Taxes and the Dentist

I considered whether I should put both Dentists and taxes in the title of this blog entry.
After all...you all might avoid it, with a title like that.
However, I'm here to tell you that neither has to be as bad as you think.

"As you think" being the operative part.

Ben Franklin so famously said:
" In this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes."

I say: "In the world of the self-employed, nothing can be said to be certain except
taxes and medical expenses."
Self-employed taxes are high (we get charged a lot), complicated (oh the boxes of receipts to enter into the computer every March, or, eeks! April), and expensive (either pay someone to do it all for you or pay someone to check your work for you and do the paperwork yourself - pricey, regardless).
And medical expenses? A lot of the same - unless you have insurance (which, even if you have it, costs a pretty penny without a company plan to cover you at least partly): pricey, a lot of paperwork and complicated. Worse, there are places to help you with payment plans, and some docs are kind about docking off a percentage if you have no insurance, but mostly you are on your own - there no CPA's of the medical bill world.

So you can understand why, in the six years I've been self-employed, I have put off my terribly complicated taxes until (usually) the last minute, and I haven't been to a dentist for the same amount of time, though I had a (relatively) nice experience the last time I went and got work done. In fact, I wrote about it here. And here's another nice wise writing from that same era, this time about getting a lot of expensive and difficult chiropractic care with no insurance. Besides the normal discomfort of dentist (even with meditation practice), there's the payment factor; besides the normal dread of taxes (quite an old human habit) there's all that extra work.

This year, I did my taxes in medium time - not last minute but not first thing. I waited for just the right day, and today was it. Why?
Because I finally went to the dentist today for the first time since that blog entry I linked to above. Why?
Because Groupon made it cheap and easy to go to a fun west-sider dentist, with massaging chairs and nice quiet dental assistants, and get the cleaning done. The Groupon was for half-off, so a $120 cleaning cost $60. It was such a steal I got one for Dylan, too, who hadn't been in forever (let's just say, much longer than me).

"You have the nicest teeth I will see all day," the dental hygenisist said. I didn't tell her it had been five years - the clerk had written in "a couple of years" when I had answered vaguely that it had been "a few years." Regardless of this compliment, the cleaning was awkward - I have a very small mouth (she gave me a toothbrush for a teenager) and tight neck, and no matter how nice my teeth looked, I did need quite a bit of cleaning. I breathed as much as I could, though, reminding myself of what I learned the last time. I would notice my hands or neck or shoulders tensing and I would consciously, deeply, breathe out. It helped - I still feel sore now, but it made of pain a lot less suffering. I was so inspired after the cleaning - fresh haircut yesterday, clean teeth - that I came right home and started doing the taxes, which I had dreaded.

Let me tell you - and me - let me tell us something about dread. I am sure you already know this, as do I, but apparently it bears repeating, because none of us have stopped doing it.
Dread sucks.
Dread is lame.
Dread only makes things worse. Dread is, in fact, concentrated suffering, and we do it to ourselves.

Lately I have experimented with doing the thing I dread the most, first (obviously, with taxes and dentist examples above, this is a practice and not perfection) - because I have finally caught on that when I do not do something very important or overwhelming, it gets far worse with procrastination. AND I feel as if I have gotten nothing done in the interrim, not matter how many other work details/errands/tasks/appointments/classes/writings/emails/nose pickings I do.

So I encourage *you* to pick one thing - big or small. I recommend dentist or taxes, if you are overdue on either of those, but smaller is ok, too. No matter how much you have been dreading it (and now I get to go to another dread thing - wrangling with Delta to get the right price for our trip to London this August), see how it feels to just do it, or start doing it. Pull through it.
Notice - the relief when it is done, and if it was, in fact, worse than you had blown it up to be.

Rinse and repeat - the way we learn - do it and do it again, and if we notice the results, once and awhile a habit breaks, and we can be just that much more free. This is, I am quite certain, the true definition of Liberty, though I am not sure that Ben Franklin would agree.

What About Me?

Please watch this two minute video first.

I have returned from my two and a half week secular Buddhist seminary retreat, where I spent half of each day sitting in silence and half of it studying in not silence with 50 other Buddhists. Guided by two senior teachers Acharyas Bower and Greenleaf (Acharyas - "teacher" in Sanskrit, considered in Shambhala to be next to the Sakyong in the hierarchy - Pema Chodron is an acharya, for instance) in our tradition, and a bevy of cooks, meditation instructors and coordinators, it's been a bit rough to come out of such a sacred container back into every day life.

Especially because instead of it taking me 8 hours to get home, it took me 36.

The weather between Madison and Burlington wasn't pretty. The airlines were taken unawares, and so were many travelers - naively, I arrived at Burlington not having checked any of the forecasts for anywhere west of where I was, and Burlington looked fine and clear. I was tired, having been gone and somewhat sick for over two weeks, and I arrived to find the second leg of my trip, Detroit to Madison, had already been canceled, and the first leg was on the block for potential cancellation. People were outraged, hopping up and down mad, wanting the poor clerks who saw a long night ahead of them to fix it for them. I cried, not to "get" anything, but spontaneously, from exhaustion, and took it aside so that no one had to see but me and poor Dylan on the other end of my call, also crying. By the time they canceled the flight, hours later, I was doing tonglen for the clerks working for Delta and for all those around me, and myself.

After a good night's sleep, I went to the airport expecting nothing, and this made all the difference. When I was told my first flight had technical difficulties, I laughed. Two women around my age sitting near me, both looking on the edge of deciding whether to cry or yell, joined me half-heartedly, then fully. The irony of combined technical error and weather between us and our destinations (one going to Florida, one, like me, to Madison) became absurd, and these two and I developed a tight bond, convinced the only way to survive was not to take it personally. Over the next twelve hours, this attitude literally saved us, for we boarded our flight no less than three times, only to have to get off twice due to doubts about the ability of the plane to fly, not to mention conditions at Detroit. When others had given up, blown a gasket (which got them nothing, but in one case, an arrest) or paid hundreds of dollars for a flight on a competing airline, we were eating Twizzlers and giggling and talking about photography.

This morning, home with Dylan and reading the New Yorker, a line from an article about the Kabul Bank struck me in the chest:
"Salehi, like so many of those who occupy high positions in Karzai's government, appears to harbor no ideology other than his own survival."

A story that Acharya Bower told, of her position helping the Sakyong to edit Turning the Mind Into an Ally (which is a fabulous beginner book on meditation, by the way), came to mind. She spoke of working for him, ostensibly concerned for the success of the book, for the Sakyong himself, but one day realizing she was only concerned about saving her own neck. The Sakyong had just made a video and song about this belief we all base every moment of our lives on: What About Me? and she had to realize she was disguising her own self interests under a seeming support of him. What About Me? was wearing the mask of "What About Him?"

Our desire, our desperate need, to make sure we live under all costs, to make sure our habits continue (even as small as coffee in the morning and chewing our fingernails) because we believe them to be directly related to our survival, in cases far less risky than Salehi's, hit me upside the head in the airport over those two days. Every time something went wrong, the people who were suffering the most took it personally. The people who realized it wasn't about them laughed, cried or moved on. This isn't an issue of those who had it easiest - one woman was trying to get to her chemo appointment, another to her all-alone daughter in the Orlando airport. Someone, just like me, trying to get home or go on vacation, without a time crunch, would be just as likely to swear at an official as someone who actually had a crisis on their hands.

My brother Alex once told me that trying to break our own habits (in this case, the habit of assuming it is all about us and feeling justified in getting it all fixed for us, not just justified, but terrified that if it doesn't get fixed, we will die or it indicts us in some way) is like trying to break our own bones. When I read the quote from the New Yorker to Dylan this morning and brought up this idea, Dylan smiled and stated that sometimes it is "less dramatic" than that - that trying to break our own habits can be like trying to squeeze something large through a small space - tiny gestures, long time, seemingly no progress. We give up, thinking there should be a big boom or sign of progress - even breaking bones would be a better sign. And then, quite suddenly, though it took a long time to get there - we are out the other end of the tube, and suddenly, we don't take it so personally any more.

I hope this perspective lasts. I will do my best to practice every day in as many ways as I can, asking myself, asking others to ask themselves: is it really personal? Contemplating my actions, the results of my actions, the causes of those actions acted upon me - the only way to see clearly, the only way to laugh in the face of adversity. Like an image from the dharma texts I studied so thoroughly the last few weeks - when drowning, remember that we survive by relaxing, not by thrashing. Thrash and we will die. Relax and we will survive.

Inversion

Today I participated in a Restorative Yoga workshop. Our teacher emphasized inversions, to get the blood going back through our system. Since I am going back to Vermont this Friday, and with the inversions, this poem that I wrote comes to mind, which went onto a friend's art piece in Vermont five years ago.

Branches Beneath

I am

roots up,

tumbling

skirt of earth,

wind dispersing

cloud feet.

Show me

your ankles

sneaking

from under

heavy weight

skin bark.

Watch water

return to sky source,

tears rising

from toes,

upside-down

ballerina,

dangling.

Letting things turn upside down, mix around, in life right now. Fascinating and frightening.

Papa Terma

For many many years, I waited for it, longed for it, imagined it.
A letter, a note, a picture with words; some kind of written confirmation.
Something from my father, who died when I was 12, saying that he loved me
missed me
would miss me
wished me well
with some words of wisdom and gentleness to guide me through the rest of my life
without him.

After searching through banker's box after banker's box, piles of economic journals, graded computer programming papers, receipts copied again and again, after years and years of secretly and not-so-secretly searching, hoping some time in the four years he was sick he thought to write to me, hoping somewhere in all the detritus of our now-sold childhood home, I would find IT. And I would know that was IT - THE letter, THE note, THE missive, THE missing piece.

I never did. Nothing for me, for either of my brothers.
"You should be glad you had a father than loved you" my mother would say on days when she was competitive over grief with me. The implication was at least when I had him he was great, even if I no longer had him in any way. Not many memories, and no notes, persay, not even to me when he was alive from him alive. Much less from him then alive now dead to me alive.

A couple of months ago I finally wrote myself that note. The feeling was one of finding the text in myself - the message mostly derived from Hakomi therapy, asking my inner voices what I need at a fundamental level - the text oriented around being gentle with myself, having perspective for all of life, and not working too hard - basically "do as I say not as I did." The message wasn't from him them, it was from him now - my dead father, as if he has grown this whole time alongside me, and seen how wrong he was in overworking, wrong he was in not being present to much in my life or my family's life, and how much he wanted to make sure I don't make the same mistakes.

For if my father were still alive I am pretty certain he wouldn't be able to see that. My living through his death and long past means I can start to see these things - I think his living through Cancer wouldn't have helped. But who knows. All I know now is that I received it not from me, persay, but from some part of him in me that has been secreted away, grown and opened, and now is blossoming when I need it most.

A Terma. Something buried from him, deep inside his Basic Goodness, his real self, hidden in the mindstream of our genes, coming alive when it is needed most. I am grateful for these teachings on Terma from Tibetan Buddhism - though my literal father would have likely scoffed at them as a skeptic, the inner father who is finally opening, that little voice, deep inside me, he knows it is true. We plant seeds and never know how they will mature, and the way his voice comes to me now, reassuring me I am making the right choices, to in fact do as he is saying now and not as he said or did then, I know he meant the best all along. He never meant to harm. He didn't know better. I can still be angry, and still forgive.

Looking through boxes a few nights ago I found this image of my dad and his mom. No date - I think it must have been just before he got sick. His mom, who was always so gentle and loving with me, was so severe with him (as you can tell in the photo). Ah the irony. He was quite loving with me but also so severe. The tone of the Terma I have received is that of this exact moment - laugh, love, be open. Don't care how you look in a photograph. You are fine. There is nothing fundamentally wrong with you or the world as it is. There are very few photographs of my father, especially later in life, as he was always the photographer, rather than the photographed. So this is a hidden photo, a surprise, as pictures of him always are from this era. And usually, he is not smiling. So a Terma within a Terma. I offer it to you, dear reader, as it was given to me - a quiet gift on a snowy day.

Chicken/Egg

I often wonder what comes first: the chicken or the egg. How did I land in this beautiful house, with this amazing partner and stunningly meaningful work for which I get paid a living wage? There has been a lot of pain, a lot of confusion, and also a lot of wonder and amazing conclusions.

I often cannot tell which action in my life resulted in where I am or a particular effect. I have been reading a lot about Karma lately in preparation for Seminary and the one thing I am finally getting is that it warns us that things are never as simple as A leading to B, or even A and B leading to C. Causes have supporting causes, conditions, circumstances. Everything is interacting with everything else. So to say "I went to this meditation class and the rest is history" is both a fallacy and has accuracy.

Two things I know for sure, though, that have equally affected me are writing and Buddhism. It comes together often, like today, that the things I learn from one are clearly manifest in the other. Today I am meeting with my editor to talk about my memoir, and editing is no longer as scary to me as it used to be. How can that be? How can I have gone from hating it to looking forward to it, secretly? It's not masochism - I don't look forward to criticism. But I look forward to finding fault so I can rework it into magic.

I feel the exact same way, 99% of the time, now about *myself* - if I have done something unhelpful, unbeneficial to myself or someone else, I want to know about it. I used to hate that, feel that I had been exposed, found out, that I was an imposter of a person who was secretly horrible. Now, it's more of a "Huh. Sorry about that. Now what can I do to make it better?"
I feel almost as if I am in the same place in my life, my meditation practice and my writing, especially right now.

So, I don't much care which came first for the moment. I just care that I am here.