Weather from the north this morning. Sunny and cold. The sun is coming up earlier now and our first walk in the morning has daylight. Today the frost on the moss looked like crystals and the sun was slanting down on them making tiny prism rainbows. Dot immediately rolled and stretched, sniffed and explored every inch she could with her nose and mouth. Everything seems new to her every day. Down on the tide flat there were some puddles of fresh water that were frozen over with thin coverings of ice which she had to sniff, then shatter, and jump back plopping her big puppy feet in the wet sand: astounded! Barking whirling then off to find another and equally excited by the next. Then I whistled her back up to the yard where she danced for joy with kelp fronds in her mouth. Her silly joy makes me so happy, it makes up for her stubbornness.
Her latest thing is she has discovered she is big enough that her head reaches our tall counter tops. She can easily lick the butter in the butter dish, or steal food off a plate. Of course this is simply not allowed. But yelling at her creates a barking game, Hitting her makes her head shy and impossible to call her home. But yell at her we do and then when she repeats the barking game she goes outside with us or goes into her crate.. Sometimes I flip her over on her belly and get really stern with her and sometimes slap her belly like a spanking when she nips and Jan at me during discipline sessions. Obedience.
We never spanked our only child. His punishment was always having to listen to our endless talk. Or being alone in his room, with his books, which was not much punishment at all, or taking away some favorite thing. As a toddler Jan would NOT play the gravity game, when young Finn thought it was funny to throw things off his high chair to watch his mom get it for him. She did it for tiny baby Finn but when she saw him laughing when she got the thing, the toy or the food, for him. She just stopped doing it. The food or toy just disappeared, Most commonly it was eaten by the floor shark, that was our dog at the time. Finn would cry but shortly he stopped playing the gravity game.
Obedience. it is a constant problem and the source of so much stress in our lives: diets, and health routines. Essentially the Ten Commandments Moses carried off the Mountain are all about Obedience. If you follow that tradition, one of the first time God himself, speaks to an official representative on earth, (arguably… I know) God gives him a set of rules to obey.
Obedience is hard. I know. Believe me I’m not trying to sell you anything. No other way around it. How do I know this, because more than half the world follows a philosophy that tries to explain the pain of obedience.
The Four Noble Truths in a nutshell. The Buddha leaves his rich fathers house and discovers people are unhappy. He starts praying and meditation about this. He prays a long time. He comes up with this,: Everyone suffers. Everything suffers, why because everything will die, everything is interconnected, and everything is transient in this world. So this means that everything from a blade of grass to the Buddah struggles to be obedient to it’s form. The Buddha says. There is a way out of this. This need to be obedient to your form is a desire of the mind. You don’t have to be any form. You just have to be. You can stop wanting. If you can stop the desire, you can leave the obedience behind you can leave the suffering behind.
Okay, sounds good to me. How do I do that? Well the Buddah said, you think about the way I did and you live right. You follow the eight fold path: a right view, Right Resolve, Right Speech, Right conduct, right livelihood, right mindfulness, right effort, and right samadi, which is the practice of mediation resulting in feeling a union with all things. Easy right? It is essentially follow the tenants of interconnectedness, transience, suffering and compassion, most of all compassion. Easy Peasy.
No, of course not. The problem is this tradition is bound by an ancient tradition and ancient language that has gone through thousands of years of history and dozens of countries, sects, military rulers, economies, governments who all have put their fingers all over this philosophy. So, that many writers and practitioners can claim to be the true interpreter of the true path.
Obedience to whom? Always a problem, even when shedding obedience.
Dot’s office Crate.
Of course my personal problem with the Four Noble Truths is that the philosophy has passed through thousands of years of languages, cultures, geographies, that are absolutely foreign to me. I have no idea of the traditions, the authentic literature, even the real food from which it sprang. Not to mention that it has splintered into hundreds of different sects and types and has morphed into so many nationalistic functions, What started in compassion is now used to justify genocide in Laos. My understanding of Buddhism is really and understanding of a San Francisco Beat Poet academic splinter group that is probably as American as southern fried chicken. I am a tourist when It comes to Buddhism with a flower print shirt and a camera around my neck. So out of it I wouldn’t even be able to recognize an authentic expert. All experts are just taking a little sip from a big river now.
But of course it sounds nice because it talks about overcoming suffering and obedience. When in practice in the countries that hold to the philosophy the populations are rarely very diverse nor are they very open to diversity. It all works as long as the understanding of the word “right” in the eightfold path is understood clearly. My hipster friends in North Beach California in the fifties understood it to mean having sex a lot and the women did the dishes while the men went mountain climbing. But that too was perhaps a little culture bound.
Christian teaching is more direct and simple. Christianity comes in high and hard with love but then the next pitch is a change up with obedience. This is probably how I was raised if I am truthful with myself… and how I am trying to train Dot.
I will love Dot but there are rules she must obey. There is a “form” she must adhere to and see herself as. I want her to be a good puppy, just as my parents wanted me to be a good boy. I will love Dot but if she eats food off the counter I will punish her and make her aware of her sin. She will have failed to be a “Good Puppy.” If she bites my hand she will be a very bad puppy. She will be disobedient.
But here is the problem with puppies and with people who have questions about obedience. I will love Dot even if she pees on the floor or if she eats butter off the counter. Dot knows this somehow. She wakes up every morning and she is happy and wiggly and she loves to see me. She doesn’t cower and she wants to snuggle. Yet still she misbehaves. Yet still I love her. Obedience is hard. For her and for me.
Simone Weil was a Polish poet and philosopher who moved to France and died during the World War II she would only eat what the Polish Jews were fed in the camps. She died of malnutrition. As she was dying speaking of God she wrote, “How He must love me, to make us both wait so long,” which I always thought was heartbreaking. But it was the first time I thought of God being an entity that suffered for us.
But of course Weil had converted to Catholicism and they, like Buddhists have given a lot of thought to suffering, but more in the practice of it rather than the practice of overcoming it.
Anyway… for the real world pursuit of overcoming suffering and the pursuit of love I think the only thing is patience. It just takes time and determination. That’s the bad news for most Americans. Obedience will always just be plain hard. That’s the nature of it. There is no quick fix for anything. Dot will eventually stop eating butter off the counters and we will always love her, she will not be a neurotic like Woody Allen forever in therapy feeling guilty that he never met the expectations of his owners/ ah… parents. I think our lives are more similar to mules than to New York intellectuals, we will finish plowing the field, and if we are lucky we will get to the end with God.
But don’t freak out. I’m not a good Christian either. I’m just like you, trying to get through this pandemic without getting anybody sick.
Heavy frost,
on a bright morning,
with a bad dog by my side.
jhs
Here is a recording I made this morning. It’s another reading from The Big Both Ways, I decided to read some of the IWW stuff to tie into what I read yesterday.
Dot was a total pain in the butt.
