Some people have a mantra, a string of words carefully chosen, a pet phrase, that they repeat to themselves over and over, inducing either calm or hope or the feeling that one's shrugged indifference is at least the proper response to the vicissitudes of existence.
I have long eschewed the idea, though I have stock phrases I rely upon just as much as an adherent of TMI or Buddhism reply upon their meditation or prayers--mine are simply more earthy, and utterly predictable as to when I enter the proper state to utter them.
Lately, though, I surprisingly have found myself repeating a line in my head, almost aloud, in a constant stream, as if my mind, tired of my antics, was forcing upon me a mantra whether I wanted it or not. This first occurred during several of my long waits to see doctors, the phrase would appear, I would see it in my mind and I would hear it.
It began to occur in radiation therapy, when the mask came down on me, and I was left in the room with the stars and the machine snorts and jolts.
It's a line from "Ash Wednesday" by T.S. Eliot, using 'me' instead of us--a personalization. Another of Eliot's decantations of Eastern Philosophy to Western religion, another in his links of culture to action: "Teach me to care, and not to care; Teach me to sit still..."
it is time for this, for if now if not the time to stop struggling to fix the machine, right the wrongs, crusade amongst the world's populations, I can't think of when will be. I cannot right the world when I am desperately out of balance, when I have come to acknowledge my own weaknesses, and I have come to embrace my own lack of ability to address them.
I cannot even know the problems of others, the problems of the world--these are merely my perceptions of what they are: I have never sit still.
There is a great premium we place upon self-industry. The never still-mother, the father who works 80 hours, the children in school and programs and enrichment and clubs. Never beyond the moment of exactitude that such schedules places upon everyone, and everyone else, in their lives.
I have come to see my daily radiation treatment as a moment that is mine, designed for me, helpful to me. The mask, I have begun to see as a tool to focus me, to force upon a body stupidly casting about for purpose that its purpose is here and now. Mark A. Price: Occupation--healing. Occupation--rebuilding a destroyed self. In the dark room, with the stars above me, with the Sixties and Seventies music they play, with my mantra sliding through left ear, right ear, I'm occasionally transported back to see my sister and brothers when they lived at home, my parents alive, 1964, then '68, then the Seventies, the music pulling me into places as a visitor. Teach me to care.
For indeed I both need to learn to not care and care. Too simply I tend to hold onto negatives when positives abounded in my life, and continue to do so--and it's no error that I bounce around past decades....the repair that the machine is attempting upon me mirrors a repair I must do upon myself: Teach me not to care.
To be at peace with my past means I accept that I smoked cigarettes, and ate foods from cans, and tanned. I accept that my family was imperfect, that my choices were as often poor as inspired that they all led to the moment of now when I am. I understand that the choices of others were not my choices, theirs, freely made. The time we spent with one another, or without one another, were conscious, and real and mutual.
Yesterday, after radiation, we drove to the Golden Gate Bridge and it was beautiful. The sun was pouring down and I didn't have my hat--now necessary for me in sunlight. We didn't stay long. I'm too tired, too often, for beauty, and that's hard to explain--but the more incredible what I'm seeing, the more it takes out of me to see it. I cannot sit still in the face of the Bridge, or the Marin headlands, or the incredible movement of the water beneath the span, the almost river like flow of the ocean water in to Alcatraz. The colors!
Afterward, we went to Whole Foods, to have our first experience being what I call "whole foods assholes", people who drive their cars to a crowded small parking lot and block the street for whatever time it takes them to get a spot in the lot. Doesn't matter. Bus needs to get through? tough. Fire/Emergency? the emergency here is that I need arugula and I can't park this car to get it.
Nothing terrible to report, we got right in. Which come to think of it was really what I wanted after all. Zen yesterday wasn't supportive of that sort of attitude, or the stillness of the engine it so often implies.
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