home sweet home
I received a blog donation yesterday. What a boon! Some went to tonight’s dinner – a lemon roasted cauliflower, and a goulash which is baking while I type. Some ($8) went into Ralph’s gas tank. And a little went into two hot sandwiches for a young man and young woman out in a parking lot, with cardboard signs. My son delivered the sandwiches and the individuals tore right into them. Nels watched them from our car as we pulled out. The look on his face as he saw the effects of helping another – it was wonderful. I have been feeling so down about myself lately and so isolated and so icky. These little gifts help a great deal.
Driving off Nels is suddenly struck – “Mama, what about you? What are you going to eat?” My daughter puts her hands on my shoulders and lovingly squeezes. “How are your kidneys?” she asks. “It’s good to ask about your Mama,” Ralph tells them. I’m thinking, as the sun hits us in my husband’s too-loud car and I know that even though I am hungry I will be fed soon enough, Yeah, it is a good thing, it’s a wonderful thing, raising kids who feel cared for and who believe the adults in their lives are caring people. Because then our children are free to grow into the souls they are.
Tonight at the treatment center our little panel of clean-and-sober individuals were queried by the clients interred – especially one man Z., a self-labeled “skeptic” who kept trying to poke holes in a life of sobriety. He asked a few very direct questions, including asking me how I balanced my life with young kids, with that of helping others who wanted to stay sober. He asked a man on the panel named L. – a man with twenty-five years’ sobriety – how that man could still call himself an addict when he hadn’t had a drink or drug for a quarter-century. “I’ll be an addict until the day I die,” the elder responded, “- and so will you.” I thought, Hardcore. I don’t say that to others although I think it sometimes. I have a lot of things I don’t say aloud because I can’t be sure they’re okay to say aloud.
The young man Z. kept asking us about our methods of living without drinking and drugging. He was not convinced. I thought: So you don’t believe anything anyone says. If I tell you I do this work to keep my family and to get my good health, you don’t believe me. If L. tells you he’s still an addict, you don’t believe him. You don’t believe it’s possible to live without drugs and alcohol – and be happy. You don’t believe us even though we’re proof, and even though part of you wants to believe us more than anything because you are starting to be real tired of having the same problems over and over.
In the treatment center his intellectual violence is all in theory and unpleasant enough. In the real world it will be unimaginably harder.
I’m pretty sure Z.’s attitude is not properly labeled “skepticism”. It’s something else. It’s some kind of Perversity and a lot of people are imbued with it. All the same, I am disturbed by Z. because I know what it’s like to have that kind of mind. Pessimistic isn’t even the word although it’s an element within. What I realized after a year or so of ruminating on this kind of mind – the mind I have – was that it comes down to a kind of arrogance. I know more than anyone else, even about their experience – although I am careful not to say this aloud. If you tell me God saved your ass I am “skeptical”. If you tell me you did it on your own without help – I’m “skeptical”. I don’t believe anyone, or anything. Until Proof. What the fuck is Proof? Anything I can have Proof of is like sand shifting under my feet. One moment lulled into comfort; the next, terrifyingly off balance. I am never comforted. Never satisfied.
It’s a horrible mind, but at least it’s a searching one. I came to the Buddha, and the dharma, and the sangha through the exhaustion of this kind of mind. I exhausted this Mind and it exhausted me.
Tonight I’m torn up; I’m troubled. Yesterday as I prayed and meditated I asked, “Let me not be overwhelmed by the troubles of others.”