Pema Norbu Rinpoche was born in 1932 in the Powo region of Kham, Eastern Tibet. His Holiness settled in South India where he built, with his own hands and with the help of a few monks, Namdroling Monastery . The monastery has grown into one of the largest Tibetan Buddhist Dharma centers in the world, housing over 6000 monks and nuns in the complex.

His Holiness also built temples and established dharma Centers around the world - in Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore, Malaysia, Philippines, Australia, United Kingdom, Greece, Canada and the United States - among others. His Holiness frequently traveled to teach and give empowerments at all of them. Worldwide, His Holiness is universally revered for his loving kindness and compassion, pure upholding of the Vinaya and ceaseless dedication to the welfare of all beings. Wherever he went, has brought and nourished the Buddha-Dharma everywhere he has been.

He will live forever in our hearts.

Lama Lobsang Chophel, Secretary
28 March, 2009
Palyul Ling International

As the head of our lineage, my teacher's teacher, and my ordaining lama, every single blessing in my life is due to His Holiness' great compassion. Every time I choose kindness over anger, every positive habit I cultivate and every negative habit I uproot-- it all stems from what he has taught.

The river of his ceaseless compassion has flowed into countless hearts and minds. There are no words sorrowful enough to express the loss I feel. And none joyful enough to express the gratitude.

Pure Light in Dark Times

2009-03-14T18:35:00.027-04:00

There are so many people in this world who use their lives to harm others. They seem to take up all the oxygen in the room sometimes, as their stories spread via the news and internet gossip.

So today, feeling like the ethers are clogged with stories of villains and criminals, I'm going to dedicate some space to the purest light there is, His Holiness Penor Rinpoche.

I first fell in love with His Holiness through the eyes of my teacher, Jetsunma Ahkon Lhamo. Her teachings are pure love—always based in compassion, always logical, useful and immediately relevant to my life. She speaks directly to my heart, even using phrases and stories that have particular meaning for me. The true sign of her purity is that, when asked how she learned what she knows, what the source of her blessing is, she never takes personal credit. Instead she points to her own teacher—His Holiness Penor Rinpoche, a living Buddha.

His Holiness has lived every moment of his life with pure compassion. It’s incomprehensible to those of us who have not attained such a state, to understand how every one of his words, actions and impulses has arisen out of the wish to benefit others. He has flooded our world with the sea of his compassion, building monasteries, nunneries, temples, stupas, schools, a hospital, an old age home and retreat centers. Thousands of monks, nuns and laypeople all over the world are the direct recipients of his compassionate activity, including me.

The first time I saw His Holiness Penor Rinpoche two of his attendants were at his sides, bracing him as he walked. He was in excruciating pain, having been in need of double knee replacements for several years. He walked slowly into the temple at his Palyul Retreat Center in upstate New York. I could only imagine the pain he was in, yet there was not the slightest indication of it on his face. His eyes were serene, like a great lake under calm skies.

I had developed early symptoms of Wegener’s a few months before going to the retreat. I could barely sit still, unable to find a tolerable position. My mind was restless as well. But His Holiness sat like a mountain, and each day the relentlessness with which he taught helped me stabilize my mind a bit more.

Later that week, he conducted ordination ceremonies for several of us. I became a nun, connecting to an unbroken, pure lineage of Palyul monks and nuns. It is said that the merit of taking ordination is so great that it purifies an inconceivable amount of negative karma. Without his blessing that week, it’s doubtful I ever would have survived once the Wegener’s hit full force a few months later.

Countless times when I’ve felt overwhelmed by life’s circumstances or discouraged as a practitioner, I have only to think of His Holiness to feel comforted and renewed. No matter how dark the world gets, the great beacon of his love cannot be extinguished.

Fifty Years of Sorrow

2009-03-10T10:28:00.006-04:00

Today marks fifty years since His Holiness the Dalai Lama escaped from Tibet and went into exile in India.

May all beings be free from all suffering, and may they know only peace.

Green Not Always

2009-03-07T10:38:00.008-05:00

I'm working on a little project that's taking some time-- changing the look of this Oh-so-green blog! I have never liked it, but being brand new to blogging I've been unable to do anything about it, short of switching to a (*yawn*) plain white template. (Which would then have to be renamed "Sweet Not Ever.")

But now I'm gathering some power, harnessing the wind, rewriting code, figurin' stuff out.

It will be here soon. Be patient. Meanwhile, though it bears an unfortunate resemblance to bread mold, make friends with The Green.

Moose and Squirrel Diet

2009-03-01T19:24:00.011-05:00

Okay, so I just discovered Hulu.com, where you can watch tv shows and movies online for free. Hundreds to choose from—classics, popular, everything. And which show do I go straight to—my heart literally racing in joyful anticipation, in complete disbelief that I have found such a treasure?

Rocky and Bullwinkle—the original tv show I cut my wit-tle teeth on in the 1960’s. (Those who know me well are probably laughing, having just connected a few mental dots about my odd sense of humor and insistence that all jokes are better when told with a foreign accent. )

I watched only one episode, saving the rest as if they were a little tin of homemade baklava. Life is hard enough—I do not want to arrive at the day when I’ve seen the last episode on the list. So I must make a rationing plan, have self-discipline and refuse to click “play” before each anointed “Watch-me-pull-a-rabbit-outta-my-hat” Day. Yes, that’s it! A rationing plan. I must not eat my cookies before dinner.

Oh no. I just remembered Dudley Do Right and Fractured Fairy Tales. Mr. Peabody. Boris and Natasia. Mr. Know-It-All. Bullwinkle’s Corner….

Someone out there, please. Unplug me. I cannot do it mooself.

Children of the Congo

2009-02-18T21:30:00.004-05:00

Please take 2 minutes to watch this video and if you are so inclined, consider signing this Amnesty International petition to the US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

Feed 'Em

2009-02-14T10:04:00.036-05:00

I normally love a good, cold winter. But since I got sick, it's like I'm made out of rice paper and just have no cold tolerance whatsoever. Northern Arizona winters were just right. Because the big snow accumulations usually happened late in the day or overnight, I'd wake up to ponderosa pines laden with snow and sun glittering through the icicles. Every time I saw it, I'd think "Winter Wonderland." The low humidity meant neither winter nor summer was too extreme. But the past few years there have seen colder winters and hotter summers. Global warming isn't going to spare any Wonderland.

Similarly, winter in Maryland has been brutally cold this year. It's my first winter here, and I've done my fair share of complaining about it. Actually it's more like complete bewilderment, as I walk outside into the icy air and say things like, "Is it really this cold? How can it be? It barely even snows here!" I find my head chronically cocked to the side like Forrest Gump. But the locals are complaining, too, and they don't seem overly delicate. (Especially not the guard at the local Social Security office-- she's about the toughest-looking person I've ever seen. Like she could just look at you and crack a bone.)

The cold winter has put wildlife in jeopardy. Biologists are scratching their heads (though not in panic, they insist) at the curious absence of acorns along the entire East Coast this year. The lack of their staple food plus the cold has led to record numbers of squirrels dying from starvation.

So here we all are-- humans and animals alike-- being increasingly frozen and melted each year as if we were being stored in a huge, malfunctioning refrigerator. Toss in eight years of unregulated corporate greed that encouraged irresponsible consumer spending, and that deliberately ignored and suppressed scientific evidence of global warming (all of which can be filed under "W") and we all know what a mess we have on our hands. Ecosystems and economies thrive on homeostasis. Neither does well with crisis-- the imbalance has to get absorbed somewhere and always rattles down the food chain to take out the weakest links first.

One of the things I love about Buddhism is that it's always concerned with the weakest links. My Lama has this thing about feeding hungry beings. In a teaching years ago she said, "I feed everything." It's true-- wherever she goes, her trees are always filled with bird feeders and she routinely feeds the deer and other wildlife.

Inspired by her compassion, our sangha has put out birdseed, salt licks, corn and nuts at the temple and our own homes to help the wildlife survive. I have one skinny squirrel in my yard who's so hungry he eats bits of garbage he finds in the common areas. He doesn't even look up as I step two feet from him. I've been slopping fatty peanut butter on a fence post for him, which he devours every day. My lousy camera phone won't let me get a good picture of him, but I did get this shot of Patch mesmerized by the squirrel. You can pencil in a scrawny squirrel in the upper left corner.

With hunger affecting more and more people, Jetsunma asked us to begin a food bank at our Maryland temple : "Give what you can, Take what you need." I saw it today-- one day after this picture was taken. We already need a bigger bin.

Times are hard and probably will get harder. A box of macaroni and cheese might just be the new face of compassion in 2009.

Sunset for Tibet

2009-02-12T19:11:00.014-05:00

Last month I wrote about Tibe t, Tara's Babies first Katrina rescue dog granted a lifelong resident pass. We had discovered that he was in need of veterinary care for some worrisome symptoms.

Thanks to the generosity of so many, Tibet received the diagnostic tests he needed, but the cancer had already spread throughout his body. He died last night, on the land reserved for him for all his days-- sacred Dakini Valley. Ani Kunzang, director of Tara's Babies, remarked how peaceful he had become in his final days. A good way to enter the Bardo.

Thank you to his loving caretakers and to all those who support Tara's Babies. No one knows what Tibet's life was like before Hurricane Katrina. But thanks to you, he was never in harm's way again.

Loving-Kindness

2009-02-11T09:56:00.005-05:00

Full story here.

Gone

2009-02-10T10:21:00.005-05:00

One of our Australian nuns, Ani Tenzin Wangmo, reported today that the wildfires there are "like a Hell realm." The news is filled with stories of people overtaken by the unbelievably fast-moving fires. Those trying to drive away found their cars were on fire, too. Thousands left homeless. A man on one news video said all his friends and all their children were killed.

Our sorrow encompasses the uncountable number of creatures affected as well. Animals experience fear. Even insects instinctively defend their homes. So many creatures left homeless, injured, killed. A Hell realm, indeed.

There are ways we can help. Ani kindly forwarded these links : one to make donations to the Australian Red Cross, the other to make donations to the RSPCA (animal rescue/shelter). Please consider even a small donation as you hold all those affected in your prayers.

Blog Eyes

2009-02-04T23:47:00.013-05:00

I never blogged before. Now that I do, it’s like I have a microchip implanted in my head that makes me evaluate everything I read, see, discuss, laugh about, fret about, or in any way interact with, for its blog-worthiness.

Here are a few things that caught my attention this week :

Elizabeth Edwards—wife of John Edwards for those with short-term memory disorders—has written a new book called Resilience. Her publishers said, “[Edwards is] one of the most beloved political figures in the country, and on the surface, seems to have led a charmed life.”

Some charmed life—she lost her teenage son in a car accident and has been living in the national political spotlight while dealing with breast cancer.

The Broadway Diner in Baltimore has a tabletop touchscreen computer game called Merit Megatouch. There's even a “My Merit” button to see how much you've accumulated. Wish it were that easy.

I’m a biologist and a Dr. Seuss fan. Imagine my delight when those worlds collided for me this week, and a new species of sea squirt was discovered
Living in their
Sneak-a-peeky world
in the deep Australian swirl

Or if you prefer,
"'It was truly one of those transcendent moments," said the cruise's lead scientist, Jess Adkins of Caltech. "We were flying — literally flying — over these deep-sea structures that look like English gardens, but are actually filled with all of these carnivorous, Seuss-like creatures that no one else has ever seen.'"

A mere fifteen days after Obama put on his Inauguration shoes to begin leading the nation out of the smoldering ruins left by George Bush, Newsweek ran a story about the Obama administration titled, “Losing Control.” Not like we have unrealistic expectations of the guy, huh? What did they expect? It’s much too early for President Obama to put on his blue tights and red cape. That’s Spring wear and everyone knows it.

Millard Fuller, the co-founder of Habitat for Humanity died this week.

He believed, “We want to make shelter a matter of conscience. We want to make it socially, morally, politically and religiously unacceptable to have substandard housing and homelessness.”

A man who walked his talk, he chose to be buried “in a simple pine box.”

While speaking about malaria education and eradication at the annual Technology, Entertainment and Design conference in Long Beach, California, Bill Gates opened a jar containing (malaria-free) mosquitoes and set them free in the room. That was probably good for both the mosquitoes and his fundraising.

Old But New

2009-02-03T15:25:00.005-05:00

This video has been on YouTube for over 2 years. Two years is a long time in the world today. Easy to think, "Yeah, I've already seen that. Gimme another bright shiny object, would ya?" But its message is no more worn out than when the Buddha first said it 2,500 years ago.

May you be happy.

One In Three

2009-01-31T23:25:00.004-05:00

Today, Iraq is having its second provincial election since Sadam Hussein was removed. That's cause for celebration, but not a drop of credit goes to Former President Bush and his comrades in terror. All credit goes to the Iraqis themselves, who are surviving an American invasion killing nearly 100,000 innocent civilians and destroying their entire infrastructure in the process.

It is not possible to bomb a people into freedom. Today the polls open because of their own courage, resilience and hope.

And clearly Iraqi women have a double gene for courage. CNN.com reports that 4,000 Iraqi women are running for office. Due to something like America’s impossible-to-decipher electoral system, one out of every three seats is guaranteed to go to a woman.

The struggle before them is enormous. CNN reminds us, “Under Hussein, Iraq was one of the more secular Arab countries, but the 2003 U.S. invasion unleashed extremist militias. Now, many activists say women have been forced back to the Dark Ages, forced to be submissive, anonymous and fully veiled.”

Sure, they have a long way to go, but just look at them. I have one piece of advice for the men who'll be taking office alongside them : Don't expect these women to fetch your tea.

Playing Leap Blog

2009-01-23T18:55:00.009-05:00

This morning I visited Bowdawg on the Mend--the blog my sangha buddy Chris writes-- and learned that his Katrina rescue Joy Beagle is currently in need of both prayers and a pirate costume.

Then I blog-hopped to one of his favorites Faster Than Kudzu. Today's Kudzu post began with a link to Little Blue School. I laughed so hard that my oatmeal took the same exit route as the foot-long flexible nasal scope from a few weeks ago (I'm still creeped out remembering that thing was inside my delicate head).

Then I hopped back to Kudzu and read the rest of her post, which included a hysterical story about a girl named Cecily, a train trestle and a Catholic nun.

No wonder I needed a nap.

The Last Word

2009-01-22T12:31:00.015-05:00

Okay, so I am officially the LAST blogger to write about Inauguration Day. Maybe it was my plan all along—let everyone else bombard the internet with their reactions and opinions first, and then like a Ninja I slip in quietly. Because now that President Obama is ensconced in the Oval Office with shirtsleeves shockingly visible, as Obama addicts are desperately panting for more Obama, as our hourly fix is reduced to pathetic little snippets of news—he’s signing this, redoing that— just then, I post.

(While that might have been a good strategy, what really happened was a brief visit to the hospital that threw me off for days. Ah, well.)

Even so, I wouldn't have missed the day for anything. On Inauguration Day, I poured myself into a big cushy chair at the home of several other nuns (the famous Ani House) and just let myself enjoy the entire celebration.

Amidst all the activity—the shivering crowds, the cameras snapping and clicking, the security officials on alert and in constant motion , and the hopes and fears rising around the world—was this precious moment of stillness as Obama waited to walk onto the dais and take the Oath.

It is the image I will never forget.

As he delivered his Inaugural Address, I was breathless. It was both his words and what they had inspired. I contemplated the vast amount of merit being generated all over the world right then, as people actually celebrated virtues like love, patience, and compassion.

Simply put, we all stopped to think how we could be kinder to one another. And if that isn’t “Change,” then I don’t know what is.

Say “Woof” If You Love Me

2009-01-17T16:56:00.018-05:00

No matter how I feel each morning, I wake up to a room full of love.

Konchog Birdy starts his singing and daily recitations. Then my dogs line up at my bedside. Patch is the submissive one, but also has the rank of “The Baby,” granting him first cuddle rights. He knows it, too. Like he has a Press Pass or something. Impossibly cute, I can’t even look at him without smiling. Lotus wedges her way in and locks her warm brown eyes on mine. And then, zoink! She gives me a quick lick on the face and sits back down, staring, reloading, then zoink! Because of the attention I’m giving her, Patch begins (I’m not kidding) mooing. His pink lips curl, his head raises in protest, and he moos. Konchog loves all this activity, so he starts singing and talking louder. This is all too much for Lotus to contain herself. She is now leaping around the room like a flea, engaging Patch in a raucous morning tumble.

All my animals are rescues. Looking at what they do for me, I guess I’m a rescue, too.

* *

Though it may seem a geographic impossibility, Tibet lives in Arizona. After Hurricane Katrina left him homeless in 2005, he was rescued by Tara’s Babies Animal Welfare and became a lifelong resident. Right now, Tibet’s days are a mixed bag. On the one hand, he could not be more loved. On the other, he’s having difficulty breathing, gets tired easily and has numerous golfball-sized lumps at his throat. For some of us, those symptoms hit pretty close to home. Tibet needs veterinary care to diagnose and treat him. If you’d like to help with his expenses, please visit the Tara’s Babies website and do what you can to make his days a little brighter.

* *

Despite the fact that Rosie is not my dog and never has been, she's my big, sweet girl. She’s so near and dear to my heart, I can hardly write about her without tearing up. We came pretty close to never meeting in this life.

In 2007, Tara's Babies began working with a volunteer at an Arkansas shelter, rescuing as many dogs as they could. The “shelter” is no such thing—built on a landfill, filthy, with intact dogs roaming freely in an open pen, a high kill rate, you get the picture.

On the way to picking up two large dogs, our volunteers got a call, “Would you be able to take an additional two?” And then, “One of them is a really pregnant Rottweiler.”

I had an instant, inexplicable attachment to Rosie. As soon as I met her, she snuggled her giant bowling ball head into my neck. I mean, just look at her. She's exquisite.

I visited her the day she gave birth to 11 enormous puppies. She escorted me to them with the most human expression of pride I’ve ever seen on an animal. With the puppies outside of her, we could see how starved she was. Yet she doted on them and they all grew fat and healthy.

It took a few months to find her a perfect home, but this week Rosie was adopted by a loving family right here in Maryland. This morning as my own animal circus woke me up laughing, I thought of sweet Rosie who was no doubt doing the same.

My Last Spoon for the Day

2009-01-13T22:10:00.003-05:00

Several posts ago, I handed out an assignment : Read The Spoon Theory. Two of my friends did so, and receive an A+ for their efforts in understanding what millions of people with chronic illness live with every day.

After reading about Spoons, one of my beloved friends Marilya has consequently made it her New Year’s resolution to be kinder to people. Her Kindness-o-meter already registers a pretty high number, so I expect to feel the ripple effect of her stepped up activity all the way across the country.

And one of my sangha brothers Chris has demonstrated such a deep understanding of Spoons that I am at a loss for words. So please read his.

What a gift to our world—to have people who would make such an effort to connect to the silent suffering of so many when they could just as easily look the other way.

Inside Out

2009-01-10T23:12:00.004-05:00

Yesterday it was back to Johns Hopkins for more tests, one of which was a nasal scope. To do it, they snake a foot-long flexible scope up each nostril and down your throat. I had no idea that was on the menu—thought it was just a routine visit to the ENT to discuss some recent symptoms.

A resident came in first and hastily prepared to do the test without much of an explanation. I was a physical and emotional wreck by then, so the thought of having a foot-long flexible scope snaked up my nose and down my throat freaked me out much more than normal. He mouthed, “I understand,” as he dug around through the equipment and left to get the treating physician.

I’ve dealt with this indifference a lot. For awhile I decided to teach my doctors how to connect with patients. These attempts had a 100% failure rate, and led to many tears and therapy sessions.

I kept trying to change them instead of me.

When he arrived in the room, the treating physician was kind and asked a little about Buddhism before starting the procedure. So while he looked in my nose and throat, I took a good look at all of me—nearly collapsing from exhaustion, experiencing pain in a previously pain-free area, heart racing with anxiety, and using every coping skill I had to keep from running out of there dangling a foot-long flexible scope out of my nose.

Fruit Headache

2009-01-07T18:16:00.014-05:00

A story I read today on MSNBC.com got me reminiscing about Africa. Whenever I open the latch to that memory box, the overriding emotion I recall is a general sense of being confused. It was almost impossible to tease out the truth even in ordinary situations.

“When does the bus come?”
“It’s coming soon.”
“How soon?”
“Not long.”
“Do you know what time it’s coming?”
“No.”
“Then how do you know how long it will be?”
“It isn’t long.”
“Do I have time to go eat something first?”
“No, wait here. It’s coming.”
“Oh good, you see it coming?”
“Not yet.”
“I’m going to get something to eat. I won’t go far. Just call me when it’s coming.”
“Okay. It’s coming.”
“It’s coming now?”
“No. There is no bus today.”

Monty Python was big in the US right before I went to Africa. I often felt like John Cleese was going to step out from behind a palm tree at any moment.

So when I read the MSNBC.com headline and saw that it originated in Nigeria, I settled in for a tale : Bikers Strap on Fruit, Pots to Dodge Helmet Law

The story begins, “Police in Nigeria have arrested scores of motorcycle taxi riders with dried fruit shells, pots or pieces of rubber tire tied to their heads with string to avoid a new law requiring them to wear helmets.”

Apparently, the law is part safety measure and part money-maker for the traffic cops who thrive on bribes. And clearly the cops are in a huff about the fruit.

"We will not tolerate this,” said Yusuf Garba, commander of the Federal Road Safety Commission in the northern town of Kano. “We gave them enough time to purchase helmets. Six months ago the price of helmets was below 800 naira so complaints about non-availability and high prices are no excuse."

“The regulations have caused chaos around Africa's most populous nation, with motorcyclists complaining helmets are too expensive and some passengers refusing to wear them fearing they will catch skin disease or be put under a black magic spell.”

Okay, so expensive we understand.

Skin disease?
"The story is that people who have scabies, craw-craw, ringworm, dandruff and all other such diseases would easily infect others with them through the helmets," Steve Nwosu wrote in the Daily Sun.

I flashed back to countless memories of being squished into vehicles to the point of experiencing extreme pain and difficulty breathing as a routine part of travel throughout West Africa. I don’t recall anyone worrying about catching skin diseases at the time. I’m starting to get that confused feeling again.

Black magic spell?
“Newspapers quoted passengers as saying they feared the helmets could be laced with magic spells so as to knock the wearer unconscious and make them easier to rob.” Little gnawing pains creeping up the side of my head....

The whole thing reminds me of the part in The Poisonwood Bible, where no one in the Congolese village will allow the new missionary to baptize them in the river. He thinks it’s because he hasn’t succeeded at converting them and goes at it with full force. No one tells him it’s because when the last missionary did it everyone who was dunked in the river got eaten by crocodiles.

Maybe the Nigerian traffic cops know the real reasons or maybe they’re getting a smoke screen, too. As for me, I don’t know if the fruit helmets are a sign of poverty, widespread disease, fear run amok or just plain old defiance. Maybe it’s something else entirely. But here I am, 20 years later and thousands of miles away, and I still really want to be let in on the big secret.

Gaza

2009-01-05T18:53:00.009-05:00

No matter what either side says about who caused what and when,
the results are in, and everyone has already lost.

Chain of Love

2009-01-03T16:25:00.018-05:00

If there can be such a thing as a beginning, then this love story begins with my dear friend Aleia who lives in Flagstaff, Arizona. I met Aleia at a wholistic fair-- she’s a massage therapist and Reiki practitioner and I’m a chiropractor. We became fast friends and over the past 10 years or so have shared not only our own ups and downs but those of our loved ones, too. Throughout all these years, I have watched Aleia reach out in kindness to anyone who needs help, no matter what it takes.

Aleia and her husband Robert were best friends with Wayne Marinelli for a couple decades. Wayne was one of those guys you just love right away—big open smile, contagious laugh, kind and compassionate. In September 2003, samsara struck and Wayne was diagnosed with an aggressive brain tumor. Aleia instantly became his primary caregiver and advocate, all the way through hospice. Wayne died at his home 13 months later, surrounded by these loving friends.

Wayne, who said he always lived as if he had Jesus on one shoulder and Buddha on the other, had planned his memorial service with his friends in mind. The week he died, I took my first set of vows allowing me to wear the Buddha’s robes. Aleia asked me to carry out one of Wayne’s wishes by offering mantra and Buddhist prayers at his ceremony. It was outdoors on a very windy day, and I was brand new to managing the voluminous robes. As I read my favorite passage from Shantideva, the wind threatened to embarrass me. I focused on Wayne’s wishes and threw all my energy into recitation and leading the guests in chanting Om Mani Pedme Hung up into the sky.

Aleia and Robert had known Wayne for some 20 years and grieved his loss deeply. Out of their pain grew Further Shores, a non-profit organization dedicated to providing pre-hospice support. Wayne’s beautiful mountain home became “Wayne’s House,” a place of retreat for this work.

By the time I got sick Further Shores was up and running. I was the beneficiary of their volunteers who came regularly to help me clean, cook, and cope. Two of them—Janine and Eliot—make me smile just thinking about them. Though they didn’t become a couple for many months, they were just such a natural pair of lovebirds. Two of the most gentle, calm and loving people I’d ever met—until I met Janine’s daughter Alana, who is all that in a child. Alana’s serenity was immediately apparent to my dogs, who are usually overly excited (read : annoying) when guests arrive. Alana walked in the first day and the dogs laid down on their sides as if a comforting patch of sun had appeared on the carpet. She played with my bird and didn’t jump the slightest when he gave her little nips. I’ve honestly never met a child like her.

Janine and Eliot married last year and a few days ago, this chain of love acquired another link : Sky Lewis Schipper was born at home on December 29. Janine described him to me today remarking how seldom he cries—seeming not the least bit disturbed by hunger, wet diapers and even a difficult blood draw his first day. Content. My joy for them all is beyond words.

So gentle Sky, welcome to the world. Your timing is perfect, little boy, because we sure need you. May you be strong and healthy, and may you, too, know the joy of serving others throughout all your days.

Who Ya Gonna Call?

2009-01-01T17:48:00.048-05:00

Thanks to a bizarre karmic ripening, I spent the past several days in Johns Hopkins Hospital with still-unexplained but spontaneously-resolved GI bleeding. I got released just a few hours before the ball dropped on New Year’s Eve. This post is dedicated to all those who helped me get through it:

The Doctors
Hands down, the doctors at Johns Hopkins are the best. Their level of expertise is staggering. For the first time ever I can relax, knowing they each understand not only all the complications and contraindications, but that they also deeply appreciate the toll this illness takes on one physically, emotionally and mentally.

The Nurses
Because of complications, I had a lot more nurses than a typical patient. With the exception of one odd apple, each one cared for me with such kindness, compassion and respect. It's a ridiculous job description : Must mop up the emotional and physical debris of perfect strangers without getting to hear how it all turns out. Given that, I marvel that they return to work each day.

The Nuns
Ani Alyce Louise holds the sangha record for the most hospital hand-holding sessions with me. She intends to maintain her record in Maryland, enduring a 9-hour local ER visit and several hours of travelling after work just to visit me in the hospital. I don’t know how she did it. Her smile wove itself into those 4 pain-filled days.

Also intending to keep her medals, Ani Dorje holds two sangha records: one, for the most overnight hand-holding sessions and second, for always pet-sitting while I’m hospitalized. Knowing my babies are safe in her loving care brings me much needed peace. On top of that, she gave up the popular New Year’s Eve celebration at our temple, to come pick me up on a freezing, windy night. My hospital stay was particularly harrowing, and our laughter on the way home went a long way towards getting me back on my feet emotionally.

It’s hard to describe the relief it gives me to have my Vajra sisters with me during times like that. Hospitals swim in fear and chaos, and the mere sight of the Buddha’s robes seems to settle it all down a bit.

The Sangha
Our Maryland temple has maintained an unbroken 24-hour Prayer Vigil for nearly 24 years. Sangha members take 2-hour shifts every day of the year. It's a monumental task to keep the shifts filled each week—especially the middle-of-the-night ones. Failure is not an option. Seeing the endless suffering in the world, each of us does our best to follow our Lama’s teaching, “Pray as if you’re the only one in the world praying, like it all depends on you.” I'm personally humbled that during the nearly 100 hours of my own ordeal this week, there was always at least one person in in the world praying for the benefit of all beings.

The Lama
In one of Jetsunma’s teachings, she explained that there is no beginning to the relationship between the lama and a student, that it has always been so. I had always wondered when it all began—how it came to be that I have only to look at a picture of her, picture her in my mind, hear her voice or her name to feel my heart melt. She is the embodiment of Wisdom and Compassion, existing in the world only to liberate beings. Jetsunma’s prayers and miraculous intervention have quite literally kept me alive. For the few days that I was geographically further away, the potency of her embrace was just the same.

To all these people, and to everyone who prays for me and contributes in whatever way towards ending the suffering of beings: Thank You and Happy New Year!

985 Down

2008-12-27T10:28:00.007-05:00

In July of 2006, with the diagnosis of Wegener’s still fresh on the page, we discovered both my legs and my lungs were filled with an uncountable number of blood clots. Well, one was easy to count—it ran the entire length of my right thigh and was the thickness of my pinky.

(Though I read all my medical reports and viewed all the other diagnostic films along the way, I would not find the courage to look at the images of that CT scan for almost 2 years. When I finally did, I couldn’t stop crying. It sounds cliché to say it was there in black and white. But it’s true—it was physical evidence that I had not dreamed that terrible nightmare, and also that I was a walking miracle. Not one of those clots went to my brain or my heart, though most had lived in me for 3 weeks by the time they were discovered.)

So, with lungs still hemorrhaging, I began blood thinners for the clots. My doctor was an ICU veteran who’d never had to do such a thing before and was sure I’d never survive it. But I had the ultimate ace in my corner : Jetsunma Ahkon Lhamo, my lama. Through her extraordinary prayers, she kept me alive and intact. She asked our sangha to dedicate their prayers to me and to circumambulate the stupas on my behalf. Even the doctors acknowledged they had no medical explanation for how I made it through.

Within a couple months I got new clots and had to switch from coumadin to daily heparin injections. First thing every morning and last thing every night, I gave myself the shot in my abdomen. It’s famously painful. It didn’t matter how I felt that day—migraine, vomiting, too weak to stand, in complete emotional collapse, all of the above—the needle had to go in. I was thrilled to eventually reduce it to one shot per day.

Last week my new hematologist at Johns Hopkins said I’ll have to stay on blood thinners the rest of my life. I don’t know why it hit so hard to hear that. I mean, Wegener’s is not curable either. Yet this was the first time my ears heard, “For life.” It’s a place I’ll sit for a day or two, but I won’t set down roots in it. Nothing is permanent, after all.

Besides, we had decisions to make. I’ve already been on the injections too long. They leach bone at an alarming rate and at $4,000 a month, they leach my health insurance, too. So I’m back to coumadin. No painful shot, but it makes life more difficult in ways the shot did not.

It’s hard to know whether—or what—to celebrate.

Looking at karma purely in a linear way, right now I guess I’m just glad to have 985 spears behind me.

My Christmas Miracle

2008-12-25T13:53:00.016-05:00

The Buddha taught that it’s a fundamental delusion that I perceive myself to be separate from you. If that’s a new, insane or just plain theoretical statement to you, bear with me as I rev up my dormant brain cell and attempt an explanation that won’t embarrass me.

Though the Buddha taught this 2,500 years ago, physicists are trying to catch up. We’ve learned we’re actually packages of molecules which can be broken down into atoms, which can be broken down into subatomic particles. (For now we don’t need to go further than that, which is okay with me since I’m already in up to my neck. Don’t try to lure me into a discussion of quarks and leptons either, unless you read yesterday’s post and you have a bon-bon on hand to revive me.)

It turns out that while you and I perceive ourselves to be quite solid, we’re actually just clouds of sub-atomic particles held together by force fields. These clouds contain more space than particles. The force field of one particle cloud influences the force field of the other. If I sit next to you, it changes the behavior of both of our clouds. Moving towards or away from each other changes our clouds, too. In the end, there is nothing I can do “to” you that does not affect me equally.

At some point, it becomes impossible to distinguish your particle cloud from mine. Is that your electron way out there, or mine? (Which begs the question: Are our subatomic particles just as graspy as we are? “That’s my quark!” “No it isn’t!” “Is too!” “Give it back or I’m telling Mom!”) And that enormous amount of space in-between all those particles—whose is it?

If you have kids that fight over their space in the back seat, you can use this physics lesson. It’ll put them right to sleep. Problem solved.

So I got up this morning and scanned CNN.com. The father of a family loses his job due to illness, which begins a domino-effect of financial difficulties. You can feel the fear clamp down on them as their bills roll in, the car breaks down, a foreclosure notice arrives.

Then a friend steps in and posts the family’s story on her blog, asking for donations. The blog link spreads across America. People are moved to help. The money rolls in quickly : enough to fix the car, enough to get current on the mortgage. A tv station runs the story and as a result, the father is offered a job. Others join in. An unemployed woman with no hope of getting a job gives $1. A woman without a car walks to her grocery store carrying her offering of a jar filled with change. Finally, a little boy knocks on the family’s door and hands the father a $5 bill, “Here you go, mister.”

Their miracle, my miracle, whatever.

Miss Special Eats Bon-Bons

2008-12-23T20:34:00.021-05:00

(I know, I know. The title of this post sounds like a headline about a final rift between two spoiled cats.)

When I’m not in the hospital (which hasn’t happened for a year now) or in obvious agony (which hasn’t happened for 3 months now), people often ask me, “So what do you do all day since you’re not working?” I’m going to ignore the people who ask with an undercurrent of, “So what do you do, lay around and eat bon-bons all day?” and do my best to answer those who honestly wonder.

Basically, you can divide up my activities into 3 categories : 1) Activities of Daily Living (ADL’s is the technical term), 2) Doctor visits/ procedures, and 3) Pulling out (what remains of) my hair.

Let’t talk ADL’s. This is stuff like buying groceries, paying bills, personal care. (Please do not be alarmed. I am not going to tell you about my potty breaks.) What healthy people don’t know is that chronic illness takes so much energy that everything becomes complicated. Showering means deciding ahead of time if I can stand long enough, if I can take the hot water without it completely overheating me, if I will have the strength to actually wash myself, if I will have any strength left at the end for anything else, or if that one ADL will land me in bed for hours. Or the whole day. It’s crazy.

A woman with lupus wrote a wonderful essay about this called "The Spoon Theory," which you are required to read. There will be a pop quiz in a future post.

(My Buddhist friends are wondering, “Um, Ani Sangye? I don’t see your daily practice on your list. What’s up with that?” For the purpose of this discussion, I’d categorize it as an ADL.)

Yesterday’s post gave some insight into the time-consuming world of doctor visits and procedures.

I spend what remains of my life pulling out the bits of hair left on my head. Think I’m overreacting? Let me take you through just one of the many current issues and let’s see how you score at the end :

I have private health insurance, which I had long before I got sick. It’s excellent insurance. Even though it’s pricey, it’s nothing compared to my medical expenses. Now with a diagnosis like Wegener’s, no one is ever going to insure me again if I lose this policy, right? Giving up my private insurance is out of the question. However, after two years on Disability the feds assume I’m permanently disabled, so they recently enrolled me in Medicare. I plan on working again at some point. Once I return to work and am able to support myself, I’ll lose Medicare.

Now, when you don’t work for 2.5 years, you get a little, well, poor. So the state kicks in and pays my Medicare premium and co-pays with a program called QMB. If I didn’t have private health insurance, it would also pay the 20% that Medicare doesn’t cover. In fact, no one can really answer how the QMB interacts with Medicare and private insurance. The big problem is right around the corner. My private insurance has a huge annual deductible. Medicare doesn’t cover that. And nobody—despite making calls that burned through (I’m not kidding) 300 cell phone minutes in 3 weeks—can tell me if the QMB program will help. Doctors offices are stumped. One doctor’s insurance person told me today, “You’re unheard of.” I have a hard time believing that, but okay. I'm so special.

So, who’s got a Magic 8 Ball? What’s gonna happen in January when I become a billing Hot Potato?

This concludes the test.

Scoring :
“Pass” if you wanted to run away or cry for Mommy halfway through.
“Fail” if you think it’s no big deal, easy fix. (Unless you DO know how to fix it, then “Pass.”)

I feel faint. Quick—someone bring me a bon-bon.

Buddhas in the Waiting Room

2008-12-20T13:31:00.057-05:00

When you get a serious illness, you can expect to spend an inordinate amount of time in various waiting rooms—doctors’ offices, emergency rooms, and outpatient services, not to mention places like Social Security and state assistance offices.

Yesterday I spent six hours back at Johns Hopkins for one test and one doctor appointment. This entailed a long walk to the test department, a 30-minute wait, a one-hour test (thank goodness it was done laying down), a wait of one hour between appointments, a much longer walk in the cold, and a whopping 3-hour wait for the doctor to walk into my room.

It was enough to leave me weeping uncontrollably—so far beyond “spent” I cannot find words—and utterly overwhelmed as more and more symptoms exploded in my body with each passing minute. The doctor I ultimately saw was surprisingly kind in regards to my case, yet could not summon the ability to mention (much less apologize for) keeping me waiting so long, even though I couldn’t stop sobbing into lousy paper towels through the entire appointment. The closest he came was, “I’m sorry you’ve had such a bad day.”

Oh.

I’ve lived this scenario more times than I can count. Once it becomes clear that politeness has no barter, I’ve reacted—whether inwardly or outwardly— in every possible way through anger, sulking, pleading, resentment, indignation, indifference or resignation. None of which changes anything. The doctor still cruises room to room, the clock keeps ticking at exactly the same rate. Eventually it all ends and you go home.

Of course I’m not alone. I watch as other patients ride the same rollercoaster. You can tell the ones who are brand new to it by the utter shock in their eyes. And you can tell the ones who are bottoming out by the utter desperation in theirs. It’s all suffering, and it’s wholly unnecessary.

Even on the days when I’m barely hanging on my heart breaks for those around me--slumped in chairs that do not accommodate bodies with troubled parts, unable to wait but unwilling to leave, distilling surrender from resignation.

Insult, No Injury

2008-12-14T18:31:00.006-05:00

It seems a lot of people have had enough these days—enough lies, enough killing, enough lying about killing. Change is in the air across this small planet. President Bush has 37 days left in office, which is 53,280 minutes too many for a lot of people.

He spent today in Iraq visiting troops for the last time and conducting a final news conference. As he uttered one more lie (“The war...is decisively on its way to being won.”) a reporter stood up and hurled his two shoes at President Bush. Mr. Bush ducked once, then again, with agility I didn’t know he had.

NPR explained, “In Iraqi culture, throwing shoes at someone is a sign of contempt.” I’d say we all got the point, without the cultural interpretation. I admit, I had a good laugh watching the clip, since I already knew he wasn’t harmed. It was just shoes, after all.

To be sure, violence is never the solution, no matter how tempting. Ultimately it creates more of the same, more suffering. Tonight there is a shoeless man in Iraq facing the legal consequences of his actions. And wherever he is in the world, President Bush can’t be feeling too good, either. He may strut around, but deep inside he knows he ducked shoes today.

Happy Birthday to…Me?

2008-12-11T16:09:00.002-05:00

Today is one of those curious days called my birthday. (Mine isn’t any more curious than anyone else’s, it’s just a good time to bring up the topic.) Everything I came into the world with, and every natural part of me that has grown or developed since then, is now officially one year older and as of today must be recognized as such. Isn’t that odd? I mean, I’m just toodling along one day after the next, and all of a sudden I’m supposed to realize that I have changed. Ba-da-bing. Completely ignoring the biological fact that many parts of me have died or are dying, and many parts of me are brand new or are just getting ready to sprout.

So whose birthday is it, anyway? Which part of me has been here the whole time, growing one year older all of a sudden every December 11th?

I lived in Spain some years ago and just love what they do on their birthdays. Instead of receiving presents, they give presents to all their friends. It was like a trip to upside-down world. Children’s birthday parties are big give-away sessions. I like to ponder how that way of celebrating one’s special day shapes their culture and their view of the world. Because what’s special about you becomes what you give, not what you get.

In honor of Spaniards getting it totally right, I have a birthday wish to give to you : May you bring only kindness to all those you encounter today.