Oh Yeah, That Zen Thing

Another thing I've been thinking about lately is my Zen practice -- such as it is. As many of you know, I was a member of a Zendo for about five years when I lived in New York. I took vows, got a Dharma name, attended regularly and did my best to practice diligently.

After I moved to New Jersey, I meditated less. And when we moved to London, I pretty much let go entirely. I've tried sitting here a handful of times. I went to a local Buddhist center once or twice, but it's not in the tradition I know and it didn't really click with me.

I've written before about my attempts to maintain my practice and continue sitting. Lately, I've been thinking that perhaps the Zen way to handle this is to simply realize that my practice has shifted. I don't mean to give up entirely, and the intention is important -- the spark that leads to a more mindful, gentle existence. I'm still practicing in small ways -- checking in with my breath as I sit on the tube, tuning in to each moment as I watch the streets around me for photographic opportunities, trying to be kind and keep my cool, even when slow knots of tourists block my path on the sidewalk. So maybe I'm not sitting for lengthy periods. Does  that mean I'm failing, or just that my life is in a different place now?

Maybe rather than wondering whether my practice lives up to my ideas, whether I'm "doing it right," and feeling guilty about the ways in which it falls short, it's enough to see the ways in which I am still practicing. I don't mean to justify laziness, but Zen is not an external thing that I have to achieve. It's here already. It's with me all the time. It is me.

(Photo: Brick Lane, on Saturday.)

Fixing Windows, and Getting Older

A lot of things are running through my head today.

First of all, and worthy of note, I voted. My mail-in ballot arrived on Tuesday and I opened it up, marked my choices, walked it to the post office and mailed it back right away. Take that, Mitt Romney.

Second, I've been using the past couple of days to complete tasks that have been lingering. I ordered a handyman from the Kensington & Chelsea Council (which owns our apartment building) to come and fix a few of our windows, which had slid off the tracks or were otherwise wonky. (He had to order parts, naturally, so the windows still aren't fixed, but at least we're moving in that direction.) I descaled our tea kettle, removing a year of lime residue left behind by the mineral-laden London water. I initiated a couple of financial and business transactions that need to be completed.

I'm also thinking about Ms. Moon's recent post about becoming invisible with age. She experienced the feeling when some oblivious guy on a dock blocked her from walking past while carrying a heavy container -- a guy who might have noticed and shifted aside, she suspects, for a younger woman. My mom made similar complaints while I was growing up. I vividly remember her saying, "All those men who hold doors for you when you're 25 slam them in your face when you're 45."

I haven't really experienced this feeling -- partly because I'm a man, I suppose, although the standard of beauty in the world of gay men is probably every bit as demanding as it is for women. It's more that I was never all that conventionally attractive and so never got the attention in the first place. I don't mean that to sound at all self-pitying -- in fact, if anything, I'm happy about it. Being ordinary-looking, maybe even a little odd-looking, saved me from a lifetime of bullshit, and it's certainly saving me pain as I age. It's harder to let go of something you once had than to miss something you never had.

Having said that, I am at a time in my life when I have to let go of some physical things. I stopped going to the gym entirely when we moved to England. I didn't feel like we could afford it, for one thing. But I also felt like it was time. The gym was getting harder and harder, and maintaining muscles for the sake of vanity turns on you at some point -- your muscles start to look stringy and over-worked rather than bulgey and hot. I pretty much gave up on them. I still do sit ups and push ups every couple days, and I've been running, though I'm contemplating giving that up too -- at the ripe old age of (almost) 46, walking feels more my speed.

It's an interesting thing, aging. My right index finger has an achy middle joint that I'm almost certain is pre-arthritic. My lower back kills when I first wake up. A few days ago I had aches in my left hip, which came (I suspect) from some strained connective tissue and forced me to be careful about my posture when sitting and my gait when running. You always hear people talk about little aches and pains as they get older -- and by golly, there really are little aches and pains!

Anyway, there's more, but I'll stop here because otherwise this will be one of those overlong blog entries that drive me crazy. Things running through my head...to be continued!

(Photo: Shoreditch, on Saturday.)

A Very Hungry Caterpillar

This is one of the creatures that's demolishing our horseradish plant. Could it be an offspring of the Cabbage White butterfly that I saw almost two weeks ago? If so, it grew really fast! It's the only caterpillar I can see on the plant, but as you can tell, it's going to town.

It may be the lone survivor, partly because I decided to intervene and kill off some of the eggs laid by the butterfly. The day after I watched it lay those eggs, I plucked many of them off with tweezers, which wasn't easy because they were incredibly tiny. I left some behind, too, but the poor plant just isn't very big and couldn't have sustained all those caterpillars if they'd all hatched. Call me a caterpillar murderer. I tried to walk the Middle Path.

(Besides, the Cabbage White came back later and laid some more. I left those alone. It was like fighting Niagara.)

We'll see what happens to this guy (and his siblings, if there are any). With the weather getting chilly, I can't imagine he'll have much more time to grow before he needs to crawl into the ground -- or wherever -- and pupate, or hibernate, or a combination of the two.

Gherkin, Salman and Dexter

This is the view looking south on Bishopsgate from Shoreditch, at Sir Norman Foster's famous 30 St. Mary Axe, better known as "The Gherkin." Isn't it a great building? I'd love to see it from the inside, but from what I understand there's no regular public access. Someone needs to open up a cafe in that nose cone.

The rainy weather continued yesterday, and I had a blessedly low-key day. I did the laundry and a few work-related tasks, but mostly caught up on my New Yorker magazines. I enjoyed Salman Rushdie's account of the changes in his life that followed the publication of "The Satanic Verses" in 1989 and the Iranian fatwa that followed. The article was especially appropriate given all the recent outrage and violence in the Muslim world over that terrible YouTube video. (Not that I am suggesting the video is culturally comparable to Rushdie's book.) I'm thinking now I should read "The Satanic Verses" -- I never tried it because some critics didn't take kindly to it, and the consensus seemed to be that it wasn't that good. But if I'm still curious more than 20 years later, that says something, doesn't it?

I also had a good long conversation with my mom via Skype, in which she filled me in on the neighborhood plane crash. Yes indeed, there is no end to the excitement in Pasco County, Florida. Turns out it wasn't much of a spectacle, though -- it happened way out in a pasture and even though Mom lives fairly close to the scene, she heard and saw nothing.

In the evening, Dave and I tried to watch "Dexter," having exhausted our supply of "Breaking Bad." I did not like "Dexter," not even a little bit. People have raved about it, but I found it way too bloody and creepy. Maybe I simply haven't cultivated the appropriate level of ironic detachment -- but at this point, I think I'll skip it.

Avocado

Here is our windowsill avocado, which seems to be growing gangbusters since I freed it from its pot on the balcony a few weeks ago. I suppose it will have to go back in the dirt at some point. I'm surprised pulling it up didn't kill it, and I hope replanting it doesn't either. It's proven surprisingly resilient so far!

Although the trees are mostly still green, we're seeing signs of autumn here in London. Yesterday was chilly, gray and wonderfully rainy. (Wonderful for those of us who could spend the day inside, anyway. I'm not sure how Pat the Balcony Spider felt about it -- she spent the day huddled under a leaf.) Dave and I sat inside and spent a companionable, cozy, nearly silent morning reading (me) and watching YouTube (Dave) on our computers. We're such a modern couple.

I read a sobering article in The New York Times about the amount of energy it takes to run the Internet, and the illusion that all our technology is somehow green and wildly efficient. Seems that's not really the case. It made me wonder what would happen if we someday pull the plug on the Web, or at least on all the dark corners where old web pages hibernate, in order to save energy. And that made me wonder about the longevity of my own blog.

I really need to back up my blog. I haven't done it in years. But even when you back it up, you get an xtml file -- not anything you could easily open and read on your computer. We assume the web will always be capable of hosting xtml files. Somehow that's not as comforting as looking through my old spiral-bound notebooks! (Everything is impermanent, right?)

Prompted by a fellow enthusiast, I also watched an amusing 1976 video about graffiti on YouTube. That hair! Those clothes! (The teacher is especially awesome at about the 7.5-minute mark.) I gotta give the producers credit for distinguishing between artful graffiti and tagging. Even in those days there was some recognition that graffiti and street art could be positive in certain forms.

Finally, Dave and I made up for forgetting our dinner appointment with neighbors Chris and Linda last weekend -- we went to dinner with them in Soho. Poor Dave is still wrestling with the remnants of a cold, and that was bringing him down, but he persevered. After all, we couldn't back out again, could we?

Shoreditch Street Art

I went wandering in Shoreditch yesterday to check out all the new (and new-ish) street art. I hadn't been over there for a couple of months, so I found quite a bit I hadn't yet seen. Some of it was Olympics-themed, like James Cochran's portrait of runner Usain Bolt (above), high on a building overlooking a parking lot.

This corner was once occupied by a Roa squirrel, but lately it had been looking pretty ragged. Probs covered everything up with this mural of an Indian.

I don't know who's behind this. And what is it? Apparently a jellyfish with a cat on its head.

This rope heart/noose by Shok-1 has been up for a while. How about the guy walking beneath in a red outfit?! I couldn't have paid for better timing.

This Damien Hirst-ish unicorn comes to us from Nathan Bowen.

Here are some cool 3-D pieces by Cityzen Kane reminiscent of trilobites. In real life they're very shiny and sparkly; the picture doesn't really do them justice.

I get a big kick out of smaller artworks, too. Bortusk Leer always does amusing characters on newspaper pages.

Every once in a while you find something a little creepy.

Here's one of Mjar's sticker faces. I had to get on my hands and knees to get low enough for a picture. Maybe that's why he's laughing!

Herman and Hoover

Good grief. Someone teach that child some spelling and grammar! Yes, that's me, writing in my childhood diary on the day my brother and I got our dogs, Herman and Hoover.

I've always believed this occurred in 1976, but to the left of the date at the top of this page, it seems to say 1975 in reverse (from the preceding page). So maybe it was 1975, when I was 8 years old. I'm not sure.

Anyway, the back story is, Herman and Hoover were given to us by neighbors. They were part of a litter of four born to parents named Puppy (whom my mom called "the ugliest dog in the world") and Wagglebee. The neighbors named the puppies -- despite what I wrote above, "we" did not choose the names.

After we medicated them for their worm problems, Hoover and Herman became the source of a million family stories. They spent their years running free and trailing my brother and me all over our neighborhood, sometimes at the cost of being picked up by the dog catcher. We repeatedly had to drive down to the county pound and bail them out. But did we put a leash on them? No.

Herman, especially, got in some close scrapes -- she was attacked multiple times by bigger dogs, got her leg caught in someone's bicycle spokes, and I think she was even hit by a car. She was made of steel but dumb as a post, and she cost my parents hundreds in vet bills. Hoover was smarter, or at least more agile, and managed to more or less stay out of trouble.

We didn't try very hard to control those dogs. I suppose we should have, but things were different in those days in the palmettoed wilds of rural Florida. Fortunately they weren't biters.

They were also perpetually infested with fleas -- which for two outdoor dogs in Florida was hard to avoid. Now we have Advantage, where you put a few drops on the animal's neck and that's that. Back then, all we had were those terrible, smelly, poisonous, ineffective plastic flea collars. (Ineffective against vicious subtropical Florida fleas, anyway.)

Both dogs lived to a ripe old age -- I think Hoover died in 1991 and Herman the following year. (I could probably figure out exactly when if I were motivated to root around in more of my obsessive life documentation, but I'm not.) You can see Herman (with me) in her old age here, and Hoover (with my brother) here. Yes, those dogs really are sisters. Mind-blowing, right?

By the way -- that bit about moving was pretty much my imagination. My mom my have idly talked about it, but we never seriously considered moving anywhere, and I spent my entire childhood in the house where my mom still lives. Herman and Hoover are buried somewhere in the side yard.