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!
 An admiring bog of one at Calf Creek Falls.
 My mother just turned 92 years old. Two things strike me about her super-golden years. Her forgetfulness has made her past a happy one. And her new-found love of trees and birds makes my own enthusiasm look modest.
Last week as we drove home from her hairdo appointment, down a shady tree-lined street, my mother said, “I just can’t understand what would make any two people divorce. Why would they do that?” Sometimes I let her wacky statements go with a nod and a smile. But I’d lived in our household; I could not let that pass without a reality check. I said, “You divorced Dad!” My mother said, mildly, “I never did.” I said, “You kicked him out of the house my freshman year of college. Divorce came later.” She didn’t protest or say a word. She had completely forgotten his indiscretions, her years of isolated grieving.
For her, marriage produced five great children and provided adventure (as an Air Force wife, she lived 19 places in 25 years). She had flown the Utah coop. She’d lived in Japan. She played golf on more courses than Campbell’s has soups. And now she has forgotten the strains and agonies that accompanied that journey. You may not like tapioca but it has a pleasing flavor on my mother’s tongue.
As for trees: my mother used to vacuum her patio Astroturf, cursing the box elder trees that dared to send their seed pods down into her seven square feet of the great outdoors. Her hatred of trees was so pronounced, I often had to excuse myself from the room. I’m a landscape designer. Trees are the answer, in my book. The only thing that kept me sane as a teenager in Davis County, Utah was escaping to the mountains, following deer paths through the scrub oak, jumping off sandy cliffs with tree-root tendrils flying overhead, shooting the tube in old irrigation culverts among tree canopy and dirt ravines.
Now, trees are my mother’s dearest friends.
When we moved her out of her condo into assisted living two years back, I made sure that her window had a view. She loves looking out on the world. And this particular view is a Utah treasure. Mount Olympus defines the skyline, and her parking lot is ringed with maples, pear and apple trees, sycamore, box elder and ailanthus/trees of heaven. I thought she would enjoy watching the comings and goings of the staff and visitors. But my mother stands bewitched by the moods of the wind in those trees. She reports on their bird visitors. She laughs like she has the scoop on intimate friends.
After her morning exercise class, my mother takes her cane and walks the perimeter of the parking lot. Sometimes twice a day. And when you visit and join her on those walks, she makes sure you stop and notice every tree, the color of their leaves, what they drop, how they’ve been chopped for the power lines to go through, which and how many birds perched in the tops and “had a conversation” before moving on. These walks are nothing short of miraculous, for me—to hear this old heathen tree-hater stand in awe of her family riches. And that’s what makes me admire and love my mother. She has changed. She allows delight in. She seeks delight where there was anger and boredom and judgment. And if she recreates her past by siding with the joyful and calm and beautiful, well that’s an affliction I hope many of us encounter with age. The world could forget plenty of its grudges. And walking with my mother, it seems our primary job on earth is to remember the overwhelming bounty of its joys. Thanks to Exploring the World of Trees for the photo of sycamore seed pods.
Go to What Tree Is It? to identify trees you encounter, by leaf shape, fruit or name.
 On May 24, tree limbs all over my neighborhood were in real trouble. They hovered at eye-level, weighted with snow from a freak spring storm. That late in May, the street trees had leafed out full, and the wet weight of snow had disfigured linden, ash and the maple tree in my front yard. Two torn limbs blocked the sidewalk, wedged downward like open hands. I pushed and pulled—they were too tall for me to drag out of the way. I would have to cut the network of branches in order to clear a path.
Let me tell you about the danger of the Mistaken World.
I have two women living inside of me. One is young and sprightly, competent and eager; she flies about fixing, creating, solving and doing for others. Once in motion, the Project Manager finds it nearly impossible to stop. Exhaustion stops her. Felled limbs under heavy unexpected snow. She feels torn and confused by the destruction that comes, every time, as a result of too much work, too much speed. Her body breaks down, her emotions follow. Hers is a Mistaken World. The world we make and read about in newspapers every morning. This is not the natural world. It is a manufactured freak snowstorm of activity we mistake, every day, for reality.
We may not recognize this world as mistaken, having rarely stepped outside of it.
The other woman in me lives quietly, a modest older sister who notes the beauty in limbs, green or bare, aloft or downed. I call her the Oldtimer. She is drawn into activity by what is around her, knowing that her main job, her heart job is to appreciate. She lives in the center. She waits to be led. She is not fooled by fury—furious accomplishment, furious acquisition, furious judgment, division, rejection or need. She smiles when her eyes open on May 24 to snow falling into her green maple tree. She sees the overweighting all down the street. She hopes for the least disfigurement of these grand shade trees.
Then she gets out her hand saw to clear a path.
We choose to inhabit the Mistaken World until it inhabits us. We’re blinded to our own very direct access to wisdom. We look to others, to churches, to Wall Street, to Google and e-zines. We accept the overweighting—as if human industry excused every stupidity, every wound inflicted, every lost limb. Mistakes en masse create misery. We all feel it. We fear and worry over it. We even despair there’s little we can do. Recognizing the Mistaken World might seem to take us far in righting the wrong, but analyzing a problem usually increases the trance it holds over us. Would you stare down an angry rattler until it told you how to escape?
It is simpler and far more effective to ask how do we recognize the real world?
I can suggest ways, but only you will know how to get real:
Slow down.
Contact your heart.
Be grateful, and patient, so that what comes to you is enough.
Let everything around you speak its piece.
Listen.
Let slights move through you.
Stand up for beauty.
Sit down and wait.
Welcome the unknown.
Get old, whatever your age, get calm, get simple. Pay attention, Oldtimer. You are in this world to appreciate it. Appreciation is our native human state.
Clear the decks for delight. Ask and you will receive.
Let’s get started.
 At a meeting of entrepreneurial women this weekend, I was told the title of my next book will be FIGHTING OFF THE SUPER BITCH. This, followed by an outburst of joyful laughter. The heat and interest in this topic astounded me. Not that I intend to write such a book, but a blog about bitchiness, yes.
“I don’t have time for this right now,” I hissed viciously at a dental office secretary calling me at work to make an appointment. I said it and hung up. Her call was the single straw that brought the whole crazy haystack of multi-tasking required at my job down. I’d been short-tempered and harried with everyone near to me, I’d even helped destroy a wedding engagement due to stress, but cruelty to a well-intentioned stranger stopped me in my overachieving tracks. I went to the dental office to apologize. With tears in her eyes, and there were tears in mine, Karen looked up and said to me, “I had a job I hated.” We understood each other perfectly. I quit my job.
Far too many women I know, ages twenty-something to sixty-something, suffer from advanced cases of overwork. They’re smart and accomplished to the point of bodily breakdown. They fear deeply for their health and do not see the stress connection. Symptoms include: sleeplessness, anger, road rage, crying jags, mysterious illnesses no doctors can name which do not relent and make day-to-day living a drain, nausea, diarrhea and broken digestive systems. Can’t eat, can’t sleep, can’t get comfortable. But boy can they still work. Hmm.
Extreme levels of stress drive those you love away. They rob you of daily delight. So while I am unemployed and face-in to a rapidly dwindling bank account balance, I prefer and suggest you wag more and bark less.
Time presses. Be yourself. And you know that self is kind.
 In 2006, the human family released 20 times more CO2 into the biosphere than the earth’s own natural rate of annual release. In the early 1960s, humans released 6 times more CO2 than the earth per year. In 1900, the earth and humans were tied at .4 billion tons of carbon per year.* We are fast-burning our way to breathlessness. And in this escalating race, it is human beings not the earth who will lose. We can’t wait for global policy-makers to slow the world vehicle. That’s the sneaky reality of such rates of speed. Each one of us can do radical good—change one life from consumption to creation. Which might inspire other lives to step up and slow down. *Figures thanks to Tyler Volk's CO2 Rising (see video) List of Outlandish Easy Fixes to Slow CO2 Overkill:- Cut your auto miles by one half in 2010--feel your pulse rise to the challenge?
- Shop local, within blocks of your house if you can
- Air dry clothes and linens
- Insulate your attic--helps reduce winter and summer energy use
- Trip combine, better still...
- Walk
- Park your car on weekends--you can do it
- Stop using plastic trash bags--humans survived without them for eons
- Harvest what’s around you
- Reduce shopping as pastime by half in 2010--shopping isn't living, it’s preparing to live
- Make do. You’ll laugh more.
Please add great ideas to this list…
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