Part II: Day 54: Treating the Patient's Codependent Pepes

On Saturday Zoe's integrative vet, Dr. Don Thompson--Dr. T., Don, I never know what to call him--comes to the house at lunchtime.  It's Zoe's monthly acupuncture house call.  I am in my studio writing and Kerry is in his shop turning a bowl when we hear Zoe barking wildly, and we know the visit has already begun.

gold star if you can find the needles

Zoe appears to be happy about this shoulder needle, for some reason.

I have never seen this man look quite this tired.  I was planning on calling the other Dr. Thompson, Amy, Zoe's local vet, to come over and join us as she has on the two previous visits.  She is following an acupuncture course herself, and Zoe is her patient, so these house calls are an opportunity for her to learn more about her craft with a dog she knows fairly well.  But when we texted each other early this morning she told me that her husband would be working on a fence today and she would have to bring her young daughter with her.  Zoe is still a little afraid of children who are too young to write papers and meet a professor in her office hours--the pre-verbal, pre-driving demographic still spooks her a little--which could be distracting and disrupt the calm vibe, but I thought maybe my husband and I could play with the child while she and Don got down to business, all in the spirit of Bring it On.

But that's not going to happen.  This man is exhausted.  He left at 3:30 from Stowe, Vermont this morning to drive to the North Country and he is only halfway through the 15 house calls he has to make today.  The next one is in Harrisville, which sounds far, even though I don't know where that is, exactly.  Not our county, anyway.  He won't get home until 11 PM tonight.  I offer him tea, but he's worried that he'll overload on caffeine and get the shakes, so we settle on Strawberry Serenity Kombucha.  I'm so suggestible myself that when I drink this stuff the word "serenity" works on me before I've even finished a bottle, but I realize that not everyone reads a word on a label as a command, so I just hope for the best.

After he puts in the needles, we fill him in on all that has happened with our dog in the last month.  Namely, the bad news we got on May 18 about the size of Zoe's lung tumors, how the biggest one was now 4.78 centimeters, and the oncologist's prognosis then: one month to three.  We're a week away from a month already, but Zoe's still full of zest.  She's supposed to head out with us next weekend for a short vacation.

She relaxes for 20 minutes with the needles in

He tells us, "This dog is not going away any time soon."  He doesn't mean travel.  He means die.  "From what I could see, with that greeting she gave me in your driveway, she's still very engaged with life.  She's got lots of time left."  He says he doesn't need to press the will-to-live point, for example, because her will is very much in evidence.

"This is how it is for us," I say.  "We think she looks great.  And then we get these grim numbers and the grim prognosis.  And I get all upset, and try to hide it from Zoe, but I know she senses it, and then she probably wonders what she did wrong when she feels my sadness, and then when she sniffs out unhappiness, she's not so happy either.  It's one of those feedback loops.  But those dips never last long.  We get back into our routines, and all is well, and Zoe sees you, and I start to think . . ."

(Not long ago I wrote a post about the dog's codependent pepes.  Even my very rational husband agrees that this is our affliction.)

"That's the difference between Western and Eastern medicine," Don says.

He asks about the India trip.  On a previous visit, I asked if he thought it would be okay for me to leave her in late July and early August for a two week work trip.  He has said consistently that he thought Zoe would be in good shape then, that it would be okay for me to leave.  If I went by the oncologist's prediction, I would be gone for Zoe's last two weeks of life in the most optimistic of her scenarios.

"The trip is being postponed to sometime after Christmas," I say.  "It's better this way."  I explain that my husband is having surgery in July, and of course I don't want to miss a minute of the time Zoe and I have together this summer.  Except for a short trip coming up this week, I'm hunkering down.

Don shoots me a look, but doesn't comment.  The way I interpret it, he thinks that Zoe will hang on that long, and that I'll be in more conflict about traveling then than I would be this summer.  But I really can't read minds, even though I try to all the time.

Today's acupuncture points, which he writes down for me, are just the general tune-up points that go with treating a dog with cancer who is in overall good form.  Stomach points.  Spleen points.  Bladder points.  Six in all.

He pets her, and we point out all the lumps that have sprouted overnight, it seems, since she started taking the new drug, Kinavet.

"It's ironic, in that that drug is supposed to be for inoperable mast cell tumors, which isn't Zoe's cancer.  But is it just a coincidence that now she's getting lumpier every day, now that she's taking this drug that shrinks tumors?"

We point to the place where he removed a lump via laser a while back.  Now a new one is growing there.

I've just been assuming they're all cysts, the kind dogs get increasingly as they age, and not dangerous at all.  Kerry's not so sure. One of them started bleeding last week.

"They're not osteosarcomata," Don says.  And he tell us not to worry.

We talk about all the good indicators.  How Zoe's appetite is strong, although she is getting pickier again.  How Zoe's still walking five miles a day without showing signs of exertion, and still cuddly and sweet when she wants to be and still bossing people and critters around in the yard.  "The other night I asked her what she wanted to do when I took her out after dinner and she pointed to the street," I say.  "In the early days, I would take her on four walks a day.  One was the after dinner stroll through the neighborhood.  We stopped doing that long ago because I didn't have the time.  She seems to want to do that again now.  So we did it twice this week."

He knows the geography here, since his family has a house around the block, and he's impressed with the ground Zoe covers on this walk, especially since it's an extra one after she's already walked her five miles.

"That's what you have to do with a cancer patient," he says.  "Just make them happy and do what they want to do, the things that keep them interested in life.  That's very important."

We talk about my husband's hip replacement surgery planned for next month, and when I mention some pain I woke up with today, Don channels his wife, who does Chinese Traditional Medicine for humans.  He shows me the points to press near my right knee for the inflamation along my left elbow, the tendon going down to my ring finger.  "That's the triple heater meridian he says."  I'm not that optimistic that we can treat it this way, but I'm open, and here's the thing: the next morning, most of the pain has lessened and as I finish this post now, Monday morning, there's just a little of it left in my finger and the rest is gone.

blissed out after the session, she rolls in the grass

Later, my husband and I dissect the visit.  He's still very worried about Zoe's lumps.  I'm trying not to be.

"Then why didn't you say that?" I ask him.  "Why didn't you say what you were thinking?"

"Because it was obvious to me that part of his job today was to treat you."  I think about this for a minute.  "He wants to make sure that you are as positive and optimistic as you can be.  Because he believes that your moods and your beliefs will affect Zoe's overall prognosis."

That's my girl!

"So maybe that's what he really means by the difference between western and eastern medicine."

Western medicine is more about what the x-rays show: the dimensions of the tumors and their location, the numbers.  The composition of the blood.  But beyond all that I don't understand about acupuncture meridians--what we really mean when we say a needle is entering a bladder point or a stomach point--integrative medicine entertains the notion that our thoughts and feelings can have a tremendous impact on our health.

I used to resist this way of thinking.  I objected to it on political grounds.  I thought it was kind of a blame-the-victim thing, like, if you get sick, it's because you're Debbie Downer.  I strenuously object to any belief system that over-emphasizes the role of the individual in health and wellness and doesn't name and critique, say, the polluters in our environment that make us sick: industry.

I'll never forget the trip I took to the site of the World Trade Center a month after the attacks.  My friend Cathy and I walked there from our hotel in Gramery Park and I smelled the damage half a mile before we arrived.  The acrid taste in my throat, the headache, the dizziness, the disorientation, the heaviness in my lungs: it hit me pretty fast, but what upset me most was the sight of all those people and dogs at work without masks.  The EPA had just put on its web site that there were no dangerous emissions at the site.  I knew in my body that this was a colossal lie.  And just this week I heard a story on the radio that all kinds of cancers are showing up for people who worked or lived near the site, and some people will be able to receive compensation.  But it's no compensation when our environment is making us sick and the agencies charged with protecting us are willing to suppress that information because of political pressure.

But on the other hand, since I started meditating I've read the science about how our ways of thinking and of dealing with stress affect the brain.  I firmly believe now that the feedback loop we create by negative thoughts, emotions, and stress can change the layout of our brain until being perpetually anxious is our new normal.  And I also believe that meditation can undo the damage.  Through meditation I've learned to witness my thoughts as though they were birds alighting on a branch of a tree.  They land, they sing, and they fly off.

Every day, the same message: it's not just that Zoe's good days are contagious, but that mine are too. We are kindred.  We are soft-wired to one another.

And every morning I search for the stillness inside to help me see the tree branch that is right before me without needing to know where and when the next bird will land.

Part II: Day 45, The Storm, the Wall, and Some Good Stuff in Between

Driving back on Tuesday from Zoe's acupuncture appointment in Vermont, after a lovely and restful Memorial Weekend at my sister's, the receptionist said: "Did you hear about the tornado warnings?"

"Really, where?" my husband asked.

She looked again at the computer.

"Uh, where you are headed right now, I think," she said.  "And all of Vermont too."  She read more about what was expected.  Torrential rain, high winds, thunder, hail.

"Figures," I said. 

For the past hour, Dr. Bond (Emily) had treated Zoe for her cancer, but also for anxiety: the first time this has been necessary.  Zoe had whimpered much of the way there from Massachusetts and had cried all the way to Massachusetts on Saturday.  Zoe's cry is very high-pitched.  It's plaintive.  Piercing.  Heartbreaking.  Normally she's a great traveler and she only whines and cries when she has to pee, or if she thinks she's going to be left behind.  Not this weekend.  This was not the same dog who, two years earlier, spent seven months in France, eleven weeks of which we wandered from place to place by car and boat, never staying anywhere for longer than a week.  This was not the dog who bounded fiercely through Alpine meadows and leapt with joy into the Mediterranean Sea.

I felt like we'd already been riding a storm cloud for days.  Now we were driving into one.

*   *   *   *   *

Just before Memorial Day weekend, I hit the wall:

Meditation: a patch on stress relief, nothing deep, nothing life-altering, and definitely nothing blissful.

Writing: A few very good days, but by Saturday morning I was too worried about Zoe to go in deep.  To write well I have to loosen the reins, forget people might read it and just follow the trail of imagery and insight and crazy loop-de-loops of insight and metaphor and characters behaving badly or surprisingly well and let them decide what to do and when.

To do this well I have to let go.  But I felt with every other part of me--the part not writing the novel, anyway--like I had to hang on tight.

In meditation class, our teacher Rebecca says that when she is with us as our teacher and guide she goes into a "light" meditation state so that she can be ready and alert if any of us needs her.  People can go to all kinds of wild places in meditation, and sometimes it's frightening.  She said, "I also need to be aware if anyone walks into the door."  She keeps the place safe for all of us.

Perhaps that's the role I'm performing for my dog these days and I really don't feel like I can abandon that post, even if she's outside or in the house and I'm in my studio.

Well, that's one way of looking at it.  The other is that I've been a frantic worrier.  Since Sunday night, May 20th, the evening after our college's commencement, Zoe wasn't doing very well and I didn't know how to help her.  I spent hours of the day looking on the internet about the side effects of Kinavet, Zoe's new drug, and not getting anywhere.

Something had changed last week, after we started her on this new drug.  She stopped trusting us.  She wouldn't eat.  She looked at her bowl with contempt.  She didn't want to just hang out with us and frolic.  She was still energetic and content on walks, and she perked up now and then--enough to tell us it wasn't The End--but something was markedly different, and we had nothing in our bag of tricks to help her.  When I found out she had protozoa in her system I was very relieved, thinking we had the reason, something ordinary and treatable, for her stomach woes, but even then we knew the new medicine had to be at least partly to blame.

It's one thing to have an adverse reaction to a drug.  That's a potentially big problem, but we could always go back to the drug she was on earlier this spring.  The real issue was this: had the disease advanced enough to make her feel bad?  Was she suffering? 

She was picky and finicky for a few days, but then Zoe went on strike.  She got all Bartleby-the-Scrivener on us and said, I would prefer not to. 

Her doggy health food diet, with all the non-wheat grains, the raw meats, the vegetables, the herbs?

She would not go near it.

She'd been so compliant.  We could mix all those Chinese herbs right into her food most of the time and if we topped up her food with a little bit of something she wanted, more meat, or some nibbles of cheese, or broth, she would ignore the ick factor and just go for it.

Then I spent a great deal of energy trying to decide if it was mean and evil of me to ask my husband to put the Chinese herbs and potions into a syringe and get them in her that way.  Mean and evil to make him do it, because I just can't, and mean and evil to subject her to more invasive stuff when all she wanted to do was lie in the shade and be a normal dog on a hot summer day.

But then again, this method of getting down the herbs works for Milo, Zoe's doggy friend in Vermont who has the same kind of cancer.  So why can't we make this work for us?

The two of me duked it out.

Meanwhile, my husband started tearing apart the side of our house so that we can insulate it better and put up some siding along the deck.  He's taking good care of us.  It's an important project and this is the right time to get it done. But here's the thing: our house's exterior looked the way I was starting to feel inside.  Like life as I had known it was now a demolition project.

This is all because Zoe had stopped trusting us, had decided her silver bowl was radioactive, and seemed also to lose her appetite for cuddling and play. 

I'd been waiting all week to hear back from the oncologist about this new drug and its potential side effects and I felt so helpless.   I wanted to help my dog but I didn't know how.  And it had all happened so suddenly.  She was completely fine, and then she wasn't, and it felt like there was nothing gradual in between.

I'd written about the whole "sudden decline" factor in a recent post: of the dogs of friends going downhill without warning, the dogs of friends who were left reeling in shock.  In writing that post I was rehearsing for the moment when I, too, will have to let go and say good-bye to our pup, but when I wrote it Zoe was perfectly fine so I could allow myself the luxury of imagining the worst--we weren't there yet.

When a week had passed without hearing from the oncologist I sent another message.  I should have called too, I should have called on Friday, but I was running around getting errands done then and it's never possible to get through to her without waiting for several hours and then I just feel frustrated and anxious.  At least, though, if I had called I would have been on her radar.  And I had total faith that I'd get an e-mail message.  The vet techs have always been great about this.  So Saturday morning I sent an e-mail thinking that maybe at the very least someone would call me on Tuesday, after the long weekend.  But when I sent my message I got the oncologist's vacation message which said that she was going to be gone all of the coming week and wouldn't be back until a few days after Zoe's drugs had run out.  That's when I panicked, big time.

It was a holiday weekend, no one would be around to help, and I thought I was going to have drive for hours and hours to some oncology vet in a distant state to get Zoe seen to.  I wrote a desperate e-mail to a vet that I thought was at the Cornell veterinary school, but was actually in Connecticut.  I looked into animal hospital hours in Massachusetts, where we were heading.  I thought about Tufts in Boston, where my sister's dog got really good care when she had a wood sliver lodged in her throat and had to have it surgically removed.  I was thinking I had to do something Big, something Drastic.  I was thinking if I didn't solve this problem that very morning All Would Be Lost.

It was a bad flashback, a deja-vu to a place I thought I'd long since left behind.  I knew what was happening even while it was happening, but I couldn't make it stop.  I felt the same panic, the same heart elevating, adrenalin-rushing-through-the-body dread and fear I felt when our mother would have psychotic episodes when I was a child and no reliable adult was available to intervene.  It was that same feeling of How can I help her?  Who will come to our aid?  How can I make a medical decision for her when I don't understand what's happening?  I have to fix this.  I don't know how to fix this.  I have to fix this.  I don't know how.

It was worse than this, actually, this Saturday morning meltdown, because going back to this place just felt so ridiculous and overblown and melodramatic and wrong.  I thought, my goodness, if you're going to have a panic attack because your dog has lost her appetite and is acting paranoid now in your company, how are you going to be able to help your husband in a time of crisis?  What good will you to be your sister or friends when they fall apart? Pull yourself together, woman!

And so on.

It's one thing to have a flashback to the places that scare us.  It's another thing to judge that experience as inappropriate and then beat ourselves up for having it while we are having it.

Honestly, in the eleven months since I first noticed Zoe limping, I've experienced many days of great sorrow, a handful of crying jags, but I don't think I ever went through a panicky meltdown quite like the one I had Saturday morning when I thought our medical support system was also in the hands of the demolition crew, and my husband and I were on our own, the dog was going to suffer now, and we didn't know what to do.

Somehow I pulled myself together and helped my husband pack up the car.

Zoe cried the whole six and a half hours the whole way there.  She has never behaved like this in her life.

I said to myself, This dog sounds like how I feel right now.  We are each other's mirror.  We're in a co-dependent relationship.  We need a therapist. 

And so on.


When we got to my sister and brother-in-law's house, Zoe seemed pleased to be there, as ever, but she didn't do what she usually does: run a lap around the house, then charge in, pull all the plush squeaky toys out of Sadie's box because she can, and say, Queen Alpha is baaack, hellooo! 

She wandered in, wagged her tail in a blasé way, then headed out to the deck to rest.  I need a break from my frantic person, she seemed to be saying.  I need some space.  Can I get a little air, please?  

It occurred to me then that just as she had seemed like a stranger to me all week, perhaps, in my panicked state, I had seemed like a stranger to her.


And then something shifted a little--the change of venue was probably what we all needed.  That night we realized that Zoe would eat if we gave her dog food and cat food from a can.  And if we put it in a different bowl, not the silver one which she now associates with All Bad Things.  There was nothing wrong with her appetite.  She was hungry.  She was just like a kid who says Enough of the spelt and spirolina and lentil cutlets!  I want a cheeseburger and fries and coke like a normal kid.   You people are freaks! 

Zoe had hit the wall too.  She'd been on her best behavior, she'd been strong and resilient and compliant for so long.  Now, it seemed, she just wanted us to treat her like a typical dog.  A regular dog, who eats regular dog food, and hangs out, and walks, and isn't fussed over, and is permitted the luxury of having bad moods without it meaning The End is Near.

So we gave her a day off, a Sunday sabbatical, from the new drug, Kinavet.  And we haven't given her any herbal treatments since.  I know they help her with her vitality and keep her immune system strong, but what we need now even more than that is for our relationship with her to be strong, and that means we do it her way.  We need her to trust us.  We need her to feel safe with us.  At the vet's on Tuesday morning, Emily suggested we put the herbs in capsules and I'm going to do that tomorrow.  She's really good about taking pills in little balls of cream cheese or peanut butter.  But the herbals in caps will mean 12 pills a day, and we'll just have to see how that goes.  If it doesn't work out, I'm not going to sweat it.

She needs to have a happy, uncomplicated doggy life until it's time to say good-bye.

And here's the thing:  Once we decided to give her a day off from drugs and to let her eat whatever she wants to eat and to take a little sabbatical from the herbs, we got our dog back.  She became our sweet, mellow Zoe again.

We walked our usual five miles a day.

She swam.

She played with Sadie and they fought their usual tug-of-war for the ball.

She found a cool spot in the iris bed and posed for us.

She rolled in the wood chip pile and gave us her goo-goo I know I'm Adorable come hither look.

My friend Sara told me this wise thing on Monday, when we met at the Leverett Coop for a walk in the woods and lunch: "Whatever your emotional baggage is, even if you think you're not carrying it around any more, it's going to hit you when you have a medical emergency with your loved one if no one comes to your aid."  She told me a terrifying story about how her mom had had surgery and then later went into withdrawal from the pain medication and went through what seemed at the time like a psychotic episode.  No one at the hospital had warned her that this could happen.  And the only thing she could do was to take her mom to an emergency room and sit with her for seven hours until someone was willing to see her and prescribe that drug again.  "When you are in a situation like this and you feel helpless, everything from your past comes out.  You may think you're over something, that you've left it long behind you, and then it's back," she said.

Then she told me how a few years ago she had helped her mom with a medical crisis and for that one she'd held it together just fine, but when she flew home to find out a kitten she had rescued was in serious trouble she completely fell apart.  "I don't cry about the people I love the way I did with this helpless little animal," she said.  "I think it has to do with the fact that our relationships with people are complicated.  But with these little animals we love . . ."

 "They're our hearts," I said.  "They're the furry little loving part of us.  We give them unconditional love and they give it back in a way that people just can't.  So when they are suffering, and we feel helpless because we can't make them feel better, we feel our emotions without any defenses."

The weekend was just what the three of us needed.  Zoe got to be herself again.  My husband got to rest his back after all the demolition work on the house.  I worked on my novel and got a lot of sleep and had other people help keep an eye on our girl--people who love her, whom she loves as much as she loves us.  By the time we were packing up to go home on Tuesday, I felt strong and peaceful again.  Zoe was fine.  She was our old dog again.  Nothing was wrong with her appetite--she just wanted to call the shots.  She still had her zest for life.

And then I found out that our oncologist had, indeed, tried to get in touch with me.  She had left two messages on my cell phone on Monday--that's usually her day off, so I hadn't expected this--and she promised a long, detailed conversation.  I had felt completely abandoned on Saturday, and now, a few days later, I got into the car to drive home with the terrible sinking realization that I was now the weak link in the chain, I had dropped the ball.  I didn't realize it at the time, but we hadn't had cell phone coverage where we'd been frolicking for much of the weekend.  The phone was by my side when the calls came but the phone never rang.

And now this person I so needed to speak to was on vacation and I was back where I'd started: the drugs were running out and I didn't know what to do.

This cancer is aggressive.  A few days without the medication might mean that Zoe's tumors blow up in no time at all.

This time I had screwed up.  All because of technology.  In Massachusetts I hadn't been able to get on the internet either--something wonky with my sister's new server--and I hadn't pushed it, or asked to borrow her laptop, because to be honest, it was nice to take a rest, have a holiday weekend without being plugged in.  If I had checked e-mail I would have known the call was coming.

I had now missed the call I'd been waiting for for more than a week, and we were in a bind.

What were we going to do?

*   *   *   *   *

This is what the sky and clouds looked like when we left Vermont and drove into Northern New York:

 Zoe was in the back seat and as the heavens opened, she started to whine.  We still had another three hours until we had to go home to our messy house where there are boards and bricks everywhere and not enough medicine for Zoe or a plan.

I took these pictures, and I prayed.  I was really pissed off, if you want to know the truth.  I did not have the proper attitude of gratitude.  I did not feel the least bit zen.  My attitude was, fuck that whole letting go thing.  Fuck the whole attachment is suffering thing.  Don't expect me to be so good.  I need to be snarky here.  I need to be mad.  I'm tired of being resilient and positive.  Let me just sink into this sinkhole for a few minutes and spew a little, okay? 

I looked back over the weekend.  I had gone three mornings in a row without meditating, which is the longest I've gone in a year.  I was on strike, in my own way, just as Zoe had been.  And now I looked at the sky, and I said, Really?  Seriously?  You're going to give this just-back-from-freaked-out-dog and her just-back-from-freaked-out-person and her just-back-from-trying-to-calm-down-freaked-out-person-and dog husband a friggin' tornado now?  Are you fucking kidding me?

Then I thought, okay.  Let's try something else.  I closed my eyes and counted my breaths, basically just to stop from hyperventilating.  I got my feet up into half-lotus on my car seat and meditated for a while, using the top-secret mantra my teacher gave us in the meditation tune-up class.


I looked outside at the pouring rain and then I asked my husband if he felt okay driving.  He said yes.  We were prepared to find a hotel somewhere if we had to but we were way out in the sticks.

But then I asked the universe, god = dog = love, the force of nature and animals, a little more nicely to give us a break.

And I started to feel better.  I said the mantra in my head for a while.  I breathed slowly.  Zoe stopped whining the minute my mood lifted.  It was that instantaneous.

The storm blew West and wreaked havoc on Plattsburgh, which was maybe fifteen miles from where we were at the time.

"It was like threading the eye of a needle," my husband said the next morning.  "Just a few miles away from us they had ping-pong ball size hail, terrible winds, torrential rain.  Everything we were supposed to have, but didn't."

I'm sorry, Plattsburgh.  I really am.  But I'm really glad we drove home safely without incident.

While we were still in the car, watching storm clouds head west, I got on the phone for maybe the sixth time that day and spoke to Willow, one of our vet techs.  We agreed she would order us more of the Kinavet and we'll just take it day by day until after our oncologist comes back.

"I don't know what's happening around here, Natalia," she said.  "There are so many sick animals.  Donna and I worked on Friday until 11 o'clock at night.  The dogs just kept coming and coming.  We don't know why it's like this.  We don't know why there are so many sick animals.  We don't know why we are this busy.  It's just so overwhelming."

I heard the goodness and frustration in her voice and I wanted to hug her.  I wanted to hug and love up all the afflicted beings in this cancer-infested broken and beautiful world. Why are so many dogs and cats getting cancer?

I was way over being mad and sad and feeling like a helpless child again.  That was so four-days-ago. 

Zoe is a strong, resilient dog but she needs to be able to feel like crap sometimes without her humans falling apart. We have to be able to see her through good days and bad days and let her feel safe and loved and protected through every minute of them until the very end.

Usually I'm pretty good at doing this, but last week I hit the wall.

Wednesday morning I woke up to calm skies and the sight of the great blue heron standing in tree pose on the rocks in front of the river.

I meditated and wrote and played with Zoe and had lunch with a dear friend and felt like my old self again.

When I turned on the internet for the first time since Saturday morning I found Facebook friend messages and e-mails from people sending good wishes, wanting to say hey, and some nice notes from the oncologist and vet techs whom I thought had abandoned us.   I woke to the reminder once again that we're never ever as alone as we think we are.

Zoe holds up a mirror to me.  When I feel bad, she feels bad, and vice versa.  I think she sensed all my anxiety on Saturday and carried it all the way from New York to Massachusetts.

We've had it easy these past eleven months because while Zoe is exceedingly sensitive, she is also placid and sweet and mellow.  She's what some people I've met recently call "a heart dog"--full of emotion and empathy--and to make her happy I have to hide my storms from her and stay out of sight, then come out in better weather later for a cuddle.

I've managed to do that 90% of the time this year.  But on Saturday, that long car ride--there was nowhere to hide.

Last night in my meditation class, everyone told stories about the weeks we had just had.  One woman, a very devoted yoga practitioner and meditator for decades, said that she's had moments during her meditation recently where she just burst inexplicably into sobbing.  She has relived moments of feeling alone and abandoned and unloved from when she was only four years old.  Others described sensations of color and heat and movement--what the yogis describe as kundalini awakening--an experience and sensation that Elizabeth Gilbert documents really vividly in the India section of Eat, Pray, Love.   Others talked about how when they need meditation the most, they can't find time to do it, or they do it and don't go in very deeply.  Sometimes when I sit in meditation in our class all I feel is physical pain.  Others feel emotional pain.  Our teacher tells us that we're "clearing" the pain--physical and emotional--when this happens.  We're experiencing it so that we can release it, so that we won't have the same blocks, physically and emotionally, we've been carrying with us for so long.

Last Saturday when I relived that panic of being responsible for another being but not knowing how to help her, and not being able to find anyone to give me the advice I needed, I was very frightened of that emotion.  It's one thing to release something.  It's another to get stuck there again.  But at least I understood what was happening to me even when I couldn't move past it.  

Zoe's her old self again.  This morning when I woke up she thumped her tail and rolled on her back and grunted and leaned against me.  She's off walking with my husband on the gentlemen's walk as I conclude this post.

Last night when I came home from meditation class, I took her outside.  She didn't need to pee, and didn't want to roll around in the sweet-smelling grass.  She just wanted to stare at the sky.  She nudged her snout towards my studio door, lifted her head, and I said, Okay.  We climbed the stairs and sat out on the balcony for a while, watching the night sky.  It was beautiful.  The clouds had woven a fine net over everything, but now and then a bright star blinked past.  The black sky that wasn't covered with this soft net was shaped like a black dog's head, a dog with a long snout.  A plane was flying south, its light like a dog's eye moving, blinking, watching.

I don't know what's coming next, but I'm so grateful that we still have more time.

Day 97: Inviting the Muse Through Meditation and Acceptance of What Is

For a big chunk of Monday I was worried about Zoe.  She was so eager on Saturday that she ran like mad, and we now think she strained her back leg like one of those middle aged weekend warriors with desk jobs who get a little too excited about that hike into the Adirondacks.  On Sunday she didn't want to walk as far as usual, and Monday morning she was sitting down and saying Not, today, duckies. 

Of course she's perfectly content to sit for hours at the balcony, staring at the waves, doing her doggy meditation, but I worried about her being in pain.  And we are up three flights of stairs at this hotel.

Our other concern is that she always gets a little clingy when we travel, crying when one of us leaves the car for anything, and not wanting either of us to go anywhere without her, but she's even more like this now.  I wouldn't mind that so much but I know stress takes a toll on her gut, and here she is taking those drugs that give her gastrointestinal system a real workout.

So before I sat down to write on Monday I was wrestling with some concerns.  Even paradise had snakes in it.  (But of course, snakes are good for the ecosystem, sacred in many cultures, and Eve was framed.)

I've always written well here in this peaceful place, sitting here with the view of the ocean coming in, and the sound itself calms my breath and my mind.  The old me would have worked hard at not letting my worries interrupt the work.  But that resistance to the here and now would also limit what I invited into the work--those sweet surprises. So, instead of demanding a great performance, my goal was to just let my worries float along in my brain along with the steady sound of the waves.  In other words, to
not worry about worrying.

And so I went to a passage of the work when my character is a bit fraught, and just went with it.  By late afternoon, I felt my peace return.

And then, guess what?  On the afternoon walk, she was in fine form.  She had more energy than we did.  And I will have some pictures and a post soon about Zoe at play with the dogs of Dixie.

Today, the world already looks brighter.  And this is what it looks like through the window:

I like to read before I meditate.  I open to Roger Rosenblatt's Kayak Morning: Reflections on Love, Grief, and Small Boats:

There's only one point to writing.  It allows you to do impossible things.  Sure, most of the time it's chimney sweeping and dung removal.  Or plastering.  A lot of the time, writing is plastering or caulking or pointing up the bricks.  But every so often there is a moment in the dead of morning where everything is still as starlight and something invades your room, like a bird that has flown through the window, and you are filled with as much joy as panic.  And then you think: I can do anything.

That's what it feels like to me when the muse says, Why, hello, Natalia.  May I visit you today?  And oh, that blessed presence: that bird that flies through the window into a room of stillness.

On the subject of mindfulness and writing and inspiration, I want to recommend a blog by Brenda Miller, "A Spa for the Mind," which I've just linked you to.  She's a wonderful essayist and editor, and I absolutely adore her resonant blog voice.  She and a colleague/friend of hers named Holly Hughes have a book coming out soon called The Pen and the Bell: Mindful Writing in a Busy World, which I know I'm going to want to read and possibly teach. 

What she and Holly Hughes have come to realize is that the interruptions to our writing life, and the interruptions to our contemplative lives are not interruptions, but are actually part of the path itself.
Brenda Miller writes:

We came to fully understand that all those interruptions are really life itself, not something apart from that life. Contemplation and writing do not happen only in quiet places, in sanctified rooms. In fact, we need to be in contact with the world, to feel ourselves in dialogue with our ordinary lives, rather than resisting them. If we train ourselves, we’ll see that our writing material, and our contemplative state of mind, can be found anywhere: in the Volkswagen repair shop, at the doctor’s office, in a traffic jam, at PetSmart.

This is so true.  It isn't easy--it's work--but I have at times entered a contemplative state of mind even in a busy coffee shop while waiting for Zoe's chemotherapy to be done, and waiting to find out the results of her latest lung X-rays.  I wrote my favorite post, Day 57: The Purple Heart Meditation, in a scenario like the one I just described.  And when I think I'm too scared to write, I just write through it.

I also love/love/love the Denise Levertov poem they quote in the book, which Brenda includes in her lovely post from Sunday.  I met Denise Levertov twice in my life: once when I was an undergraduate at Northwestern University, and she came there to read, and then in Seattle in the 1990s, not long before she died, via a friend who had done some work for her.  Her poetry always inspired me.  O Taste and See, the collection, as well as the title poem, made me want to write.

Here's the quote, that I just copied from Brenda's post, but do go over there and check out the whole post anyway, and look at her back pages about her dog, her yoga practice, her writing practice, and her serious attacks on the clutter in her house.

Preface

"A certain day became a presence to me;
there it was, confronting me—a sky, air, light:
a being. And before it started to descend
from the height of noon, it leaned over
and struck my shoulder as if with
the flat of a sword, granting me
honor and a task. The day’s blow
rang out, metallic—or it was I, a bell awakened,
and what I heard was my whole self
saying and singing what it knew: I can."

    —Denise Levertov, “Variation on a Theme by Rilke”

That bell awakened reminds me of the end of Annie Dillard's essay "On Seeing" from Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, where she finally finds "the tree with lights in it" after wandering through the Shenandoah Valley in Virginia trying to view the natural world with the same wonder and the same absence of preconceived ideas as the newly sighted.  She writes:

"I saw the tree with the lights in it. I saw the backyard cedar where the mourning doves roost charged and transfigured, each cell buzzing with flame. I stood on the grass with the lights in it, grass that was wholly fire, utterly focused and utterly dreamed. It was less like seeing than like being for the first time seen, knocked
breathless by a powerful glance. The flood of fire abated, but I’m still spending the power. Gradually the lights went out in the cedar, the colors died, the cells unflamed and disappeared. I was still ringing. I had been my whole life a bell, and never knew it until at that moment I was lifted and struck."

I love the idea of being the bell, not just listening to it.  Of feeling oneself to be struck by an outside agent of beauty and breath, life and energy.  To reverberate with that ringing.

I'll end with "O Taste and See," Levertov's great 1964 poem that inspired another generation of writers:

"O Taste and See" by Denise Levertov

The world is
not with us enough
O taste and see

the subway Bible poster said,
meaning The Lord, meaning
if anything all that lives
to the imagination’s tongue,

grief, mercy, language,
tangerine, weather, to
breathe them, bite,
savor, chew, swallow, transform

into our flesh our
deaths, crossing the street, plum, quince,
living in the orchard and being

hungry, and plucking
the fruit.
 

Gentle readers, may the muse inspire you today, whatever you do, and if you are one of my readers for whom grief is the language you speak most right now, I also wish you mercy, plum, quince, and many bushels of tangerines.

Namaste!

Day 66: The World Outside the Window

I used not to be the most observant person in the world.  Either I had a lot on my mind, or I was in a hurry.  Or both.  I remember once, when I was about twenty-four, I had just moved into a new apartment and a friend was picking me up to go out to dinner.  I had made the decision to break up with my boyfriend and move out so quickly that I hadn't really paid attention to what the new house looked like.  It was a cute little mother-in-law studio above a house in Greenwood, with white walls and a nice view of the street, and the price was right, and I had just walked in and said, "I'll take it."  So when my friend asked for directions on the phone, he said, "What color is the house?" I asked him if he could hold the phone for a second.  I went outside, then came back up.  "It's white," I said.

In my meditation class with Rebecca Rivers, she talked about how one of the reasons to do yoga and to meditate is to scrub off the windows that interfere with our ability to see the world clearly and to experience our highest selves beyond our professional and familial identity.  Meditation allows you to just rest in pure consciousness.  She had asked us all on the first night to answer the question, "Who am I?"  A year ago I would have said, "Duh, a writer and professor."  I knew that wasn't the answer she was looking for, or even the answer that felt true to me now, but "I am a being of light" (those words actually did come to me) sounded a little too teacher's pet-like, so I just said something about how I'm trying to learn a lot of new things right now, so the answer of the moment is "student."

But what was the answer?  No answer sounded quite right to me.  When I was eighteen I once went out with a boy who called himself a "a poet, a dreamer, and a student of life," which was his prelude for saying, "I don't do relationships," so those phrases were definitely out.

The word"purify" comes up often in yoga and meditation, and it has a scary connotation to our Western ear.  I think it's just a bad translation from Sanksrit of what happens to our consciousness, mentally, emotionally, spiritually, and philosophically, when we stop attaching to ourselves the limiting identities we hold so dear.  When we are young we struggle to figure out what to do in life and once we are firmly launched on that path of vocation we know something essential about ourselves.  Decision made.  Next?  And if we are writers and artists in a culture that values commerce above all, to claim the identity of artist is almost transgressive and hence, hard-won.  Why wouldn't we want to inhabit that identity fully? 

But to cling to this idea that we are just these brains with these personalities in these bodies, to grasp onto that nexus of desire and ambition, is tiring, really, at the end of the day.  What I like about yoga and meditation is a central paradox.  That the "I" becomes less constricted, more expansive, vast enough to incorporate the universe, just as the ego drops away.  To be open to the "union" that is yoga, to join the stream of life, that force that pulses through everything alive on this earth, is to know great freedom and bliss.

Some of the most serene moments in my life and some of the most intense moments in my life have been those instances when I forgot who I was, my gender, my age, my nationality, my personality quirks: when everything dropped away.

I love being on a train or a bus watching the scenery floating by outside the window and to imagine the lives being lived in every place we pass.  In this picture below, Zoe and I were on a bus with my husband and some students coming back from Honfleur, in Normandy, and we'd had a wonderful day looking at art, walking on the beach, and eating ice cream.  Zoe had gone swimming in the sea. 

On the bus back from Honfleur, Natalia and Zoe

The other day when Tara Freeman gave me a photography lesson, we stood at the window in my studio looking out at Zoe, who was staring at the river, doing her canine meditation, utterly focused, transfixed on the play of light on water.  Tara was trying to show me how even when your subject is  flooded with light, you can still take a picture, but you have to choose an ISO with a very low number.  I remembered this moment in meditation class when Rebeca asked us who we were, and I almost cracked up.  I was so tempted to say to Tara, "I am a being of light."  She has a great sense of humor, but I would have had to explain.

When there's less inner chatter, I've noticed, there's more to see out the window.

For example, I used to spend my breakfast planning my day.  Today I noticed that there were quite a few birds at the feeder.  Then, to my surprise, I saw that there were at least a dozen tiny birds on the ground trying to get the seeds the squirrels had spilled in one of their raids.  The next step will be to open the bird identification book on the counter, but I was having too much fun just watching.  I think some of them were brown nuthatches, but to be sure, I just signed up for a Cornell bird newsletter while I was trying to find a matching picture of them on google.

the birds are close in color to the bark of the tree

there are tiny birds in here with the squirrels

The view out my window as I wrote this post

The view to the deck windows, where Zoe likes to watch the river

It's going to be really cold this weekend here in the North Country.  Highs in the single digits.  A good time to spend indoors writing and reading with a certain dog beside me, who, when it's cold, likes to stick her paws and snout on the windowsill and watch all the life pulsing out there, in our yard, along the river.

Day 65: The Yoga of Sitting Upright

If you’ve been following this blog, you know that for some time now I have had a low-key morning meditation practice that helps me get through the day without leaving my keys in random places or driving into the garage door, and that sometimes doing it helps me locate a clearer channel inside when I am about to write.

Without trying too hard, and definitely without knowing I had embarked on a spiritual path, I found myself committed to this daily ritual.

I had a method that had worked for me for nine years.  I wrote about it on Day Two: Meditation for Skeptics, Slouchers, Neurotic Planners, Caffeine Addicts, and People who Think they are Too busy to Meditate, but Want to, Kind of.

But for these past three weeks, I have been taking a lovely meditation class by Rebecca Rivers at her yoga studio, Northern Light Yoga, and I’ve been challenged to try new techniques.

First off, I’ve moved from the chair to the floor.  In this picture on the left, you can see I’m still cheating, because I have a blanket as a bolster behind me, which I used for starters because my neck was not happy, but I’ve been trying to sit upright now, without anything against my back, letting my core muscles keep me in a modified lotus position, and now that I have gotten used to it, I feel more energetic in this position.  (Both of these photos were taken on my camera by Tara Freeman.)

Then I go back to my chair and write.

I’m still working on the sitting still part.  It's getting easier now, and I can sit for twenty minutes, even half an hour, but I don’t know that I will ever be able to match my dog’s remarkable stillness as she meditates at the river’s edge. 

Last night in meditation class I felt a force like a river moving up my legs and my spine.  As it surged upward I understood that this calmness and power is like a geographical place I can go to any time as a refuge.  It's not unlike having a river in one's back yard.

Namaste, gentle readers, namaste.

Day 60: The Deep Root Cure

Yesterday I woke up with a headache.  I get them on the days I take Zoe for chemo, and they usually linger the day afterward.  It's no big deal.  They're just like some bad weather I'm moving through.  A lot of people get headaches.

It's odd, though, because I didn't grow up as a headache sufferer.  I only started getting them regularly this past summer, before we knew Zoe was sick.  When I took her to two vets to find out why she was limping, and they both said she was fine, but maybe had a touch of arthritis, the headaches got worse.  I got two whopping migraines--my first ever--the week before that Saturday when, on an impulse, I took her to the Canton Animal Hospital, where she wasn't a patient, and asked them to x-ray Zoe's leg before I knew what I was going to say.  Ever since we got the diagnosis, the migraines haven't come back.  Just the milder malaise headaches on chemo days.

If you've been following the posts in this corner, you might have sensed that this week for me was kind of intense.  I wanted to have a relaxing Saturday, but I also wanted to see if I could cure the headache without taking anything.  It was a challenge because I carry around Ibuprofen in my purse so it's always there when I need it.  I'm not a purist about these things, but I was attending a workshop on balancing one's energy, taught by two lovely sisters, Jan and Julie, and I thought that maybe I could put the workshop to the test and get to the root of the imbalance without just treating the symptoms.  And then after the workshop, I was going to take two students I have deep roots with, Lettie and Scott, to a party at Deep Root Farm.  It seemed like a good convergence of forces for experimenting with natural remedies.

A year ago December, my students and I ate a chicken at my house that Lettie and Scott had helped raise and slaughter at Deep Root Farm.

At the energy workshop, we started with a meditation I have done for years.  You picture deep roots growing down from your spine into the earth. That always takes away my excess nervous energy. Then you picture branches growing up through your body, out your head, that reach to the stars.

Jan and Julie

Jan told me at that the sixth chakra, which governs intuition, could be the source of the headaches.  Sensing something is wrong even when others are telling you all is well will certainly give you a pain in the head, even if you don't go in for this kind of thinking.

Halfway through the workshop, my headache began to lift.  The delicious, earthy red lentil soup and homemade bread that Ann made us for lunch helped too.  And I drank a lot of tea and water.

Then it was time to meet Scott and Lettie.  They were waiting for me in the parking lot of the bookstore at St. Lawrence University.  I love these students, and seeing them also reminds me of places I have been with them--excursions deep into the country up here with Lettie and her classmates from a first-year-seminar I taught called Widely Traveled in the North Country--and adventures in Quebec City and Rouen and Paris and Dakar with Scott and the students who traveled with me on the France program.  (To read Lettie's lovely prose, See Day 8: Lettie Discovers the Zen of Orange- Eating.  See Day 45: An American Dog in the City of Light, Part I, where Scott has a walk-on part.)

Lettie and Scott

But I still had the ghost of the headache when we arrived at the party, even though the drive was so lovely, out into the deep country, on a road I'd never been on before, past pastures of horses, and tree canopies laden with fresh snow. 

The cure crept up on me before I knew it.  I loved talking to Mike and Maria Corse, who own Deep Root Farm, and their son, Ian, who, at age 17, has already written a novel, which he was happy to turn into a 750-word story, because he gets that you have to cut/cut/cut and let go to be a good writer.  Val, my massage therapist was there.  And it was great to catch up with Lettie and Scott and other former students like Maddie and Mike and Claire.  Mia, who went to to France in the group Scott was in, came in from sledding and we were happy and surprised to see each other.  She volunteers for Campus Kitchens, which serves free suppers to hungry people in our community on Monday nights.  They get some of their food from Deep Root Farm, and Maria helps them.

Claire wants to be a farmer, as do a lot of this group's friends.  I spoke to an English major I'd never met before about the meditation class I'm taking, which she is going to take next month.  Some of us went outside and watched children skating on a pond, and watched the last of a bonfire become coal, and we checked out all the greenhouses where seedlings will get started soon.  And naturally we had a good talk with the chickens.

Scott, Lettie, Maddie, Ian

Deep Root Farm chickens

a new greenhouse at Deep Root Farm

We saw a lovely bird with blue markings and a white breast, and we all tried to guess what kind it was, but didn't know

Before we left, Scott and Lettie and I each had a mug of Mike's homemade soup.  He had made it with kale and squash that grew in these gardens we had just walked through.  It was so delicious, so nourishing, and it made me feel, for lack of a better word, balanced.  When we left the house, it was hard to believe I'd ever had a headache, or might ever get one again.

Then, homeward bound, and a gentle walk with Zoe across the river and back.  We looked at each other often on that walk.  She is always a bit subdued after chemo days, a little tired, and I am too.  I asked her when we should stop and she told me with just a slight nod of the head. When interspecies communication works, it always seems like it's the simplest thing in the world.

Sometimes what we need is very simple, so elemental.  To feel rooted to this earth.  Warm soup with legumes and vegetables that grew near the place where you are eating it.  The company of people who are kind and who are trying to plant themselves in a community where they can grow and be part of other people's growth.

Sometimes we don't have to travel very far or do very much to get what we need to cure what ails us.

Day 58: The Chew Toy Mantra for Dog Lady Meditators

I'm two weeks into a wonderful meditation class taught by Rebecca Rivers, who began her professional life as an ecology professor at St. Lawrence University, where I teach English.  She is a full-time yoga and meditation teacher now, but her years as a professor taught her how to find the precise language to reach every kind of student.

For the Type A student in meditation class, the witty, overloaded-with-responsibility publicity writer with four kids, she knows how to make her understand that she is still accomplishing something major, and life-transforming, whenever she meditates, even when she feels frustrated by the perambulations of her very busy mind.

For the widow going through grief (my dear friend taking the class with me) she offers complete acceptance.  When she talks to my friend she has a way of looking and being, in her expression and her posture and her voice, that allows my friend to simultaneously witness and experience her emotions without being inundated by them, and meanwhile still get all the calming benefits of meditation.

For the brainy and physically active man with the sports injuries from his earlier life as a rower and avid bicyclist, she helps him move through the pain as he settles into his posture, and she can speak in a way that addresses him both as a cerebral person and a doer.

And for the dog lady in this corner, she knows how to speak dog.

"The average person has 600,000 thoughts a day," she said.  "And I'm talking about an average person without a higher education.  Everyone in this room has far more thoughts than this.  And we only need about 600 of them."

We all smiled.  We knew.  We had each had 300 thoughts in between the beginning of the sentence and the end.

"But that over-active mind is like a puppy," she said.  "You don't want to punish the puppy for being so hyper-active.  You just need to give it a chew toy."

Then she told us we were going to meditate this week using a mantra, which is the best chew-toy for the mind she knows.

I have never been attracted to the mantra form of meditation.  It has always seemed so seventies.  I picture George Harrison doing TM in India, and even though George was my favorite Beatle, he was the next-older generation, and in the seventies my two mantras were a) I have too much homework and I'll never get into college if I don't get it done and  b) pass the joint.

My other reluctance to using a mantra was that it seemed so hard-core-eastern, like the thing you can't do correctly until you find a guru.  I came to meditation first as a way to quiet my mind and help me focus better on my writing and tame my anxiety and cure my insomnia.  In other words, I came to meditation as a westerner.  So it's taking a plunge to say that I'm on a spiritual journey.  I know that in my heart, but I don't often say that out loud.

My other resistance to the mantra form of meditation is that I thought it would tire me out.  I overtax my throat muscles daily as someone who lives in the realm of words.  It's not just that I talk a lot, but that I read my work out loud when I write, at least silently in my head.  So it's like I give myself mantras all day, just in life.  To balance things out, I've always gone the other way with meditation and chosen images, color moving up my spine, pictures in my mind of flowers and trees, to rest my voice and the verbal center of my brain.

But last night, Rebecca gave us a three-syllable mantra, Shiva-ham, (the ham is pronounced more like "home") and I had only said it a few times in my mind when I felt a sensation wash over me of complete relaxation.  It was like taking a warm bath.  And then I felt sensations of pure good energy--waves, then smaller pulses--move through me.  I didn't want it to end.

Rebecca had said that the mantra would be like a chew-toy is to a hyper-active puppy.  She was so right.  But the best part of it was that my jaw went completely slack.  I just floated for a while, and I think I drooled on my sweater.

I rode home on that wave of relaxation where my dog was waiting for me.  She sat beside me as I wrote this, waiting for me to empty my mind of the last of the day's quota of thoughts so that we could go upstairs to sleep.

Namaste, gentle readers.  Namaste.

Day 34: Meditation for Skeptics, Slouchers, Neurotic Planners, Caffeine Addicts, and People who think they are Too Busy to Meditate, but Want to, Kind of: The Prequel

A month has passed since I first wrote about meditation and I said that I'd write about "my first time" back in my late teens, and how and why it didn't work for me.

I was eighteen and living in Evanston, Illinois.  It was summer and I'd just ended my first year at Northwestern University, and besides waiting tables at a restaurant called The Third Rail, which was near the El station (I think the name of the place was a joke, because the third rail is where you can get electrocuted), I had a six-week job replacing a secretary on maternity leave at this crazy, right-wing law firm that had John Birch types on their list of clients and alum.  (Don't worry--I didn't help their cause.  My main job was to file, my training "didn't take," and I just put the files away wherever there was room in the drawer.)

I had met the lawyer who found me this job on Rush Street, at a shiny, seventies-style disco (it was, after all, the seventies).  He lived on the Gold Coast of Chicago in a shiny, high-rise apartment, and had seventies sideburns and seventies shiny shirts and a seventies beige shag carpet.  I think the right-wing office in Evanston was just some branch of a big downtown firm, because I don't remember seeing this guy on the job, except for one time, later in the summer, when he came to town in his three-piece suit and took me out to lunch.

The only other thing I remember from the law office was that I didn't have proper office attire.  I got my clothes then from two places: The Mexican Shop, a boutique featuring peasant tops, Indian wrap-skirts, Oaxaca embroidered dresses, and magenta and turquoise harem pants from Afghanistan; and thrift stores, where I went in for vintage looks like forties suits with padded shoulders and cinched in waists, or baggy Annie Hall tweeds and newsie caps.

One of my roommates in our summer apartment, Bill Grossman, dropped out of music school that year to join a ragtime jazz band that played music from the 30s.  I was one of his groupies.  My friend, Sue, and I would go to hear him play downtown in one of Chicago's many blues clubs, and then we'd sometimes stay out drinking with the band.  Whether we partied with them afterward, or I went back to Evanston with Sue in a cab, I would sometimes wake up at dawn to hear Bill in the living room sitting zazen.

He had some kind of meditation gong, and its sound was pleasant, but not when I was hungover and had only slept for three hours and now had to get up and misplace files for right-wing John Bircher types.

Later, Bill quit the band and moved to the Dai Bosastsu Zendo in the Catskill Mountains.  I was visiting him there at the end of a retreat when Ronald Reagan was elected president, and looking out at the fields of snow in this peaceful place while the words "nuclear winter" formed in my mind was one of those moments of cognitive dissonance that stayed with me for most of that decade.

Bill knew I was struggling to find balance in my life, knew I needed to train my roiling, restless mind if I ever wanted to find peace, let alone the concentration it takes to be a writer.  But every time we sat on those round, black cushions that summer in Evanston when I was eighteen, I started giggling.

It's not just that I was young, and beyond young, profoundly immature.  Bill and I as a team were all about two things: music and shtick.  We did gags together.  Once, I covered my face with a nylon stocking and walked into his room with my teddy bear and a bread knife, turned on the light, and said, "Don't anybody move or the bear gets it."  Bill introduced me to Firesign Theatre, Burt and I of "down east" Maine, and inevitably, Monty Python.  When we weren't listening to music, to Samuel Barber's Adagio for Strings and Ravi Shankhar's Shakti and Pachelbel's Canon in D (which wasn't so ubiquitous then) and Mahler's big booming symphonies, all of them (Bill was a tuba player and Mahler was great for the wind instrument), we were listening to comedy, or performing our own improv, and laughing and laughing.

I didn't want to sit still then.  I was on the run.  From my mother, my childhood, and the messes I kept making in relationships by compensatory free spirit happy-go-lucky behavior, when I felt anything but lucky, and didn't really know what happiness was supposed to feel like unless it was extreme.

Sometimes when I read about people meditating I wonder if I am "doing it right."  If you open up Elizabeth Gilbert's Eat, Pray, Love to chapter/bead  51 (just as this blog is part of a 108-day series of meditation and writing, her book is organized in 108 short chapters like the beads on a mala) and you come upon this passage, meditation seems very, well, active:

The most fierce experiences come when I let go of some last fearful reserve and permit a veritable turbine of energy to unleash itself up my spine.  It amuses me now that I ever dismissed these ideas of the kundalini shakti as mere myth.  When this energy rides through me, it trembles like a diesel engine in low gear; and all its asks of me is this one simple request--Would you kindly turn yourself inside out, so that your lungs and heart and offal will be on the outside and the whole universe will be on the inside?  And emotionally, will you do the same?  Time gets all screwy in this thunderous space, and I am taken--numbed, dumbed and stunned--to all sorts of worlds, and I experience every intensity of sensation: fire, cold, hatred, lust, fear . . .When it's all over, I wobble to my feet and stagger out into the daylight in such a state--ravenously hungry, desperately thirsty, randier than a sailor on three-day shore leave."

I love this book, and I love Elizabeth Gilbert (and if you haven't listened to her TED-talk on inspiration, it's a must.)  She's smart and funny and disarmingly honest, and reading her makes me want to adhere to her mantra: "tell the truth, tell the truth, tell the truth."  But as much as I am moved and entertained by her accounts of India, where I've spent some time myself, I think, wow, girlfriend, you just underwent the Iron Man of meditation sessions.  It's sitting as extreme sport.  She writes about it so well I can feel it with her, but I haven't experienced meditation like this.  Maybe I'm just not built for extreme sports.

As a runner, at my most athletic, I never ran more than seven miles a day.

I've never been on the elliptical for more than 45 minutes.

I've never tried to meditate for more than half an hour.

Maybe I should.  Okay, I think I will.  Sometime before this 108-day cycle is through I'll try to sit for an hour, and then post about it.

But in Elizabeth Gilbert's case, perhaps you need to be in an Indian ashram surrounded by fellow seekers, while meanwhile going through a divorce and still getting over the hot-and-cold rebound guy.  And maybe you need to be not only a fearless, open writer and world traveler, but also in your sexual prime to feel energy surge upward with such power and velocity.  For me, that turning the inside outside and vice versa happened not in meditation but in actual mixed-up, messed-up life: my tumultuous twenties.

For me morning meditation is quiet.  It's a 3.2 K, not a marathon.  The energy moving up my spine warms my body as it meanders along, and when it reaches my face, I smile.

When it's not too cold, Zoe does her meditation on the balcony while I do mine in the corner of my studio.  She stares at the river.  She can do this for hours and hours, a true meditation marathoner, whereas I generally sit for 15-20 minutes