16 September 2014

Before the Rain ...

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My projects are half-completed
yet done so with great satisfaction,
by the time my back starts hurting,
terribly and inevitably.
So, it's time to call it a day,
because a big storm is rolling in. 
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I put my chair in the shade
where the best breezes flow,
and I pour cold beer over ice,
waiting for the cooler breezes,
and I open a book. 
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Winds rise, skies darken, thunder rumbles,
and the world scrambles in fear:
Pinkie the Cat runs in a
desperate comical low-crawl dash
to some outside retreat.
Silly Willy loses his nerve and goes inside. 
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Then the Black Dog, a fat old soi dog
with gray whiskers who often shows
up for food, waddles by.
He is afraid of me - though not
afraid of gentle Tuk when she's here.
I wave, say "Hi," and talk to him in friendly
nonsense phrases while I slowly push some tuna
that the cats didn't eat
through the fence for him.
I back off to give him space and courage to eat.
He eats it up; I approach again,
give him tuna, and again back off; he eats;
we repeat this dance until the
tuna is gone and he is happy. 
As he turns to go, we part as friends.
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Cosmic bodhisattva Black Dog,
thank you for enlightening my world. 
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-Zenwind.
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… Rain at Last

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Holding down the home fort in the
outside courtyard on a Buddha Day,
through the hot afternoon right through
to the rain before dark.

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I'm glad my phone is waterproof,
because I'm getting drizzled on
mightily by the blowing rain and spray
here under the meager eaves as I type this.
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The coolness of this downpour
is such a radical drop in temp
that I can hardly contain my joy. 

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Blessed Coolness. Zen Delight.
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-Zenwind. 

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12 September 2014

Pain

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Chronic physical pain.  Acute, agonizing, excruciating, chronic, and intensely brutal continuing physical pain.  Pain that saps the very life right out of you.  My back hurts so bad that it hurts to even breathe.  Hell on earth. 
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It drives me down into the depths and makes me empathize with old Sisyphus as he goes through the endless and hopeless cyclical motions of his ancient curse.  (See Albert Camus’s essay on The Myth of Sisyphus to encounter what is actually a rather “cheerful” account of such existential predicaments.) 
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 It’s far worse if one’s painful condition is not uniformly recognized by the medical “establishment.”  Some doctors sympathize, but most just don’t understand how much it hurts.  Or give a shit.  They won’t give you legal (but controlled) pain relief medication that might help.  I most often see that very lack of remedy to be a despicable failing of the medical community.  Lack of caring (“for poor suffering creatures everywhere” – Jack Kerouac). 
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Here I am – feeling sorry for myself.  Poor, poor, pitiful me.  I get unbelievably ugly when I’m hurting.  Not a nice guy. 
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I admit that I don’t entirely know what medications would help relieve my acute pain.  I suppose that morphine or other narcotic pain-relievers would work in the short term, but how dangerous and addictive is that?  Sounds like bad complications.  Alcohol is the only legal short-term relief, but that’s an ancient one with its own complications. 
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I hurt my back in the early 1970s while doing farm work.  But really, I must ask:  is it a coincidence that my major acute FMS pain started its present intensity in early 1982 after I had stopped smoking the great cannabis herb (on New Year’s Day 1980) and also had become stupidly enmeshed within the most super-stressful relationship of my entire life shortly after that?  Worst decade of my entire life.  I cannot prove any of it, but I do know for sure that my physical agony started then, along with total mental anguish.  Self-sacrifice is so primitively brutal and self-destroying. 
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Dukkha happens.  That’s the way of it.  We are born; we live; we suffer; and we die.  But – importantly, intriguingly – in between those gates of pain we do have instances of grasping the precious gem and really living.  And we are (sometimes) rational animals who pilot our courses in astonishingly interesting directions.  That’s our glory.  We climb mountains and discover new worlds.  We have a poetic tradition of hope. 
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I don’t know what else to say.  The pain is still reverberating deep throughout my very bones, and my mind is completely exhausted. 
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-Zenwind.
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