One way to combat a faltering economy is to indulge in your frugal side. Frugality actually puts you in contact with a realer reality anyway, so it’s good for the spirit as well as your net worth. The more you interact with the world to meet your needs, the better. I don’t mean society or cyberspace or created culture, when I say world.

Tonight, walking the dog with my sweetie after dinner, we passed a field of blackbirds perched on cattail stalks in a field empty but for one person in a royal blue rain jacket playing a recorder to them and only them.


Every bird in that field, all musicians themselves, sat facing the flutist. (It was dusk, so photos weren't possible.) S/he played for the twenty minutes it took us to circle the field, and played on after we’d departed.

Earlier today, walking the dog with my sweetie after breakfast, we met a frisky pup on a mountain trail who wanted nothing to do with her owner’s brisk goal-oriented workout run. Lily came pouncing off the trail to meet my dog, whose age and temperament yell NOT ME, I’M NOT PLAYING, but lo and behold, right nearby lay a pile of bear poop and Lily snapped her jaws on a firm dark morsel and couldn’t be persuaded to part from it. We called to her owner, “She’s eating poop!” and chased her in the friendliest way, knowing the gastric results of a dog on a scavenged diet, which of course Lily took to mean playing and poop, too? Fantastic! All this fun didn’t cost her a cent.

This afternoon, I hauled out the crockpot and combined two recipes to use what ingredients I had to make slow-cook red beans and rice. We get to smell this luxurious concoction for five whole hours while it simmers. And eat it tomorrow. Simple as simple. You can’t buy that at Sears.

I’m knitting a hat for a baby gift for Christmas. I’m writing a novel that may never make a dime. We’re still eating the chocolate frenzy birthday cake we made for my sweetheart’s daughter five days ago. And for her Halloween costume, she needs “hillbilly teeth.” No stores came through, so her father took a black straw we’d saved from dining out one night,* clipped off 1/3”, disappeared into the bathroom and came out with the most convincing hickabilly act I’ve ever seen, broken front tooth and all.


Did you love playing with oddments when you were little? You can do it old, too. Create the world you inhabit rather than buying it at stores. Or buy the parts and pieces and remake your life into a self-made interesting one. Get your hands on life. Play with nothing till it’s something. Play for blackbirds.

Frugal need not be stingy or austere. And always take photos.

One of the most profound things you can do on this planet at this time, it seems to me, is to lie down on the earth, belly down—and really that in itself is so good--

lie down and say thank you.

That is it, my challenge. Do it more than once. In different places. Don't put it off. With winter coming, the belly-challenge will be more challenging!

Thank you, Sevier River.

My former cat Pete, now living on sixty acres of upland valley paradise, seemed always to get it right: play with abandon, climb any trees willing, keep neurotics at bay (oh, what an arsenal of weapons Pete had for keeping clear boundaries), lose toes, lose fights, win dominance in your own pacific home. For all his crusty bossy masculine ways, Pete was a full-on lover.

When I moved to Boulder and could not take a cat, didn’t the person coming to buy my loveseat scoop him up and say she knew the perfect home, with cows and kids and roadless horizons where he could hunt outdoors all day? Pete adopted me in the country, and to the country he returned.

Now, I live in high-density housing, where you could toss four different neighbors hot dog buns off the back deck if they called for ‘em. We are packed in tight. Rather than stay inside or drive to a park, I looked out all my windows and called up beauty. Wherefore art thou? I asked, from the balcony. I am astonished to report that even in a backyard skinny as two beans laid like an L, beauty came.

First, you trim the lilacs struggling in too much shade. You transplant strawberries and a shade-bound climbing rose against a sunny fence. Cover them with shade-giving cardboard for three weeks until new leaves emerge, and they sparkle. Cut curving bed lines and whack out sod, an hour or two each morning. Hang a bird feeder. Sink a used post to support the new grape vine.

Use the gravel under the deck to start a pathway. Make borders with hand-sized rocks. Move the hummingbird feeder three times, without luck, till you tie on a lucid red ribbon, then watch from the balcony as the lightning birds feed.

When you love your soil, love your views, love your neighbors’ sumac trees’ exotic foliage, dream of eggplants warm with sun, dream of iris, dream of songbirds, you are Pete, who grabs every moment out of doors and shakes it, until all the good falls out.

If you are too young yet to love gardens, grow old.

We’ve been conditioned to believe freedom comes after winning a battle (NOW I’M FREE), even if it’s a battle for a parking spot on a crowded city street. But the amped-up mindset needed to compete stays after the contest is over, and then where are we?

Amped.

You may call it revved or pumped. Your parents called it “acting out.”

The trouble is, acting out leads to the belief that we’re getting somewhere, when what we’re usually getting is more stuck. In anger, force, will, self-defense, desire, stress and more desire.


Reacting is goal-oriented. Reacting to the door-to-door solicitor with a growl and a slammed door means you did rid yourself of the intrusion but you also gained a gut-load of anger, and guess which one lasts longer? I speak from many slammed doors.

I have no silver bullet or five-part course on chillin’. I’m hoping to raise a little flag on a slender pole in the midst of the push-pull American feedlot frenzy to say: don’t ruin your health or our society in the name of winning. You do not have to be a heifer behind anybody’s bars.

Freedom feels nice. (Reactivity does not. It’s sort of itchy and hot and snowballing, and the contradictions are part of the whole seductive deal.)

Freedom is subtle, and not so highfalutin. Try casting no blame while holding your place. Retract the claws you want to sink into anything, issues as well as political systems as well as people. Remember your aunt or uncle or friend who had such a level head and an open mind? How you loved being around them? Be them.

Freedom has to start somewhere. We can all lower our psychic cholesterol.

“Instead of allowing ourselves to be led and trapped by our feelings,” Tibetan teacher Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche once said, “we should let them disappear as soon as they form, like letters drawn on water with a finger.”

Well, the packing and cleaning and long-haul driving are behind me. I now live in Boulder, Colorado. I can’t yet say what I’ll be doing to earn a living. Here’s what I know I’ll be doing every day.

Boulder isn't so much a city as a network of trails connecting green space. Most of which isn't actually green, it's dry prairie and curling creeks and old tree snags left for roosting.




Five minutes from my home, on foot, I’ll be chatting up my new neighbors:
egrets, foxes, mallards, kestrels, coyotes, prairie dogs...

Canada geese and white pelicans!

I love pelicans more than I can say. A flock of five winged by me on yesterday’s walk. Today, my mutt Sal swam where South Boulder Creek bulges into a small lake, and then she swam again aways downstream.

R-e-s-p-e-c-t, that’s what Boulder city planning means to me. No matter where you live, scruffy undeveloped land and all of its many inhabitants are your neighbors. Isn't that every kid's dream? A playground as big as—well, as big as the "church of the blue dome," to quote my outdoorsy nephew.

I may just buy an old snowmobile suit, flatten all four tires on the Buick and
cycle everywhere.

No one knows me here. And green is such a flattering color.

















P.S. What's not to love?!

If you’ve ever sat through a juried trial, you know one thing: lawyers are not there to get at truth. Lawyers are there to win their case. Extreme bias for combats extreme bias against, hired specialists paint diametrically opposed scenarios, and if you happen to be a juror your head and stomach get tied in knots in the drawn-out dead-boring struggle for the glittering prize—the verdict.

I walked out of my first jury duty knowing I’d added my own bias to the fierce legal biases; once I’d touched the thick metal pins that held the defendant’s knee together after his motorcycle collided with a truck, my impartiality vanished. Suffering warranted remuneration, and this man had suffered.

Was justice served?

I bring trials up because a couple of weeks ago, my dearheart said—after listening to an operatic description of my woes—that my lawyer was talking, not me. (My father was a lawyer so this struck me as hilarious and likely utterly true.) I laughed so hard tears spilled onto my shirt. I had lawyered-up with my grievances against my man and turned a very open world into one pained with operatic Sturm und Drang.

To make my case at the cost of accuracy, openness, fairness, peace. Well, wasn’t that silly? And of course damaging, because lawyering-up meant I had separated myself from anything and everything but loyalty to my own story. Lawyering-up is a big hard elbow pointed at the world.

If you find yourself trapped in a line of thought that is rigorous, full of thrust and churning out glittering hard-edged conclusions, that is very likely your lawyer speaking. Not you. Good news, eh? You can stop paying your lawyer to spin thoughts into self-serving conclusions. You stop paying the lawyer because it’s a false world, a biased world, an unpleasant world in which to live. And it nearly always harms others, too.

Neuropyschologist Rick Hanson has a fine take on this lawyer-prototype who lives within us. Hanson says, “Watch how a case starts forming in your mind, trying to get its hooks into you. Then see if you can interrupt the process. Literally set down the case, like plopping down a heavy suitcase when you finally get home after a long trip. What a relief!”

Case dismissed. All those cases...

Set 'em down, take in a big long draught of freedom. You are right back home.

Subscribe to Rick Hanson’s weekly e-newsletter, Just One Thing. The week of 4/14/11 (#59) is called “Who are you prosecuting?”

And a charming site on what to do with old suitcases!

Sturm und Drang: storm and stress

Driving a back road to Rocky Mountain National Park last week with dog and boyfriend, gaping at the rural scenes, I saw this devilishly handsome baby with its feet to the clouds

        
and I shouted STOP!


Have you ever seen such
surrender to place? Do you have
any doubts a happy family resides
at this farm?



Walking on a beach in Ocean Springs, Mississippi, a decade back, I came across the most striking sand drawing: a pure large circle which became, on closer inspection, a smiling woman with her legs and arms thrown up over her head, split open to the joys of the oncoming tide. She was naked.

I still remember that drawing and smile in wonder.

Who made these crazy sandstone eggs?

An artist in Lyons, Colorado, smitten with place.

Who knew lilac trees in China have coppery peeling bark?

The gardener who planted one in Boulder, Colorado.

What does your postal carrier see when approaching your place? A box this grand?!

Cheryl Crow’s “And This Is Home” sang itself in my head all the way to the Stanley Hotel at the outskirts of Rocky Mountain National Park. Sleet descended. Too early for a tourist’s drive through, and so we turned around. “This Must Be The Place” by the Talking Heads accompanied our U-turn, and the lovely drive on back roads to Boulder. (“Pick me up and turn me 'round…”)

Do a sexy lamp dance. Find your own way home. If you don't love the human race, watch these music videos and you may. Be smitten. With our time and our place.

It's all home.

If I said, “Don’t believe everything you think,” you would not bat an eye. It seems reasonable. You’ve been wrong once or twice before. If I said, “Don’t believe anything you think,” could you stay with me here? Could you keep your breathing steady and consider it?

Experience comes in via our senses. Pain, pleasure, puzzling new input. We process and categorize the incoming data for our safety and use and growing intelligence. Shutting that sense-experience up in idea boxes is a primary cause of confusion and suffering. Who are we, with our limited understanding of cosmic forces, to properly categorize the world? On what basis do we label, interpret and file away life?

What say we dump the blowhard routine! How about staying open instead? What if your native intelligence sees the fluid surprising beauty in things, even mundane things like the dull green slime that clings to the underside of the kitchen sink stopper? (Have you tried wiping it off with a dry paper towel, a wet paper towel, the sponge you use for the dirtiest pots and pans, only to rinse the sponge and the green slime adheres to your fingers? Icky cool!)

Here’s the problem with words and thinking: we spin stories instead of staying alert to what’s really here. Monks and yogis spend decades trying to detach from their thoughts, not to be heavenly space cadets but to be present. To live beyond bias. You can do it, too.

Stop for just the length of a breath when a new experience comes in. Stop with no purpose except to be with that whatever. Pain, pleasure, scent, glare, potholes, underarm deodorant, none of these requires a plot. You need not sew the stream of experiences you have together with word thread in order to be someone.

You’re the world perceiving itself.*

The next time a mental story line tries to take you off on its golden back, rein in. Don’t take the ride. It really can be engaging to watch the story fly off kicking up muck, leaving you behind, centered and largely unconcerned. Any story will do: I can’t stand it when she…, I’ll never make enough money to…, Why do all my friends…? The experience on its own can and does deliver the punch. The storyline your thinking concocts whirls you off on a goose/moose/monster chase, and leaves you ignorant where you could have been informed.

Believing what you think misses the mark. Please witness the world. Leave stories to novelists (some of whom love life enough to try bending words beyond themselves into the shape of pure being).

*A fantastic calling, and full time.

Synonyms for blowhard: babbler, blabber, blabbermouth, chatterbox, cackler, chatterer, conversationalist, gabbler, gasbag, jabberer, jay, magpie, motormouth, prattler, talker, windbag. Jays and magpies have my apologies for the comparison.  

Buy a bumper sticker online.

You must be a writer!

Seriously, though, you would be in the company of Helene Hanff, Ulysses S. Grant, Abraham Lincoln, Buckminster Fuller and Emily Dickinson, as well as countless notorious bums who turned the world upside down with their avarice and steely wills. So what's an honest upstart supposed to do? How do you know when to keep that shoulder to the wheel and when to let your shoulders slip into a comfortable state of ease?

Chogyam Trungpa, Rinpoche, my first buddhist teacher said, "Try, but don't try try try."

For Westerners, bent to every task imaginable, BENT TO BEING SOMEBODY at any cost, the grace of being simply in the flow is often absent. Signals all around suggest we bark up different, friendlier trees but snouts locked onto a ravening scent, we pursue. (And suffer.)

Whereas the fragrance of a rose in full bloom at Green Gulch Zen Center on a sunny April day sets all counters at zero.

Ah, zero. The whole world waits on thee.

So here's my hope for 2011: I will listen for the sound and relish the fragrance and cultivate the taste of zero.

And send you all into January with Ms. Dickinson's lines—

I'm nobody! Who are you?

Are you nobody, too?

Then there's a pair of us—don't tell!

They'd banish us, you know.

How dreary to be somebody!

How public, like a frog

To tell your name the livelong day

To an admiring bog!