It can be a little disturbing to realize that not only does your cat have a preferred side of the bed to sleep on but that you move over so she can have it. MK and I were having a good night, she was out catching moths – which is one of her favourite things to do, and I was trying to work. Truth be told, I was absolutely exhausted and wanted to do nothing to sleep because it had been a long night. But once MK is out and it is moth season, forget.

 

I wound up arguing with her for an hour when she brought one in and I closed the door, thinking I could sneak off to sleep. She sits on the step and will cry. Just once and then look at me. I tell her “no” so then she will try to open the door herself. When she can’t, she will sit down, look at me and cry again.

Cry (No)

Cry (No – but now she gets up on her little carpeted pedestal so we are on the same level)

Cry (No)

Cry (No – I try turning my back to her. Now she comes over and sits by the bed, just out of reach and we repeat the same routine until finally – I give in, get up and let her out.

 

She has a three moth quota for some reason. She catches them, brings them into the house and lets them go. After the quota last night – she sprawled on the floor. I picked her up and put her in the bed with me (left side).

 

That is when she lay there and purred so incredibly loud and kept patting my face that I knew that something was up. So I asked her, and she patted my face and literally oozed over me to the right side, where she prefers to sleep. Also, preferably with me holding one foot.

 

I have been stunningly busy of late and going through a lot of things (good) which is why I haven’t been blogging much. So finely, I came to a decision about the blog the other day. I am taking an official two to three months off from either worrying about it or trying to post to it. The same goes for status updates etc and pretty much the only place I will be on is email and pinterest.

 

Why? The reason is very simple. I have a book and  I have been trying to get done for over a year now and they are not happening. Especially not with the addition of all the workshops and freelance stuff in my life right now. So….rebalance the energy for a little while.

So…rather than take August off this year, that should be when I am returning, with gifts in hand.

 

Enjoy the Spring!

 

c.2012  Cassandra Tribe. All Rights Reserved.

I think one of the most interesting things is the transition from having an understanding of something (through comprehending a theory or explanation) and that sudden shocking moment when you make the connection to how it works in real life. It is like the moment when you “get” that yes, if the bicycle moves than you do not fall over. Or, if you apply the brakes smoothly and lightly, you will stop without flipping over. It is a simple revelationsthat what someone has told you is truth.

 

I think that is probably the only way you can ever know if what someone tells you is really true. If what they told you matches what happens in reality, then they have spoken of reality – maybe not truth, that is maybe a more dense and complicated a thing to even discuss. But, you can begin to understand who is speaking from reality and who is talking from illusion/delusion from whether or not reality offers unsolicited evidence that proves what they told you.

 

One of the things I was mulling over this morning was the nature of conflict. How conflict is based in illusion/delusion of one or both parties and is very different from tension, which is reality based. From there my mind waltzed over to the thought about how the only constant in life is that everything changes. The desire for the unchanging is based in delusion and a denial of reality.

 

From there, my brain flung one end of her boa around her neck and stuck a rose between her teeth as the seductively trim figure of politics, culture and activism (wearing this seaon’s new design by society, le cape du dogma) pulled her into his arms and they began a dangerous tango. “Cheri,” he whispered in an awful, fake and undefinable accent, “You may always rely on corruption, power and politics to always be the same.”

 

And I thought, ahhhhhhhh there is the delusion. All this talk about how nothing has changed as far as the politics, culture, corruption and powers that influence everything is nothing but illusion. An illusion that makes any effort to create different outcomes far less effective than they could be. Because everything is approached as if it is the same moment in time and nothing is ever the same as how it has been. Yet we structure all of our funding and approaches, our bills and protests as if nothing about the system that maintains us has ever changed. And it has changed in its every aspect, not just the ones that we are comfortable (or that it is unavoidable) in recognizing.

 

If then (and while leaning backward in a dip my brain slipped off one feathered mule and clubbed her partner unconscious – ending the tango) then all of this conflict – the political discussions, the social discussions, the efforts to introduce changes to our societies and cultures is based in illusion and tries to fight an illusion with illusion and therefore – will accomplish nothing, except maintaining the delusion that nothing about power and influence changes.

 

Interesting.

 

Yesterday was a very powerful day for me. Not in an overwhelmingly comfortable way. I came face to face with a repeated situation that I had stepped away from dealing with and just hoped to avoid and now – it would appear it is time to deal with it. I am fortunate that now I have the meditation practice to help me with this and I got angry when someone I knew saw my mood and wanted to “bring me out of it.” I didn’t want to escape the mood, I wanted to do what I am supposed to do which is learn to sit in it and discover its fullness. I sat and faced the white wall. Thirty minutes later I was in a better place and had more control over my emotions. I was ready to face the kneesnappers who were already lurking and shouting “Don’t you want to play GO???” and trying to get around the person (so kindly) trying to keep them from rampaging onto the mat where I was sitting (40 feet away, wisely).

 

When I stood up, I realized with a shock, that I had been crying the whole time I had been meditating. I was not aware of that, but tears will still streaming down my face and I had to do a quick “oh whoops!” and scoot past the kneesnappers to clean up before charging into 3 hours of hyper play with them.

 

And then later…

 

Inadvertently…

 

I was exposed to my first instance of what has been described to me as “malevolent shenpa.” That is when someone who is in a position of influence allows their shenpa to force a meditation group into that person’s darkness.

 Shenpa, loosely translated, is the “hook” or what we do as habit or use as habit to allow us to escape reality and permit us to shut down emotionally. A shenpa holds some promise of “relief without suffering” and we bite at it like a fish and get hooked. Because we know the food is tasty, easy to come by and at first – works, we bite it each time we see it until we get so used to doing it we seek out the baited hook.

 

Malevolent shenpa is when someone defines an expectation of another as only being good if they are biting at the same hook as that person. If they are in a position of authority, it is easy to make acceptance of and participation in their personal shenpa  a requirement for being in the group. It becomes the perfect rationalization for the avoidance of facing yourself, by making everyone around you the same. If you say it is good and a bunch of people go “ok,” then the self-examination of whether or not your shenpa is causing you harm or, harm to others becomes unimportant to you.

 

By introducing their malevolent shenpa to the group as a definition, in a way, they introduce poison. The group, to remain a group, has to adopt the shenpa as their own on an individual basis and it can be psychologically and emotionally devastating.

 

There are good shenpas too. But meditation, yoga, spirituality, religion, prayer, fitness, health, whole foods – all of that is still a hook we use to escape the totality of being present because they are things outside of ourselves that we use to prove that we are good or bad or compassionate or suffering or whatever – rather than take the responsibilities of seeing and being those things, we have to put things around them to try and contain them – limiting our capacity for understanding and realizing their importance. Good shenpa can easily become malevolent, you see that a lot when someone becomes so single minded in their devotion to a practice they decree it is the only way for everyone or, that only they and its practitioners know the truth or have special insight. Shenpa has a lot of other names.

 

So I experienced malevolent shenpa last night. I thought it would be more spectacular, dramatic and obvious but it wasn’t. It was subtle but being aware of it, it highlighted how everything changed for the entire meeting. Afterward, a few of us were like “did what just happen, happen?” Because it is not what we are taught to expect of these things. Part of practicing is learning to spot teachers who teach from their shenpa rather than from their practice. Part of it is learning how to protect yourself from taking in that poison. And part of it is learning what to do after that has happened.

 

I have no idea.

 

But as the koan says,

“You have so much to do, why are you wasting your time on a question like that?”

 

c.2012. Cassandra Tribe. All Rights Reserved.

Today, I was sitting in a different café, having a bit of a snack (one of the downfalls of riding the bicycle I am in constant snack mode) before going on to my I-want-to-give-Buddha-the- finger-what-the-hell-is-going-on meditation training.

J

Suffice it to say, the past few weeks have been almost insufferable and I squarely blame my meditation practice for it. As it turns out, I was right. The blame for my unease and dis-ease lies in the meditation, which made my teacher laugh and laugh and congratulate me because at long last I have actually begun the practice. Which did kind of make me feel good. In an odd kind of way.

 

All of this is very strange. I was under the deep impression that meditation was all about release, peace, centering, calming your thoughts, letting go and ease. Apparently, I have stumbled into the school that is about another level of meditation – that of the warrior. But it resonates. And it also, as I learn and study more, is explaining to me why I have rejected so many forms of meditation before – they are not what I am apparently built for.  Also, because of the focus I am studying, while I can appreciate other forms, I don’t necessarily get along with them.

 

Which is just what it is. Neither here nor there. In the end, unless the form of meditation has become a form of maladaptive escape behavior in and of itself – we all wind up at the same point, fulfilling all the different roles along the way.

 

But anyway…back to my story. So the café I was in has a double bay door, it used to be a gas station. Because it was so warm and beautiful they had begun to open all the doors and windows. Oddly enough (and this has been a trend everywhere I have gone these past few days), the same song was playing over their speakers (conjure one’s center of the sun, if you haven’t heard it, find it). I happen to really love that song at the moment and it speaks to something growing within me.

 

So there I was, in the café, with my tidbits, with the door open and the heat of the sun creeping into the crevices. And I watched as all the little birds (who I bitched about mugging me for bread last year) were trying, as a group, to decide if they should enter the café. One by one, they would hop a little closer until one brave bird got up on the threshold and bounced around. Then they flew off spastically and circled and came back to repeat the process. Hop stop hop stop hop stop hop…..bounce bounce bounce and away.

It was the funniest thing.

 

And it reminded me of my walk home late last night. Here I was, going on my fourth day of just feeling brutally uncomfortable in my skin but also, giving off some clear signal to strangers and animals that I was an a-ok kinda person and come share. Not the former, “come tell me your tragedy” vibe I used to specialize in, but a very different – I just want to share space with you for a moment kind of beauty. I had slowly started to notice this happening – despite how I felt, this is how people were reacting to me, like I was some kind of source of joy for them.

 

And I had just decided that maybe…maybe…maybe a better judge of how I am doing and feeling is not what I am thinking but how everyone around me is reacting – from babies to birds to adults. Needless to say, I have also been hit on so many times in the past three days a friend has started to refer to me as “catnip.” It is a funny experience.

But there I was, late at night, walking home and thinking all these things when I saw a woman and her (extremely large) dog coming out of the darkness. The dog began to do a shimmy shake and start dragging the woman toward me from about half a block away. It wasn’t until they were about ten feet away that I recognized the dog. A puppy really, a six month old great dane that is big as a house that I met once, a few months ago for a few minutes on another street corner.

 

He practically shimmied up my body and into my pocket and we had a shameless love fest that somehow included me sticking my hands in his mouth repeatedly.

 

The whole time his owner just stood there repeating,

“I don’t understand this. He totally loves you.”

And right then I knew

Whatever space I thought I was in

Was just a thought,

And in reality,

I was somewhere I would much rather be.

I just have to learn to recognize

When I am there.

 

c.2012. Cassandra Tribe. All Rights Reserved.

I had a thought, last night before I went to bed, that I meant to write down because it was the subject of this morning’s blog. The thought, of course, was desperately important and illuminating. Therefore,

 

I have woken up today and cannot remember it at all. Or, it is more that I can remember it but it doesn’t seem to be quite as earth shaking as it seemed just past midnight.

 

Slowly I am learning that while it is a good thing to notice these “inspired” moments  that what comes from them pales in comparison to what comes out of the steady process of showing up. And on my walk to where I am going this morning, I was thinking about that in relation to writing.

 

It is easy to get out of the habit of showing up. I am not talking about showing up to the places or things that you have made a commitment to, that is a whole other discussion. I am talking about showing up for yourself. Funny how it is the first commitment we let slide and then spend more time scrambling to find a short cut back to rather than just doing what we know has to be done.

 

Like with writing. If you want to write, sit down and write. Even if it is only for ten minutes a day it will be of more use to you than waiting for one “inspired” moment and then writing madly for hours. Why? When you show up every day for yourself, because it is important and you do it whether you want to or not – you begin to not only value yourself and what is inside you, but you actually begin to learn what is there.

 

A lot of the time our inspirations are nothing more than reactions and do not even come close to representing who we really are.

 

Showing up.

 

The mad kitten shows up every second for her life. She would like me to show up every second for her life too and takes….umbrage (she is a cat of large and meaningful words) when I am there but not present. It is one of the lessons I am struggling to learn now. How to be wholly present in suh a way that does not exclude more pieces than it includes. This is harder than it sounds. Doable, but it will take much work.

 

Not only do I have to practice showing up but I have to practice knowing what I am feeling and then turning outward and finding it in what is around me so I can do what needs to be  done to make that kind of connection real – whether it be adjusting my actions because I recognize my own loneliness in someone else’s behavior or, seeing my own need for love and affection in the insistent tap-tap-tapping of the mad kitten on my leg. Or, seeing my own fear within and connecting to the fear in others. Not to fix it, not to share, but to be in common presence.

 

To be in common presence.

 

That is the action. It must begin within and then become focused on another in order to allow it to be extended to the universe.  For before we can love what can never be known or experienced fully in this mortal coil, we must have discovered what it means to bear the responsibility of unconditionally loving ourselves and become able to accept and love another even though the repercussions may affect our lives – we must learn to live within the lack of security that comes with loving someone. Many people try to skip that middle stage…well….the first one too, because they are deeply painful. To touch our love, we must discover our sorrow. And that sorrow is the root of all joy, for like the poetry form of the Ghazal, it is about a decision to remain with love even though the love may never be realized or safe or secure .

 

To be in common presence.

To show up.

To see the promise in sorrow.

To stop living in ignorance  of the self.

To bear the responsibility of your choices.

To accept what is and let go of what you want to be.

To always know that what is -  changes, and can become anything.

To be free of the past.

To be free of the future.

To be free to be fully present.

To do without boundary.

To do.

To be.

To live.

To breathe.

To love.

 

 

 

c.2012 Cassandra Tribe. All Rights Reserved.

I hit my wall of tired a few hours ago and have struggled with basic spelling to complete my deadlines today. I have one lingering overdue job but managed to catch up with the bigger one and stay more current with others. Part of the reason I am just so tired is how bad this allergy season is, I normally don’t have any but this is getting even to me. I cannot even imagine how people with constant seasonal allergies survive. The second issue is I have just been pushing myself through several barriers and not accepting the “usual excuses” I allow myself to get out of doing things. Some of the things are simple, some are more complex. But it has become exceedingly important to me to raise my self-discipline above the level it has been at for years.

 

I am very self-disciplined. I am highly self-motivated. I am a doer. I tend to be all three of those things but mostly when there is something I want to do

 

J

 

But it is easy for me to lose all of that if there is something about what is to be done that either does not captivate me, I have moved past or in some way touches on something that makes me uncomfortable. I am working my way through Pema Chodron’s book, “The Places that Scare You,” and it is downright illuminating. The thing is, if you just read the book and come to realizations it will not make one whit of difference in your life except to create a more complicated delusion about who you really are. You have to actively practice it. And I don’t mean (and neither does Pema) actively practice what she is talking about by deciding how you are comfortable doing it (a common failing when trying to use any kind of self-growth text – we decide what is the action) but by practicing sitting meditation. The kind without chants or music or anything else. Just to sit and learn to be compassionate towards yourself and to accept all the aspects of yourself without judgment and without designating them as “things I am working on.” And you have to be able to sit for longer than you would like to. I use a timer with two gongs, one at the beginning and one at the end. It is an mp3. Therefore I have no clock to look at, no deciding that “I am done,” the length of time I am sitting is what someone else told me to do. And it has been hard. And now it is getting easier.

 

But there is hard sense of humiliation and shame when we set out to do something and either fail to succeed or relapse in our efforts. The first few weeks I tried to sit for at least a half an hour I eventually wound up with a million excuses as to why I wouldn’t sit at all, then suffered all the next day from humiliation and shame.

 

And then, when I finally just sat and did it – I did it. Suddenly…the next day, whenever one of my small excuses would pop into my head I was like – “dude, I can sit for half an hour with my entire body screaming in pain and not blink an eye – I can write for ten more minutes no problem.”

 

My humiliation turned into a kind of right pride because I have shown myself what I can do if I do not give up or give in to myself.

 

Like being in Baduk (GO/Weiqi) school. For six weeks now I have been absolutely tortured and humiliated and wiped across the board and lost every game in spectacular ways but I refused to allow myself to give up and give in. Finally, during the last lecture of the beginner’s section, Master Lee said ”Now we go to Inter and for the first time you will begin to learn how to play. All of what you have been doing has not been playing, it has been about basic moves.”

Today, I did the first 5 lectures and then won 3 games in a row. Having won them I realized two things –

1.     I had right pride for not having given up or given in and to have stayed until I knew enough to begin to be taught.

2.     That until today, I have never played a single game of GO before.

Today I played for the first time and it is awe-inspiring to me. It also resulted in my being called a nerd in Italian on Pinterest for a picture of a board I posted but do you know what? That made me happy.

 

There was a quote I came across the other day but I cannot remember the exact words or who said it but it went something like this –

 

“If you believe that any part of you is something to be overcome or changed then you will never know love or be able to love or be able to be loved; only those who have learned to balance all the parts of themselves without rejecting any will be capable of that.”  

 

c.2012 Cassandra Tribe All Rights Reserved

This is ridiculous. It has been a very busy week and I finally get time to blog and am I writing? No, I am looking through image after image searching for the one white Ralph Rucci dress I saw once that is…sublime…in order to use it as the pin board picture for this post on Pinterest. I did not find it. If you saw it, you would know why it has remained in my memory. The picture I am using is his of his graphite grey Infanta dress. Beautiful, but not an object of divinity like that white dress is.

 

Pinterest is funny. It is returning to me my joy at just looking at things. Which is also funny when I think that today, in the last of the “Art of Memory” classes, I realized that I don’t really see anymore. No, I am not going blind and have excellent vision but…as one of the final exercises, I had the class write a letter about themselves to be given to their great (or great great) grandchildren so that they would know who they were. They were to use their bodies as the means for telling the future who had they had been. A woman wrote of her hands, that it was with their arthritis that she finally learned that to let go of a tight hold on what you love, let it live and become even more. A man wrote of how the first thing people always noticed about him was his skin, but how he discovered that was the least thing that they eventually remembered.

 

The last struck me. I had not noticed his skin until the second or third session of the workshop. He had been burned over 70% of his body and was scarred (as well as missing bits and pieces) and yet, somehow I missed this.

 

This is no statement of how wonderful a person I am, I am not. This is a statement about how I see.

 

Somehow, over the past six months or so, my vision has changed.

 

I could tell you everything about the nature of that man after having spent two hours talking at him in the first session and reading his first writing assignment. But I could not have described to you how his fingers are missing and body is covered with very visible scars. I could have told you how his body shifts as he hears something that challenges him or affirms him. How clear his eyes are. How open he is to the world around him and yet cautious. But that the underneath of his face is a patchwork – no.

 

I have taken to seeing what is beneath. More and more I rely on my hands to see.

 

It is an indulgence…a hedonistic and decadent luxury for me to reach out and touch something and feel every inch of it. I would not be able to tell you of its shape, but I would be able to tell you if it belongs.

 

I find that I am talking less. Listening more, not to the words but to the meaning as it is revealed in the tone and how the tone is echoed within the body as the body shifts its shape and changes the air.

 

I have people near me that I have to behave around with great effort because all I want to do is reach out and see them with the tips of my fingers. I want to lean into them and feel the strain of their breath against the confines of their body as they shape and change the space around them – first becoming larger and then pulling in.

 

I feel as if my eyes are looking elsewhere.

 

I notice the sky more. Light. Placement. Pattern. Movement and stillness.

 

It is interesting. It is…like sweet fruit and cool water. As if after years of traveling with only the barest of sustenance, I have found a banquet.

 

It is the oddest sensation of being blind and yet, finally beginning to see. And maybe, just maybe, I am beginning to understand that song just a little bit more.

 

And now I know how the City of Love ends and why there are two characters left that are unresolved. And the future begins to unfold in a blossom I cannot see, but I can feel how it reorders the universe to hold its shape – its temporary and blooming then fading and seeding for growth again shape.

 

c.2012 Cassandra Tribe. All Rights Reserved.

Today, I worshipped at the Church of the Silver Cycle in I don’t know how long. It was a short, but intense service and at the end, I napped for two hours (after eating just about everything in the house). The best part is that yesterday, after a year of dropping into one of the most expensive bicycle shops in the city to poke around their odds bin, I found toe clips that would work on my pedals. I have an older cycle and it has just been a chore to find pedals, clips or the time and dollars to change them out. There are places in the city that will do the work for free and provide the pedals etc., but their hours make them unavailable to me – but there, there in the bottom of the bin was a set marked down to $2. My kind of price.

 

But it was good to be back on the road again, even if it was 48 with a 15-40mph wind. I felt sweaty, cold, hot, hungry and happy. Now I just have to shift my schedule because being back on the bike frees up more time for me – which I am guarding viciously. My schedule is tight and full right now and any open time I am claiming for myself.

 

Saturday was madness with the kneesnappers. I don’t know if there was something in the air or what but everywhere I went, the under 12 set was acting like they had gotten a different set of rules for the day. Sunday was equally odd but good. It was, however, the throwing out of 6 large trash bags of “stuff” that made it amazing.

 

My Zen teacher has me going through my things and getting rid of everything that has nothing to do with the life I am living. In my head I thought I knew of the few things that involved. But the reality is that for someone who owns nothing to begin with, I am surrounded by of dead lives. Not even ghosts, but things that have been and are no more. Yet I have carried them, cared for them, made choices based upon their presence in my life, worried about their well-being and felt the weight of their demands in the resentments I have carried around deep in my soul.

 

The simple act of just throwing them out has proven to be uniquely freeing. I have far to go because you cannot throw out all that is no more as simply as you can a few material items that no longer have a place in your life. You have to learn how to live without them.

 

And that is a new place. A place without the familiarity and comfort of the past. And frankly, it is a place I am finding that I would rather be. The past was a wondrous mixture of things that I have learned from, but the past has no bearing on the present and future. It is like GO, the day after you play a game it no longer matters whether you won or lost the game yesterday – of what importance is that? All that matters is how you play today and today’s game will always be different from the one played before and the one played after. Even the things you learn while you play may not apply.

 

After all, just because you have learned something doesn’t mean it will ever be of any use to you. So why do we teach that we must always cling to what we have learned?

 

J

 

We are locked into thinking that all of our experiences are guiding influences. They are not. They are just a bunch of tools we have. Sometimes, our lives grow in ways in which we need a different set of tools then what we have used for years. Like changing from working on American cars to Foreign Cars, the measurements are different – the principles are similar, but how you use a tool and which tool can be used has to change or you will cause nothing but suffering in your life.

 

Now…I go on. It was an odd thing to have someone say to me that what I have been searching for these past 20 or so years has come to pass and to ask what it is that comes next. That is all. No fanfare. No “YAY! You Did It! You Should Be Proud Of Yourself!” Just a quiet – obviously you have found what you were looking for and what you were looking for has been a huge part of your identity. So what comes after the end?

 

What comes after the end?

 

Do you want to know something funny?

 

I didn’t even have to think to give her the answer.

 

 

c.2012. Cassandra Tribe. All Rights Reserved.

Today I woke up and looked out into the cave and thought, “What a mess.” I briefly flirted with the idea of getting up and cleaning but then (shiny) got distracted by the next thought. The Mad Kitten was trying to balance on the clothes piled up on the (broken) ergonomic chair so she could get up on the (folding) strange table I have that was slightly (completely) covered with crap. Instead, she took out the whole shebang and fell on top of her food dish.

 

Which she then had a snack from, as if that was her true intent all along. Then she came over and bit me.

 

And I thought, “If I cut the legs down on that table it would be the perfect height to play GO on.” So I did. With the Mad Kitten racing in and out and in and out of the house so happy that there was busyness going on and me madly cutting away (not noticing it was) over my bike helmet (which is now coated on the inside with fine sawdust). I will have fun when I ride and sweat.

 

When I was done, the table was indeed the perfect height and I dug through all the piles and gathered all of my bowls and boards and books and tucked them away neatly. A small island of a new beginning in the cave. Then I contacted a friend to find out if she knew of anyone interested in some things I plan on getting rid of.

 

Material objects are funny things. They are both necessary and unnecessary. In a perfect world, we would need none. But few of us live a monk’s life in which we are supported and cared for by others. Most of us have to contribute in at least some way to our living. The trick is to learn when the material things we need shift. I have things I have held onto as needful and devote time and worry to whether or not they are safe and cared for – when in reality, they stopped being necessary in my life several years ago. The new objects that are now necessary, have suffered because they have not had room to be in my small cave.

 

And the Mad Kitten, the original monk, who needs do nothing but live and sleep and snack and love and explore – shows me through her excitement that yes, more space is good. Because space itself is a needful thing. Not grand amounts, but enough to stand and stretch your arms or toss a meese to be chased. Enough to stretch out and lie down and listen for the Earth below.

 

Tonight, I buy more garbage bags and go through more things. Some I save because they will become new things. Some I will give away because they are necessary in someone else’s life, and some…some are just shiny things that once were bright and are no longer of use to anyone except those who cannot see.

 

c.2012. Cassandra Tribe. All Rights Reserved.

Well, now I can actually say it. I am caught up. Since I caught up, I have been absolutely exhausted and while the temptation is to take a few days to rest and eat and recover, that is a sure fire way to fall behind again. One simply has to keep on going and the recovery part comes as life remains calmer. I did take Tuesday to myself to nap and eat and enjoy just having no deadlines to meet. Now it is Wednesday and I am getting back into the loop.

 

It’s funny, as I keep moving forward (after several years of standing still) how smoothly things are joining together and how easy it is now to see what needs to be let go and what I should gather. The endless obsession with GO is now blending with the Zen. My zen teacher finally found what it is about the two that makes them a unique and powerful tool of change – they embody the philosophy of “not always so.” This, she says, is the core philosophy of life and the key to living.

 

I explain this to my kneesnappers using the GO board, only instead of the black and white stones (yin and yang), I use red and clear stones – I tell them that, “Today, we will play with fire and ice.”

Then I ask them a few questions, illustrating the questions with the stones on the board. First, I put down one red stone and begin to surround it with clear ones while I ask, “If you through ice onto a fire, what will it do?”

And the kneesnappers answer, “Melt and put out the fire.”

“So, ice is stronger than fire?”

“Yes.”

And I change the board and put one clear stone down, then begin to surround it with red ones. “If the ice is set on fire, what will happen?”

“The ice will melt and the heat from the fire will make it evaporate.”

“So, fire is stronger than ice?”

And they pause…

 

I have said it before and I will say it again. The only constant in life, the only truth – is change. What is the only way of doing things – is not always so. What never works – is not always so. What will cause a specific effect – is not always so. That an effect does not always have the same cause  - is not always so. That life is difficult – is not always so. That life is wonderful – is not always so. That we are deeply in love with someone – is not always so. That we sometimes feel less love for someone – is not always so. That something threatens or frightens us – is not always so. That something gives us comfort – is not always so.

 

If nothing is always so, then what is? Simply, your ability to change and respond. But that is not always so.

 

We become open hearted, we lose our need for judgment, our expectations that lead to disappointment and pain, we lose our bias when we realize – we are not always so.

 

The kneesnappers get this easily. That what is one moment, is not the next and can be again soon but not necessarily so. Adults have a harder time with it. They can conceptualize it but have a hard time internalizing it – living the principle. Go (baduk, weiqi) allows us to explore how what we know – is not always so.

 

My charge from my teacher is to rid my life of the things I have kept out of belief that they are always so.

 

c.2012. Cassandra Tribe. All Rights Reserved.

If you have been reading my blog for a few years then you know that I am really big on patience as one of the virtues. You also know that I view it as the one virtue that requires the most active practice and devotion of them all. Patience is all too often confused with passivity. When you are “in patience” you will be busier than ever and strained for time and sleep. Because patience is one of the cornerstones on which faith is built, it is the choice to become prepared without the promise of opportunity. To pursue learning and skill without knowledge of reward or an end point. It is the only thing that will allow us to take meaningless coincidence and turn it into a window of opportunity.

 

Things don’t happen for a reason. Things just happen. We are the one who give what happens meaning and reason. It is why two people could be in the same car and get into an accident and for one, it becomes a life changing event and for the other – just something else to get through. It is not because the first person was singled out by fate, destiny or kismet and given the accident to cause change but rather that the person has chosen to be in patience so that when something happened that presented the opportunity to be able to act on a path of destiny – they recognized it and could do something about it.

 

It has been an odd morning of meaningless coincidences that became opportunities for me to move in the direction of a destiny because I recognized (from what I have learned while practicing patience) what they could become. The first was simple. I have been so stretched thin by deadlines that I have barely been active for the past three weeks and physically just feel yucko. I keep thinking, “as soon as I am caught up I can get back to being physically active, “ and it just is not happening.  But this morning, I did make sure I did at least a minimal amount of situps and popups and felt just a tiny bit better. But of course, I had to leave to catch my bus to my Sunday appointment. On the way there I ran into someone I have not seen in months and chatted. Briefly. Now I was going to risk missing my bus. If I miss the bus, the next one will put me where I need to be yes, but will mess with the way I can use my time to keep moving on the deadlines. I started walking fast thinking I wish I could just run when it ocurred me I could. Backpack and all. I knew how to do what is called a double time march, which is a military thing that allows you to almost jog with full gear. It is a very economical form of movement and so that is what I did. As I was double timing through the city I realized that although my time is so tight right now that I can’t go for my morning jog, I do walk everywhere and I can double time it until things calm down and I can jog again. Suddenly, I have found a way not to lose out on being physically active, get all the benefits from it and now make  myself feel guilty or under pressure to make time for it.

 

On the bus I sat with a man and we began to talk. As we talked we discovered that we have several things in common, namely our interest and commitment to the issue of homelessness and the working poor. As the conversation began to unveil, it turns out I was sitting next to the director of an extremely innovative soup kitchen and pantry and that they were putting together a special program that everything I do with GO would fit into so well. I just got a matching fund grant for the GO academy and have been thinking/dreaming for weeks about how to bring this to kids who are homeless (and adults to) and designing a portable program. Most people around me have thought I was nuts. But….Voila!

Now we begin to make it real.

What you do or do not do when you are in a position of not being able to move forward defines whether or not your expression of patience is a virtue. The virtue of patience is demanding because you must be willing to work hard and work fast and do so without promise of reward or even the suggestion of an idea that you are learning/doing something that will be helpful.

Patience is the choice to continue to live and be when everything else around you is too confused to let you define your path.

Opportunity is when something random happens that you are prepared to act on to choose a movement down a path. You are prepared because you have practiced the art of patience.

 

c.2012 Cassandra Tribe. All Rights Reserved.

I left so early this morning to get to the café and get even more caught up with my overdue work that it was still dark out. And cold. It has been beautiful and 60 for the past few days so the one morning it is actually the appropriate temperature for March it just felt brutally cold. But, I was driven on by the knowledge that what has to get done has to get done. So here I have been since 6. I left last night at 9.

On the walk down, in the cold and fog, I saw all these animals about. Two birds were fighting. At first I thought maybe it was a spring mating dance but no, they were fighting. Two male robins. Then I saw several cats crossing the street, on their way home to warm houses, bearing gifts in their mouths of other small animals. It made me think of Sunday. Every Sunday I go do something somewhere else in the state and as I walk the 2 miles into the place, there is a Peregrine that haunts the trees.

I had a hot date the other night.

Shall I tell you about it?

It came after I did what is my newest habit, being part of a zen sitting meditation group. I am the backup leader and I also provide the breathing lesson before and the zen teaching after. The joke is that I am not a zen master but I have one I see each week. She is wonderful and is training me as to what to bring to the group each week. We have talked about all the different styles of zen and of the need to be cautious with zen teachers. Zen, in the wrong minds, can be very hurtful. I am fortunate that I am listening to my intuition more and more and choosing to avoid certain groups and teachers – just because.

Anyway…after all of that, I stayed behind in the dojo to meet my date while the rest of the group went out for drinks, appetizers and bonding. I was nervous. I didn’t think they would show. We had made the date the previous Saturday and here it was Wednesday and they were not there.

And then the door opened.

And there she was.

Sensei’s mother. All 67 years of her, smiling, taking off her shoes and apologizing for being late but you see, today was the one year anniversary of her mother’s death and she had wanted to wander. She wandered all day and then looked at her watch and realized that she didn’t have her sword with her so she had to go home and  get it.

She is a swordsmen. And the sword…unbelievably beautiful.

We had made a date to practice our disciplines together.

We turned out all the lights. Lit some incense and divided up the dojo. I took the upper ¼, by the plate glass windows looking out over the street where the heavy bag was. She took the rest, all 40 x100 feet of the white padded room. And we started.

I used to box. I used to have my pro license. But boxing is a sport of youth and I have lost my anger which is what made me so formidable way back when. But I love the absolute harmony of body, mind and rhythm. I work the bag in 10 and twenty minute rounds. It is silent except for the steady punching of the bag.

She is behind me doing kata. The sword is sheathed and at her side. She is quiet. Moving so slowly sometimes it is hard to tell she moves at all.

Then suddenly…

The whistle of the sword through the air, so suddenly unsheathed and loosed.

I turn, but she is in seiza again, quiet, still and the sword is sheathed and by her side.

So the night continues, we supported each other in our practices just by being present in silence, in darkness. After, we sat seiza in the center and talked for an hour about all the minute details of our disciplines and told stories about how we learned.

We are going to continue dating.

Maybe two or three times a week.

It is that serious.

 

 

c.2012 Cassandra Tribe. All Rights Reserved.

In all the madness of my life these past few weeks, I have not failed to notice and pay attention to the continued madness of the world. There has to be a rhythm to how you connect to what is going on or you can risk becoming strident, narrow-minded and ineffectual. I see it a lot with people who dedicate their lives to one specific cause. Their very narrowed focus does allow them to do great things but sometimes, at a great loss as to what could be done.

The whole Kony controversy is an example of this. There is a lot of criticism about the campaign because of its narrow and oversimplified focus and its use of the traditional appeal to the idea of the civilized having to rescue the uncivilized. The BBC and many other agencies have published some very in depth reports on the good the campaign is doing, the bad it is creating, and the discrimination it is promoting. You see, nothing in life is one thing or the other – or even one thing over another. In everything there is a bit of the tragic and the joy, the good and the bad, the healthy and unhealthy. It is when you cease to see that because of a narrowed focus that you begin to lose ground in creating change. Especially if your focus has narrowed to the point that only one thing has become important and you cannot see how all things connect and feed off each other.

In my current workshop, Writing Your Self into Life, we are working on the development of heroes and villains as characters. It is funny to see all my writers start to “get” that every hero is a villain and vice versa. That heroic deeds can be villainous, and villainy the only saving grace sometimes. It is learning that they co-exist  that allows a character (and person) to become fully alive. The acceptance is about their simultaneous existence, the character comes in in exerting the choice between the two. Some people stop at the acceptance and never exercise choice. Choice can be frightening because it means you are letting something go.

In China, there is a ragingly popular new interview show called “Interviews before execution.” The show interviews prisoners before they die, they have limited themselves only to those convicted of violent murders. The most popular episode featured Bao Ronting, who brutally murdered his mother. For many people in China, watching Bao’s interview was their first exposure to an openly gay man. Ding Yu is the reported performing the interviews. She has said that part of the reason they do the show is because these prisoners have something to say and what they say underscores the value of human life. Bao asked her two questions during his interview that deeply affected her. The first was when he asked, “Do you feel awkward speaking to me?” She had never been near an openly gay man before and it floored her that he was so aware of how she must be feeling and was so gentle about it. She did feel awkward.

Then Bao asked, “Do you think I will go to Heaven?”

And Ding said, “At that moment I realized that I had witnessed the transition between life and death in another human being.”

China’s execution policies are changing. There are less capital offensive and more state judges speaking out against it. And this show, as strange and opportunistic as it may seem, is putting a face back on the execution. It is revealing that in execution too, a life is taken violently. A life that still has something to give.

Then you pull back and find something to let yourself escape for a moment the knowledge of the horrors we do – Homs, the Afghan massacre, the building collapses, floods and other tragedies. You have to or your vision will narrow and you will forget the world and all the life within it. No matter how much good you do in one tiny area of life, it is not nearly as effective as it could be if it is done without being able to coexist with everything else in the world.

 

c.2012 Cassandra Tribe. All Rights Reserved.

I am starting to really enjoy my Saturdays with the kneesnappers. It has taken me a few weeks to settle down and relax and for the kids to get used to me. One boy came up and said, “Will you play with me?” And when I said, “Yes.” He hugged me and laid his head against my chest for a moment. And I am coming to appreciate the ones who are hyper and spastic, the ones with no interest but who want to show me tricks and stunts, and the ones who come running in and say “I practiced what you told me all week.”

 

One of my tasks this week was to keep an eye on when I chose to be water. The teaching goes like this, you are like a pile of ice cubes in a round glass jar. The glass jar is your of life. When the ice cubes are piled in there, they can keep their shape because the cold increases, but there are gaps and spaces because the glass jar is round. It is in these gaps and spaces that things that shouldn’t be with water, even when it is ice, can begin to take hold. And these things may be enough to make the ice melt. So the choice, is to melt and become water and to fill all the space in your life. The task – pay attention to my week and spot when I chose to stay ice and when I chose to be water.

 

I have become water with the kneesnappers.

 

c.2012 Cassandra Tribe. All Rights Reserved.

I know I keep saying this but I am slowly seeing the light at the end of the tunnel and soon! Soon! Soon! I will be back on top of things. But, it has been an amazing revelation of self-discipline to have paced myself the way I have been and keep going to get everything done.

On my in-between of living in the café, writing madly, sporadically having people drop in for conversation, consultations, meetings and chance encounters  - I am also teaching two writing workshops and GO, plus helping run a Zen meditation group. It is the GO, the Zen and the conversations that are making this all possible. And I find that what I am learning from their combined and continued presence in my life is illuminating dark corners like someone lit a string of fire crackers and threw them into an attack.

One friend came to meet me, who I have not had a chance to sit and talk with in almost a year, and she arrived on a beautiful day in the middle of the week with her new dog, Mona. The minute you see Mona, you want to touch her. She exudes sweetness, is a smaller –mid-sized dog with white fur and a darkened circle around one eye. She is some kind of Australian sheep dog, but, as my friend pointed out, those dogs are all mixed breed anywhere so I just introduce her as Australian.

Mona is from Tennessee, from a shelter. She was not abused but had a litter of puppies and abandoned. The shelter placed her with a foster home to get her ready for adoption and put her picture and profile up on what can only be the largest doggie dating service in the US – Pet Finder. My friend and her husband had lost their dog of 20 years 8 months ago and were feeling the need for another living presence in the house. They saw Mona and fell in love. Two months later, much paperwork and several home visits by Pet Finder volunteer – they were approved and they paid Mona’s transportation fee from Tennessee to Rhode Island.

Now…it turns out there is something called the Petabago that leaves about once a month from Arkansas and travels all through the south, collecting dogs from foster homes and shelters who have been adopted by people in the North East. It is a Winnebago type RV that has been gutted and kitted out with pet carriers and someone, someone with a lot of love and patience I imagine, drives this Petabago full of dogs and cats for weeks delivering them to their new homes.

My friends got the call at 10pm one night. “Come meet us in the parking lot of the Cranston Mall.” They went, and there in the empty parking lot was the Petabago under sodium light. They gave the driver the papers and the driver gave them Mona. She is almost 2 years old. Happy, sweet and falls apart still when my friend walks away for even a moment.

Last night, I started teaching the first “Art of Memory” workshop in Providence. As always, there was a reason that all of us came together. And this workshop I know will be life changing for me. When the woman asked, “What was it that was inside us that allowed us to do what we did and to survive what happened?” I thought of GO.

And I told her that the question is not so much what was inside of you, but what happened that opened that door that let that part of you finally come out and live? In GO they say don’t look at what you did to win, look at what your opponent did wrong that allowed you to make that move.

Find out what the opportunity was that arrived that you had never had before, and then go backwards and remember. Remember and see how your life has been affected by such a beautiful part of your self seeking to come out into the world and only finding these closed and locked doors. It will make you start to think of your past differently. It will allow you to look in the present and future for what paths lay with open doors so that all of you may come out and live.

And you will become able to get through anything. You will be able to survive.

 

c.2012. Cassandra Tribe. All Rights Reserved.

I find it rather amusing that as I begin to go into motion again, the blog is shifting and it is returning to its center, where it was just about 3 years ago. The center is where I do more posting of a shorter variety and less of the long, feature article length posts. It is a reflection of the return of motion to my life. Shorter posts, more often and the longer feature-length pieces are off finding their well-paid homes. It is good to see that shift happening again.

I got an emergency project from a client to fix what another writer had created. 100 articles (it was a content job) that can only be described as …perky. My job is to fix perky and return it to professional. Not that you cannot be cheerful and professional, but I swear, I think this writer is descended from the Care bears.

I also had my first experience with understanding a Zen Koan. I have been asked one before but I already understood it, but this one I have been obsessed with. It’s the one I keep posting about “If there are no words and there is no silence, how do you know what truth is?” And the master’s reply, “I remember sitting in a meadow and two butterflies were flying over the field.”

A – I just love the language of it. But, I knew that I totally was not “getting it.” I had an understanding of it based in memory and presence but had this feeling that totally was not it. So, I did what I was told to do. Meditate on it; contemplate it in all my actions. Meditate and focus on my breathing and forget about it. Then think about it some more while walking.

This morning, I sat down to become the mad kitten’s Ferris wheel (also known as assuming the lotus position) and before I even started, understanding flew into my head and I ‘got it.” It is not at all what I was thinking before and then, I found the discipline to forget it and meditate. To let it go and come back to the understanding when I was done with zazen. Zazen in the morning, Zazen in the night. I am up to 25 minutes. Now, I have been told that I must find where my limit is and choose to go farther.

And here I sit, still racing to catch up with work and looking towards a gloriously busy day of work, GO and 4 meetings with people I have not seen in ages.

 

c.2012. Cassandra Tribe. All Rights Reserved.

 

A monk asked Fuketsu: `Without speaking, without silence, how can you express the truth?'

Fuketsu observed: `I always remember spring-time in southern China. The birds were singing among innumerable kinds of fragrant flowers.' (The Gateless Gate)

 ----

The most interesting autobiographies do not necessarily come from the most dramatic lives. What make good autobiography is the reader’s growing awareness of who the person is and how they came to make their choices in life. Writing your life story can be an amazing way to open a door between you and your kids/grandkids, to pass on a part of the family history or to explore and find healing within.

As we gain in experience and emotionally maturity, how we remember the events in our lives evolves. The nature of forgiveness is said to have its roots in our ability to remember from our present. In this workshop you will not only learn how to approach and organize writing a memoir, but you will explore what memory is and how it creates change in how we make our choices and transforms what is within us. You will also learn different techniques and habits that can increase your ability to mindfully experience the fullness of your memory.

Who you are, why you made the choices you did, why your hopes and dreams are what they are - is more important than the events that occurred. With every step forward in your growth, you will see the past differently. This is why learning to write your memoir is a way of transcending your history and revealing who you have become. It creates a unique record of your life that is not only a document of your existence to leave to your children and grandchildren, but one of the greatest gifts you can give to yourself.  

 

Cassandra Tribe is considered one of the top 100 performance poets of the century. She is a professional freelance writer and her work has been featured in Senior Living Magazine, Living Well with Montel, The Journal of Modern Living, Epicurious and New World Hope among others. She is a long time vigil and Reiki volunteer with Hospice and is nationally certified in Alzheimer’s care. She holds certifications and degrees in sociology, social work, aging, thanatology, philosophy, divinity, economics, fine arts and pastoral care.

Cassandra's The Art of Memory class is being at Learning Connection for 5 weeks starting Friday March 9th from 7:00 pm -9:00 pm. Click here to learn more, get $5 off the workshop fee and register.

 

c.2012 Cassandra Tribe All Rights Reserved.

This has been a hellaciously busy week. I have been racing to keep up with deadlines and stay on schedule, which is a wonderful thing. Two months ago I was struggling to find projects to even have a deadline, now I am turning down work. It makes me think that perhaps there is economic recovery going on. Although I will admit that little of my work is coming from US based companies. I have found, a business person and freelance writer, that the best way to survive is to not limit yourself to work from one country. I made the mistake a few years ago of getting lax and coming to rely on one country for work and paid the price.  Now I am done with that suffering.

And the thing that has been helping get through the 18 hour days has been the morning and evening meditation I have begun to do again. Nothing else needs to happen in the day except those two sessions and then everything else can happen. It is remarkable the difference it can make in your life.

But I wonder if other people who meditate on a regular basis run into the same issues I have, namely, the Mad Kitten. She can be all in her own world but when I set myself up, it is like an invitation to love. First, she parades over me as I sit there. Mind you, she could go around but it is her choice to climb up and over me on her way to get a snack.

Then she will start to climb up and sniff my face before setting against the curve of my legs, stretched from knee to knee and resting. You have to picture that I am sitting in front of the small space heater, not on purpose, that is just how the space works. So when she is tucked up against me, she is in front of the space heater too. I think it is our version of a hearth and roaring fire.

The peacefulness of this last about two minutes before she decides it will be much more entertaining to turn over and latch onto my foot or leg, all teeth and claws, and kick and chew. Now, I have tried staying in position and taking this as an exercise in discipline but eventually I cave. She wants attention. She wants love. She knows I am very relaxed when I am sitting like that and I think, “What cost is it to me to give her love while I count my breaths and focus on being present?” No cost. No cost at all.

I have a backlog of very serious and complicated blogs to produce but they are just going to sit there while I chitterchat about MK and pass along quotes and get to the point where I am not only caught up with my work, but exactly where I should be to return my life to normal.

 If You Love, Love Openly

Twenty monks and one nun, who was named Eshun, were practicing meditation with a certain Zen master.

Eshun was very pretty even though her head was shaved and her dress plain. Several monks secretly fell in love with her. One of them wrote her a love letter, insisting upon a private meeting.

Eshun did not reply. The following day the master gave a lecture to the group, and when it was over, Eshun arose. Addressing the one who had written to her, she said: "If you really love me so much, come and embrace me now." (Zen Koan)

c.2012 Cassandra Tribe. All Rights Reserved

I have so much to do in the next three days that I am just sort of breathing deeply and evenly and getting it done. I have project deadlines, am spending all day at a memorial event leading guided meditation and doing Reiki, and one of my workshops starts tonight. I am working on a blog concerning the Republicans and Women but it will have to wait until the end of the week. In the meantime…I will babble.

 

This weekend I managed to do something that while I understand what happened, I have no idea how I did it. I went on Saturday to go run the GO academy and played about six games. There are players of all skills there and it becomes like a teaching train. I teach someone less skilled than me and in turn, get taught by someone more skilled. It is a nice balance.

 

During one of the games, one of the higher players was explaining the concept of the wall to me and he would demonstrate the pressure and force of the wall on the board by drawing his hand along the straight lines of the grid towards the opposite side. I understood what he was saying and could see how to do it, but something was bugging me. In a manner of speaking it seemed like a limited way to understand the game - - all walls and straight lines, but it is an excellent tactic.

 

I went home and started reading that book that I quoted yesterday and a light bulb went off in my head. I pulled up the messages I have been swapping between myself and a professional player in Japan and finally got what she was saying. Its been hard, her English is bad, my Japanese is non-existant and her understanding of the game is so far above mine that what to her is a simple concept to me requires a PhD to understand. I reread the messages and understood as far as I can right now.

 

I logged on to Fly or Die, a live Internet GO site, and waited to be challenged.  Sure enough, I was challenged by someone with a rank 3 times my own. We started to play and when I say I won twice in a row I mean I one twice. I won as both black and white (white is normally the weaker side and given a handicap), in under 5 minutes for each game (we were playing a 9x9 board) and I won each game by 44+ points. The guy was horrified. Someone of my rank should not have been able to do that, maybe give him a few moments of challenging play but not to do that in that manner twice in a row.

 

What did I do?

 

I turned my walls into the wind. I played the wind and the wind does not move on polite straight lines. It was a beautiful thing for me to watch happen, all the while knowing that it was intuitive play and it may take me months to come to understand how it worked. I get the concept – GO Is also a living example of the seasons roaming over the Earth. But I do not really recall what I did to make it happen or what mistake he made to allow me to do it.  Now I get what my new friend in Tokyo was trying to say, that “When GO was played by everyone, it was everything.”

 

So much to learn. It is a nice thing to have around and take breaks with throughout the day.

 

Now, onto my piles and piles of work.

 

c.2012. Cassandra Tribe. All Rights Reserved.

I run a meetup group called “Healing Grace” for alternative and complimentary practitioners and I was asked why I had posted, as a recurring event, the Saturday GO academy I help run. “What does this have to do with healing?” I believe was the question. And at first it does seem strange, people are so used to thinking of GO as a martial strategy game that what gets lost is the origination of the game and its interplay with the healing and meditative arts.

 

Here is the post I wrote, much of the information is adapted from the introduction to Peter Shotwell’s book, “GO! More than a Game.”

 

“What does GO have to do with a healing group?

Everything.

GO is surmised to have come into being during c.2000-1400 BC in China, it was seen as a living example of the earth-oriented feng shui and acupuncture theories that developed in that period. The play of stones was seen as collecting and blocking the forces of ch’I energy as they coursed over the earth shaped, square board.

 

As GO developed through history it also assumed the interpretation as an example of nature – the board a reflection of the heavens, with the stones as the sun, the moon and the stars, while the play of the game represented the rhythmic changes of the seasons. GO was later seen as a means of examining and manipulating the balances and imbalances of the ever changing Tao, and the primal Yin-Yang energies.

 

By 600-1200 AD, playing GO was seen as a virtue and a reflection of the greater powers of the universe. It became more than simply a lesson in the Way of the Tao, the game for Confucians became an expression of the One and for the Buddhists, a method to lift the ”Twenty-seven Veils of Ignorance” that prevented mankind from learning the Truth – on the board and in life.

For the Japanese, GO is a form of art and contemplation. One Japanese Noh poet wrote the following about the game:

 

When playing GO, resentments clear away

Thoughts become like the moon arising at night

 

There, on the beach of endless

Births and deaths

The GO stones become uncountable grains of sand

 

Even though the players struggle, their hearts

Remain gentle

In placing their stones down, their hands reveal benevolence

 

And as the pieces strike the board

The mantra Aum reverberates

 

Before their eyes rise boundaries of life

And death

And the pattern of Nirvana itself

 

The white and black stones become the colors of

Day and night

The star-points become the nine lights of heaven

 

The three hundred and sixty intersections

Render the numbers of the days of the year”

 

 

 

 

Kudokushi means “the lonely death.” It is a Japanese term for when people die alone or unnoticed. If you have been keeping up with the news you know that there has been an increase in kudokushi over the past few years in Japan. A husband, wife and son were found dead together, most likely from starvation, several months after they had last been seen. Two sisters froze to death in their apartment and were not noticed missing for weeks. I would include the bit about Japan’s oldest man actually having been dead for 30 years but that would appear to have been more because of a family scam then kudokushi.

 

The family that died had run out of money and food. They had asked their neighbors for assistance but been turned down and told to apply for welfare instead. Welfare, in Japan, is something that is seen as beyond the last resort because of the stigma and shame associated with it. People would rather starve to death then become known for being on the rolls. And the whole thing is shocking when you consider the culture of Japan towards its elders. Somehow, people have begun not to notice each other.

 

But it is not just in Japan that there has been this shift away from community and more towards isolation. Not to mention, the act of going on welfare or assistance, besides being socially unacceptable and shameful, is such a brutal and dehumanizing process that yes – people would rather starve,  for the most part, then take on something that strips them of all hope and humanity.

 

That is a fundamental flaw not just in our social perceptions of need but also in our culture of providing help (and now I am speaking about the US). Our system…no…our industry of help is a very sick puppy. While yes, it is trying to provide for a very large population it has grown to devalue the person and to make it virtually impossible for someone to get off the assistance. There are serious penalties for trying to go beyond.

 

A large part of this stems from the originations of our social work system. Jane Adams and Elizabeth Blackwell are generally credited with beginning the system. But, like Margaret Sangar, who is known as one of the earliest advocates of contraception, their ideas of helping, while based in compassion, were guided by their strong beliefs in Eugenics. Eugenics is the belief that only the best should be allowed to breed. Every time you hear the phrase “master race” is has to do with Eugenics. It is the idea that there are those who are the future and those who should only be the beasts of burden of the present.

 

What they started has grown into an unwieldy system that does not help people to get out of poverty, but instead sustains and maintains them at that level. Even the vaunted “welfare-to-work” program was so ill thought out that the majority of participants wound right back up on welfare after a year or so of being off because their life was unsustainable. We have this illusion that giving someone an opportunity is enough for them to break free of the grinding wheels of poverty. We have an illusion that certain sectors of society have developed a culture of poverty, when in fact, they haven’t, it is the rest of society that has developed the culture of keeping that group in poverty.

 

After all, what would the world look like if everyone could eat and feel secure?

 

The rise of governance by group (and I don’t care if it is a democracy, Marxist or socialist group) has resulted in the destruction of community the world over. There is not one political system that has come into being that has done anything to reinforce community. When you have a strong community, they feel a responsibility towards taking care of their members. People do not go missing. People do not beg and get passed by.

 

The only model I have seen that is even remotely functional is that of the intentional community and I am not talking about communes. More and more intentional communities are building, one of the strongest is the online community of computer programmers. They take care of their own. They are able to move effectively against a governing body if their community welfare is threatened, they feel a responsibility towards each other and are not so isolated that they do not participate with people outside their community. There are other ones rising. More and more you will find intentional communities of doctors, lawyers, artisans and food growers who get together and decide that their services should be affordable to the community at large and they go against the grain of profit. It’s not socialism, they still get paid and still make a profit, but they have opted to cap that profit to retain community accessibility.

 

I forget which economist it was who, back in the 40s suggested that unless we had a ratio cap on wealth and profit, America would eventually be ripped apart by class and income differences. He proposed a ratio of 3 to 1, I believe. No one could be paid more than 3 times what the least member of society earned (and that included compensations, bonuses etc). He said that unless we codified this ratio the captains of industry would lose their sense of responsibility for the community and their recognition of the role community plays in making them successful. If they would like to earn obscene and unnecessary amounts of money well, then they have to invest in making sure the least keeps pace.

 

It’s an interesting idea. One, however, that flies in the face of the kind of culture of “l am better than you” that we have evolved.

 

I think I have digressed. It was a hellofa busy week, but a good one. Now, I have a weekend of no work, just a little volunteering, a lot of reading and a lot of fooling around with MK. MK who has just discovered the joys of being made into the bed. Who knows where her logic comes from?

 

c.2012 Cassandra Tribe. All Rights Reserved.

All hail the Baroness Veronica Amos, UN Under-secretary General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator Incumbent, who stands to travel to Syria to negotiate a safety corridor/daily cease fire for delivering aid. Depending, of course, on whether or not Damascus replies to the letter the UN sent inviting her to the party.

 

Earlier today pundits were kicking around the idea that sending Kofi Annan would be the wise route for a special envoy. Neither Annan nor Amos have pristine reputations but each has strengths that would make them a viable choice for this mission. That is the funny thing about politics, especially on a global level; nobody can wear white to the wedding without telling a big fat lie. Annan is notorious for his coddling of dictators and tyrants and being the head of the UN during one of the most scandal-ridden periods in its history. The Baroness is considered by many to be one of the most corrupt British peers around and has never faced an electorate but risen to power based on internal appointments.

 

Annan was part of a team that received a Nobel peace prize for their work on the Global AIDS and Health Fund. The Baroness has received numerous awards and accolades for her work in South Africa and other countries on humanitarian missions. Which one is worse?

 

Neither. But it looks like they are both going to get involved in the Syrian crises but in two very different capacities.

 

Annan, was named the UN-Arab League envoy to Syria, will be working to resolve the crisis. The Baroness will be going in the capacity of securing a corridor for humanitarian aid. If you haven’t heard her interview on the BBC, she does an excellent job of defining what the difference between someone who is envoy to stop human rights violations and the envoy out on a humanitarian issue. The difference, she explains, is that the first envoy has a list of who is right and who is wrong, there are people you do not deal with but may have to negotiate with; the latter envoy, the one on the humanitarian mission, has no right to distinguish between anyone and must talk with all sides – even those that may have perpetrated the worst atrocities because politics are not allowed to enter.

 

She also goes on to explain the different options. To create a humanitarian safety corridor would require it to be policed by the UN and introduce an outside military presence in Syria. To get all sides to agree to a 2-hour cease-fire each day that will create a safety corridor – requires no military presence.

 

The thing about politics and diplomacy, as I said earlier, is that no one can wear white. Allegiances and situations are too complex to be adjudged as right or wrong. It is hoped, in her capacity as the Secretary General of Humanitarian Affairs that the Baroness is indeed free of allegiance to anyone – but that is not a realistic expectation. As a Labour Peer, when her time at the UN is done she will return to Britain’s governance. Annan is perhaps, building a career for himself as a crisis envoy – in the end, his allegiance is to himself.

 

Which is better? Again, neither. But having an awareness of both of their potential failings and bias is what will allow their actions to be guided towards a larger result.

 

It is, however, hopeful that the effort of intervention in the crisis is coming from the two-pronged approach of intervention and humanitarian aid. The ICRC has been all but crying for help in the humanitarian arena and perhaps, the Baroness with her known allegiances, will carry the weight to arrive at an agreement to provide aid.

 

Listen to the interview with the Baroness about her potential role

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-17146591

 

c.2012 Cassandra Tribe. All Rights Reserved.

American journalist, Marie Colvin, died in a shelling attack in the Syrian city of Homs today. She was not alone. French photographer Remi Olchik was also killed. British photographer Paul Conroy was wounded, as was Edith Bouvier of Le Figaro. It is feared that Mlle. Bouvier will bleed out before adequate medical attention can reach her. The ICRC has been unsuccessful in getting both sides to agree to a two-hour daily cease-fire to allow medical and humanitarian aid to enter the savaged areas of the city.

 

This was not Marie’s first brush with danger. She thrived on covering wars, believing that what she did had purpose and could bring about change. If you have noticed, in the pictures of her, she is wearing an eye patch. She lost that eye to shrapnel in Sri Lanka in 2001. Still she was motivated to continue doing what she believed in. No tribute to Marie would be complete without mentioning her awe of the quiet bravery of the civilians she met in Syria, in Sri Lanka, in every war torn area that she covered.

 

One of the things I actually managed to leave out of my very long blog about Syria this week is that the violence did not come from the citizens that were protesting. The citizen protests were wholly peaceful. It was the groups outside of Syria that immediately jumped in with weapons and violence. The people of Syria got a little caught up in it, but after increasingly violent crackdowns by the Security Forces, most of them have opted to return to non-violent protests. The majority of what you see on the news is not the people of Syria fighting, but fighters from exiled factions coming in to try to wrest control of the country away from Assad.

 

This is what…pardon the pun….has everyone up in arms. The Arab League is concerned about these external factions gaining an influential foothold in the country by promoting violence. Civil War, by the way, does not necessarily have to entail guns. It is a far more powerful and shocking image to see non-violent protesters facing down weapons. Shooting and all of that, while not admirably, is the province of those trained to die. In the Western media, because it supports the best in ratings and the old school hat trick of violence, is promoting the image that this is a bloody and violent revolt. It is not, that is being created by external factions that is being created and fueled by the West. As I said in the earlier blog, there is a moral struggle going on between the fading super powers and the rising three about the nature of global intervention.

 

I have a fellow in my Google+ stream, Ali Alhasani, who is a blogger and citizen journalist who usually covers Jordan and every morning he has been posting (along with the account ‘Syrian Revolution’) a daily stream of news and video from Syria. From Homs. Every morning I am starting my day seeing images that are not shown in the Western, or more accurately, American media.

 

Ali and the others do this because they know that the West is not really paying attention. We have our Whitney Houstons, our Rick Santorums, our Adeles and Strauss-Kahns to occupy us.

 

It is not until there were two deaths of Western journalists that people began to notice that something awful and powerful is going on. Two deaths out of the...what was the number I quoted in the blog? Two deaths out of the over 5,000 Syrian citizens and 2,000 military members who have died in Syria so far.

 

Marie Colvin would see it as a kind of justice that it is her death that has pulled people’s heads out of their respective streams of self and begun to notice what is going on. She was fueled by the belief that she made a difference and that she has. Both in life and in death.

 

There are more who need emergency aid in Syria than Mlle Bouvier, but if it is her tragic need that gets the West off its duff to secure aid and forget the guns for a minute, so be it.

 

I am sure no one will argue with the whys of the channel opening for the ICRC.

 

You can read the blog “Why Syria Matters” at the link below

http://ctribe.blogspot.com/2012/02/why-syria-matters.html

 

c.2012 Cassandra Tribe. All Rights Reserved.

I have been more at home this week then I have been because I am working on several projects in time zones that keep me up very late. The mad kitten has been deliriously happy. But she still likes her schedule. Up at 5:30, a ball of treats, a pinch of catnip and an open door. She runs in and out and in and out for an hour or so, coming inside periodically to sit in front of the heater and warm up until she is tired enough to go back to bed. In the meantime, I sit at my desk, directly in the path of the cold air streaming inside and try to remember my name, having only gone to bed at 4 or so.

 

It is an interesting and strange life that the two of us have together. Spring seems to be arriving without much of a winter and we are transitioning to our warm weather pattern, where she spends most of the day in the yard. The funny thing is, for all my complaining, I am the one that has the problem adjusting to her not being in my business 24/7. Ah well…I was trying to figure out how old she is and I think 6. I am still waiting for the part where she sleeps 18 hours out of the day. For some reason, my animals never seem to reach that stage. It is as if the play switch got stuck at an early age.

 

It’s funny how things tend to go in waves. I am involved in two things right now that are almost solely driven by proverbs. One of them is the game GO. I have finally started to study it and practice on a dedicated basis. It is a fascinating game. One of the oldest board games known. It is considered to be about 100 times harder than chess but is far easier to learn as far as moves and rules. The odder thing about it is no programmer has yet to create a software version that can beat a human being. There are a myriad chess programs that are unbeatable but there are too many possibilities in GO for play to create a computer player that can trump a high pro dan. Anyway, it is one of my obsessions and I have gotten very into the proverbs that are used to teach strategy and tactics.

 

One of which is, “don’t go fishing while the house is on fire.” In the game, this means don’t traipse off to another area of the board and start something new when there are battles to be attended too. Apply it to real life and it means much the same thing. Don’t turn to something else when there are things that need to be taken care of.

 

The other proverb, koan really, that is chasing me around (actually assigned to me) is the Zen koan, “Before the world came into being, was there a Creator?” I think I have mentioned that one before, and the answer, but I am not going to repeat it again.

 

All of this is well and good until I studied further and came across two other very important proverbs. The first being, “don’t expect to win by proverb” and the second being (Zen again) “The world is so large, why do you follow a bell?”

 

I have spoken a great deal about duality and balance, of the co-existence of our natures within our persons and these proverb/koan sets reinforce what I have been talking and thinking about. We need our rules, we need our examples, lessons and our teachers…but in the end, it will be what we chose to do that may be uniquely ours that will provide our solutions.

 

Learn all you can.

Gain mastery, discipline and patience.

Follow the rules.

But be prepared to throw it all out the window in a heartbeat to do what needs to be done.

 

c.2012 Cassandra Tribe. All Rights Reserved

Since March of 2011, there has been growing unrest and bloodshed in Syria as mostly the mostly Sunni population has begun to demand that Assad’s regime fall. In recent days, if you weren’t all caught up in Whitney Houston’s funeral, you would have seen the footage from another funeral – the one in Syria that turned into a protest and then Assad’s security forces opened fire on the mourners.  

 

Unlike the Arab Spring in Egypt and Libya, the matter of intervention in Syria is much more complicated for the rest of the world. For the first time in a long while, even the Arab League spoke out against Assad, first offering a proposed solution that would allow him to step down from power and a multi-identity government to be in place within two months but, Assad having simultaneously agreed to the plan and dismissed it by increasing the violence of oppression, they chose to vote for sanctions. The Arab League even went as far as to call for the UN Security council to intervene. The council, who came up with their own proposal, was rendered powerless by a block veto from Russia and China. No one on the international front, it would seem, has authority or consensus on how to intervene in the growing crisis.

 

A crisis that has left over 5,000 civilians and 2,000 military members dead. The country, already impoverished after 48 years of “emergency rule” is suffering even more. In a highly unusual turn of events, the Red Cross has spoken out publically to acknowledge they are in talks with all sides in Syria to try to negotiate a cease-fire to allow aid to get through. The Red Cross, in the form of the Red Crescent, is currently the only international aid group present and active in Syria. The ICRC typically makes no comment about the state of any negotiations that they are involved in but the concern is so great that Syria will devolve into a civil war that the ICRC is raising its voice.

 

There are three reasons that you should pay attention to what is happening in Syria and the international response to it. None of them has to do with oil, let me get that out of the way.

The first is obvious – Syrians have lived and suffered under a dictatorship for far too long. Out of a sense of compassion and brotherhood, one should be at least minimally involved in monitoring the situation. The tactics that Assad’s Security Forces have used to oppress the population are beyond appalling.

 

The second reason has to do with the last sentence of the paragraph above. In this rising age, there is no room for despotic leaders and gross violations of human rights. There is also a growing resistance to the use of sanctions and force to topple governments. Libya may be the last of the “easy military choices” that we see. The reason for this comes from the fundamental attitudes of what are considered the rising super powers in the world – and no, the super powers are no longer seen as China or the US. The rising power nations are Brazil, India and South America. All of these countries have fairly recent histories of both living under regimes and suffering the process of being “freed” by the traditional western approach of sanction and might. In then having to free themselves from western control, they have preferred to use mediation and diplomacy. These “softer” methods, while seemingly not allowing for as swift a change in a country, do allow that country to change without destroying the economy and causing further human rights violations against the people. The power three are moving closer and closer towards the kind of solid alliance we are also seeing now between Russia and China. While the three have supported the initial UN decision, they did it with a lot of foot dragging. As this triad matures, there will be a radical shift in how the international community responds to crisis and a shift towards viewing human rights violations as a greater crisis then that of economics or military issues. It is in their recent history, it is in their blood. Our (the US) next few presidents better damn well be on the same page or we are going to find our standing and effectiveness on the global stage even further eroded.

 

The last reason, and this is important, is that both Russia and China vetoed the UN call for intervention. China then went on to proclaim that the West was encouraging a civil war in Syria. This is most likely true, but not well thought out on the West’s part. The Arab League gets why a civil war in Syria would rock the stability of that area – there is no way a civil war would be an “us vs. them” situation but would quickly become a multi-fractioned sectarian war – with Assad and democracy forgotten and old hatreds running high. This kind of shattered standing would destabilize the region by allowing other extremist groups to gain even more presence and power. Rightly, the Arab League wishes to avoid that.

 

Russia wants Syria stable for two reasons, they are strongly connected to them economically and Syria is Russia’s only strategic ally in the region. She is a necessary point of entry for Russia.

 

Now China…China on the other hand does not have a whole lot to do with Syria except in one aspect – like North Korea, Syria is one of the few totalitarian regimes left in the world. Both Russia and China have opted out of the growing discussion of the importance of human rights that the rising super three are pushing to the front and are pulling back and stacking up stones in the wall. If there is a totalitarian regime in trouble anywhere you can bet China and Russia are there to help. They have to. In their own countries, they are brutally silencing any dissent.

 

The world is beginning to divide in two in a way that is not based upon political or religious ideology, not on economics or military protectionism…but on a sense of global morality. There has been no other time in history that the international community has been shaped by a shared sense of right. Not even during World War II. We would like to think that, but the atrocities of Nazi Germany were not widely known when other countries entered the war.

 

And an even bigger change that is beginning to influence the world is that violence – whether through actual military might or through damage to a nation’s economy – anything that would constitute a human rights violation against the people more than the regime –is becoming unacceptable as a means of resolving crisis.

 

All of these reasons combine and pose the question to Americans of, “What kind of leadership are we getting ready to vote in?” Are we going to vote for the old guard and lose our effectiveness on the international stage? Or will we choose a leadership that will be able to become a part of the rising unity of power?

 

What we do and choose to do an international stage reflects how we also approach our domestic problems. Think carefully. Pay attention. We all have a long way to go.

 

c.2012 Cassandra Tribe All Rights Reserved

Several months ago, I set upon a plan to try to keep my Internet experience as open and Internety as possible by setting up a system to boggle all the “customized-for-you” algorithms that were just being announced. I don’t want a customized experience on the Internet. I want to be able to trip over things I would not have thought of, be exposed to new ideas and even tempted to buy things I would never consider in my right mind. I also, because I do a lot of research for a variety of freelance projects, don’t need a search experience that reflects my personal life – I need one that reflects the world.

 

So anyway…I decided to do a couple of simple things, most of them centered on google+. I decided not to separate out my connections there into defined circles. Everyone is lumped together – no matter what their views or why I know them. I also decided to circle people who had radically varied views and backgrounds to keep the mix balanced. Then, periodically, sometimes for sh*ts and giggles, I follow their links. Add to this that my search history is all over the map because of the freelancing and at this point, I half expect the “custom” ads to be signs saying, “Please Stop Having an Identity Crisis.”

 

Mind you. I am doing all this even though I have opted out of the customized advertising. I believed that promise like I believe in the tooth fairy. I pay attention to these things and it is shocking how fast the advertising/spam changes to match my clicks and searches. Anyone who thinks that any of the Internet giants has any interest in protecting their privacy and information would do well to go to cracked.com and read the series of articles on  five reasons to be afraid of google and others. Oddly enough, Cracked Magazine, which I remember as being ridiculous in my youth, has grown into one of the few online sites that has its feet squarely in reality.

 

But, I digress. All of the above was just to lay background as to why I have been able to sit back and read a myriad of opinions, especially concerning the current US Presidential race. And not just read one or two pieces, but to be able to see clusters of support communication. Democrats, Republicans, Progressives, Anarchists, Conservatives, Liberals, Libertarians…I have people who can’t stand Occupy and Anonymous, I have people who completely support them going in and out of my news stream. It is a very interesting mix. I have begun to enjoy the part of the day when I just get to sit and read everything that is going on.

 

Here is what I have noticed.

 

They are all the same. Oh, they may, on the surface, differ in their policies and desires but when you carry the thinking forward about what would happen if they got what they want and how it would be implemented –there is not one difference between any of them.

 

Not a one of them is concerned with individual rights or freedom of speech for they all use fascistic forms of censorship to block dissenting voices. Not a one of them has any type of economic plan that would bring any real change because all of them have (or are evolving) hierarchical structures that are no different from the bureaucratic machine already in place. Where one group would cut something in one area, they would also raise it in another or worse, have no valid plan for how to support various entities.

 

The problem with any kind of revolution is that all it does is change the people in the same system. Unless you are completely willing to destroy society, infrastructure etc and so forth – no revolution can become anything different from what it has replaced. If you don’t believe me, look carefully at all the revolutions around the world over the past 50 years and what the “new” societies became.

 

Does that mean that it is impossible to change the way things are done? No, not at all. But to create change you must first be willing to see where you are similar to what you want changed. One of the old adages is that “bias and prejudice are not to be gotten rid of, but managed.” Just because your group may be just about the same as the group you rail against and want to replace – doesn’t mean you have to strip yourself of that, it means you have to acknowledge it and turn it into a strength.

 

We are or possess, most often, the very same traits as that which we despise. To overcome these traits we do not get rid of them, but accept them and choose to amplify another trait so that the despised tendency has less priority. To try and get rid of it, impossible – all it will do is act like a slow poison and eventually burst out as corruption and destruction somewhere else in the system.

 

That is how revolutions go from a light in the dark to the darkness itself. They deny themselves the right to be just like what they despise and in doing so, do their opponent’s work for them as far as destroying their very integrity and existence.

 

c.2012 Cassandra Tribe. All Rights Reserved.