Zen Strawberry

A lion in the house

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Tim and Marietha Woods in A lion in the houseI didn’t have any intention to watch Steven Bognar and Julia Reichert’s documentary A lion in the house that aired on PBS last Wednesday and Thursday. Who in their right mind would want to watch a documentary on very sick kids going through cancer treatment? Especially with no reassurance that, as it usually happens in TV, they will survive and get better.

And yet last Wednesday, flipping through channels, I could not resist going back time and time again to PBS. Even if it was painful to watch, there was something in that documentary that made it impossible for me to avoid.

For once, it was true life and therefore thoroughly engrossing. No fake reality TV, no boring celebrity stories, no stupid and wasteful challenges to win and competitors to eliminate. It was real people dealing with real life-and-death events and decisions. And differently from other TV shows, these events and decisions are relevant to my life and instructive.

It was also a necessary look at what we constantly try to escape but we want to know everything about: sickness, pain, death. In a seldom visited but always awake region of our mind, lies the awareness that at some point we will have to confront these less glamorous aspects of being alive; and yet we live in absolute denial. We have so many questions about death and they scare us, because death is so unknown and yet never talked about. How is it to get sick and die? How does it feel? How does it smell? And the unthinkable: what happens to our life when our child get very sick?

(Sometimes I think that the reason why people are so attracted to car accidents is not just sick curiosity. Perhaps it’s the fundamental need to get a glimpse of injury and death, because they are so close to us but so mysterious. We may meet them one day, and we won’t be prepared.)

As painful as it was to watch Bognar and Reichert’s documentary (at some point I was sobbing so loudly that I worried people in the next house would hear me and call the police), it was also surprisingly reassuring. To witness the stories of those children and their families was a step closer to admit that death is part of my life and that I might be able to get through it as I got through other difficult events. Stopping to think about death was nurturing, because to be reassured about death is such a profound and denied need. We feel so lonely in the face of death, because death is not part of our social experience. And yet, watching A lion in the house it became clear to me that dying in the presence of people who love you makes it sweet and almost bearable. Finally, it gave me permission to think that if kids can handle sickness and death with such dignity and grace, maybe I will be able to.

There were many surprises and lessons in A lion in the house. For example, the only thing those parents seemed to regret was continuing treatment even when it was clear that it was not helping (which suggests that losing dignity and suffering in vain is worst than just getting sick and dying). How the most heartbreaking stories were the ones of the older kids, not of the younger ones, because the awareness of death and sickness was more painful than just death and sickness. (Buddhism teaches us the difference between pain and suffering, but seeing it in real life is all another matter). How parents broke down not while they were dealing with their kids’ sickness and death but after it. Because when they were struggling for their kid they had hope and they were doing something, but afterwards they were just surviving.

Some of the medical staff at the Cincinnati Children Hospital were amazing. By the end of the documentary, I wanted to have Dr. Robert Arceci as my doctor, friend, father, and president of this country.

In the end, the lesson is that death is an inevitable and painful but natural physical event, even when it happens to children. As hard as it is to look at death in the face, it’s much less scary than pushing our fear of death away, and dealing with the dark unconscious panic that comes from constantly having to hide from her.

Flowers are not boring

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In the world of marketing and cool stuff we live in, people and things can become hugely popular in a moment and then be rapidly forgotten. We buy stuff, and then we buy more stuff, and almost everything we buy breaks fast to leave space to the new and improved, version 2.0, turbo model of the same crap. We work too much to earn money that we spend to buy more and more stuff (unless we don’t have enough for the essential things, in which case we work too much just to survive; but where is the boundary between essential and non-essential in a world where appearance and social acceptance are essential part of our success?).

ToweringWe live in a world of marketing impermanence.

Every spring, I look at the flowers and I am amazed. Every year they look the same but they are so beautiful, one can never get tired of them. They show up for a little while, then they disappear, leaving us craving for more, and every year they come back.

Flowers are perfect, short living, fragrant, elegantly dressed up in beautiful outfits (white, yellow, bright red, purple…). Probably everything we humans have learned about beauty we learned from them.

I love bulbs, because they are so loyal and independent; they hide most of the year, and then they catch us by surprise, appearing on their own where there was nothing. And they make us happy like a surprise visit of a dear friend.

Flowers are impermanent too, but in such a different way than a product that is cool one day and useless the next.

Yellow

So different, yet the same

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Today I ate my lunch outside. It was a warm, breezy spring day, one of these perfect days that we experience rarely in a year. The sky was blue, the trees full of white and pink flowers, the air felt and smelled sweet, and the breeze was just cold enough to make me appreciate the warmth of the sun.

It occurred to me that about 30 years ago I was having the same identical experience. I was in high school in Rome and that spring day I decided to eat lunch with a few friends in park. I was so much younger, I lived in a different city in a different country in a different continent. The world around me was different and I had different dreams and concerns. For all intents and purposes, I was a different person.

Yet the feeling of calm—as if time had suddenly slowed down and almost stopped—and awe at the beauty of that particular moment were the same. Perhaps there are feelings that don’t belong to us and cut through time and space, and are just there to be felt. Perhaps enlightenment is when we can quiet everything else inside us and outside of us and just be inside these unchanging experiences that are just there waiting for us to notice.

Evelyn Rodriguez on Art and Ambition

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Evelyn Rodriguez quotes Prabda Yoon, a writer from Bangkok who, among many things, led two drawing workshops for the victims of the Tsunami:

It would be difficult to find an ugly artwork by a child. That is probably because when a children make art, they don’t begin with an idea in their heads that what they are doing is making art.

Evelyn writes:

Perhaps ugliness springs from ambition (…) The quality of children’s art is that it defies all the annoying artistic ambitions held by most adults; the sorts of ambitions that turn art into making a career, or a self-serving, egotistical expression far removed from acts of creation inspired entirely by nature.

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Snowstorm in April

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After a few days of full warm and sunny spring, this morning we had a surprise snowstorm. Everybody in my office gathered around the window and watched incredulous the snow falling heavy, twirling in the strong wind. It didn’t last very long. But it reminded me how much power weather still has on us, even with all our air-conditioned glass buildings, excessive energy consumption, and unfounded feeling of control. Thankfully, Nature still has us.

Snowstorm in April