Tropical Zen

I’ve been here in California for six days now, and I’m starting to become acclimated to the weather, and also to the dancing. We’ve even managed a sort of a comfortable routine; late mornings with a large meal, puttering in the afternoon until it’s time for my lesson, then games until dinner. Some nights we go out dancing, get home late and fix a little more food, but more often Beatrix and I end up in the hot tub, soaking our sore bodies. It’s comfortable enough, and I really enjoy them as people.

Yesterday I put on a pair of Beatrix’s shoes. Her feet are only a little bit larger than mine, and these are surprisingly comfortable for three inch heels; the sides are a soft mesh and the whole shoe laces up, so it moves with your feet and adjusts to the contours. The arch is very solid, the sole a very thin suede, so I can feel every nuance of the floor beneath me.

And everything about my dancing changed again. Smaller steps, directly under the place my hips stop; no more skidding to a tenuous halt, no more underpowered steps, I can’t afford them in these shoes. It’s good. The bones of my big toes hurt, through the base and all the way up the inside of each foot; not because of a lack of arch so much as because I’m using new muscles I haven’t felt since I was re-learning how to walk after the military… or during my exploration of zen … or during my first time learning to walk in tango. Or my second time learning to walk in tango. So I guess this makes it Learning to Walk v6.

I’ve been learning about walking again; I also learned something I dearly wish I’d known three years ago. I showed up to a practica in a new city, knowing only my teachers, and almost immediately a friendly man asked me to dance. It was the shoes, he explained. Oh, I said, as we danced around the small dark room.  I’ve been waiting more or less quietly for over three years to find out how to tell the men I want to follow, and here it is! Finally!

So tomorrow we will go out shoe hunting. The store where Beatrix got them is in Berkely; we’re headed there for a milonga tomorrow night, so we’ll just go a little early and catch dinner after. I have no idea how much they will cost, and I don’t think I care. If I can find good Cuban heels like Michael’s, I’ll get them too. Those he bought in Seattle.

[edit: Her shoes are from Experience Shoes in Seattle beneath Highway 99 in downtown, his shoes are Capezio Cuban heels which we were able to find for $80. It took a few days to get comfortable in them, but with the right socks they're very nice.]

But tonight, we dance. I’ll bring in my thighs in the back, try to stay hips over feet and belly button toward the leader. Zoom!

So I’ve done another crazy thing: I’ve followed some tango teachers (Michael and Beatrix) to a strange city so that I can pay them an extraordinary amount of money to teach me to dance better. Actually, what I want to learn is how to have a good time, but a large part of that involves dancing better. Dancing better doesn’t always mean that my steps will be perfect; it means that I will spend more time focused on the real, live, human being in front of me, and making adjustments according to their abilities. My job, whether as leader or follower, is to take care of myself and to get in to the music; if the leader has to take care of both of us, we never have any time for dancing.

So I’ve been learning a great deal about tango. New things, like how to walk again, and really new things, like a cross that becomes a sacada that becomes a turn around the follower. Crazy stuff, good stuff, and really interesting and well-explained.

I’ve started blogging a little bit about my journey, so here it is. Enjoy!

It’s Veteran’s Day.

Again.

In most times and places throughout history, disabled veterans were to be discarded immediately after use; this was how it was done until relatively recently, when governments were forced to set something up. The VA as we know it was largely a product of WWII; such an overwhelming majority of the population were involved with The War Effort that Congress could not ignore their disabilities and had to create a comprehensive infrastructure to support the broken ones and their dependants.

“World War II resulted in not only a vast increase in the veteran population, but also in large number of new benefits enacted by the Congress for veterans of the war. The World War II GI Bill, signed into law on June 22, 1944, is said to have had more impact on the American way of life than any law since the Homestead Act more than a century ago.”

From http://www.va.gov/facmgt/historic/Brief_VA_History.asp

War causes so many not-dead, not-whole casualties; “undead” is not an inaccurate word for some of us. Constantly fearing for your life, and having to kill another of your own species, does a lot of psychological damage. The results are often bewildering to the civilians around us; they don’t understand why we startle at loud noises, bolt awake in terror at night, or see the faces of our victims people we may have killed when we go out shopping. It can be easy, also, to write off the common forms of self-medication in which many veterans try to lose themselves–alcoholism and drug addiction; easy, but not correct. This is suffering that has taken over mind and body, and won’t let go. Choosing escape isn’t always a moral failing. How do you explain the grueling real-ness of a nightmare that you can never wake from?

For some of us, there *is* no way to ever really come home again.

For this, if we get an “unemployable” 100% disability rating we’re paid just $300/year more than the Federal Poverty Standards; just barely enough to *not* qualify for fedral housing, college grants, or assistance programs. That’s a big if; there are so many new disabled vets coming in from the “war on terror” that the backlog for processing new vets is in the multiple hundreds of thousands. Between leaving active duty and being integrated into the VA Healthcare system, there is nothing. No money, no health care, no answers.

Those military and ex-military people who are not disabled are quick to ascribe their good fortune to their own strength, or skill, or faith; they believe that they had something to do with whether or not they were injured and disabled. This is not usually true, but it’s a tidy fiction, important to assuage survivor’s guilt. (There are situational exceptions; and the difference between “disabled” and “dead” is sometimes because of skill or determination.)

It very easily could have been you instead of me, but if you hold on to the idea that your skill somehow saved you from injury, you don’t have to think about how close you came to barely surviving, living with chronic pain. You get to maintain a sense of control.

In reality, it has to do with where you happened to be when the bomb went off; which war you were sent to and when; or sometimes, how close the truck behind you happened to be when you got bumped out of the convoy and run over. It is mostly a random chance, an accident of probability; a certain percentage of service members are going to be wounded, damaged, and killed, and it’s a crap shoot as to which side of that line we end up on. Remember, I was a warrior too, once.

I made the same commitments as someone who ultimately retired, offered the same outstanding level of wartime service, worked as hard or harder to perform my duties after I was injured during my duty– why am I not a full veteran with all the recognition and (meager) privilege? Why am I second class? We all made the same promises, we all signed away our individuality and freedom so that we could have a chance to preserve that of our children. Some of us were wounded or broken, and some of us were not. Chance.

There is often talk about “the ultimate sacrifice” – as though death were the worst that could happen. It’s not. I was young, healthy, able; now for almost 14 years, every day I struggle to get out of bed, argue with chronic pain, fight to control my PTSD and depression with pills. I fight a different fight than the service members who stayed for the full retirement; when they retire, they get to stop fighting.

I don’t get to stop fighting until I die.

Today’s Trick: Opposable Thumbs

Take your thumb and rub it lightly back and forth across the second segment of your fingers to make a whispering noise-”tssa, tssa, tss”. It’s distinct enough that that noise, repeated a few times, is enough to prevent a startled (and possibly violent) response when someone touches me unexpectedly.

Over the years, it’s come to mean many things — among them affection, care, respect, for fears and needs and space.  It also often means that petting is about to happen. This all started many years ago when I first had Sputnik the surly black cat. That boy shed like he was being paid by the by the strand–short black cat hairs floating gently everywhere with each pet. As I’d pet him I’d rub some of the fur off my fingers in the above-described fashion (tssa, tssa, tss) and he quickly associated that noise with affection, so whenever I wanted to touch him I’d make that noise. If he was sleeping, I could make the finger-whispering noise and he’d keep drowsing as I pet him (instead of attacking, which he often did in his kittenhood).

I don’t know exactly when it became a thing to do with humans, but I most strongly associate it with my kid. Like me, she startled easily and could be angry and very frightened when caught unawares. “Heightened startle response,” they call it. I also tend to pay close attention to certain familiar voices and sounds so I can pick them out from the undifferentiated din of public places, but it’s still often a game of “guess what they actually said.” We used the finger-whisper enough that even my hard-of-hearing ears could pick the noise out of the background, a vital thing when I need to hear something/someone.

Sometimes, the noise was a shortcut to whispering, “I love you.” (tssa, tssa, tss.)

I’ve since trained other animals to the sound; they pick up pretty quickly what it means. With an animal’s keen sense of hearing, they can often hear the signal from much further away than a human could, so it works pretty well as a “come here for something you like” call.  I wonder –who trained whom?

Sigh. I really miss my kid right now.

I’m trying *not* to think about actual politics today. I’m fearful of the result, whether stolen, tricked or legitimate. I’m already an anxious person with a shaky sense of hope; paying close attention to the news* and vote counts is not going to make it better. It’s all one great big anxiety-inducing show; the numbers will be the same whether I watch them or not.

This isn’t physics, where the observer effect will cause the election to be greatly altered by my singular addition to the millions of people already doing the observing. We could also see it as a thought paradox, like Schrödinger’s Cat . This was intended to point out the ridiculousness of quantum thought, but it’s still a very useful tool for seeing exactly how each version of quantum thought plays out.  I’m thinking that the same kind of ridiculousness is happening with the US presidential election–that Obama both is and is not President-Elect until we open the box (the Electoral College votes are tallied, and then the Supreme Court casts the only twleve that count) and that my anxiously watching the outside of the box won’t help either me or Obama.

I prefer to try to think about it from a zen perspective: there is no observer.
Now if only I could remember that all the time.

* “These findings demonstrate that watching the news on television triggers persisting negative psychological feelings that could not be buffered by attention-diverting distraction (i.e., lecture), but only by a directed psychological intervention such as progressive relaxation.”

One of the neat things about community is that there is some level of mutual accountability. I think, in fact, that that is a requirement in my definition of community, and probably true for the general definition as well.

I’ve decided to let anyone read, but you have to be registered to make comments. By requiring such registration for tropicalzen, there’s at least a little bit of accountability here, or more work for them to make a spammy or nasty remark. One of the things I don’t like as much about the “purely democratic” nature of the web is that there is no accountability; this is part of what makes flame wars easy. The way to combat flame wars is for the community to get together and say, “we’re not speaking to this person anymore” — accountability.

I’ve thought about this often; it seems to keep coming up all over everywhere, or the lack is sorely missing. We talk about a gay community, but there isn’t one–not in Seattle, and not in Puerto Vallarta. The scene is too big and there is no accountability. It’s strange to come from a large group of friends where checking references is easy, meeting new people is harder, and if somebody is a real jerk they can be ostracized, to a new city where everything is the opposite. More on that later, I think.

It’s okay to have anonymity and still have accountability; I don’t need to know your legal name, only who you are in relation to my community. It’s the relationships that *make* it community.

Welcome to it; I hope you’ll find some interesting people and ideas here.

My sister’s husband broke his spine last Sunday, but his spinal cord seems to be intact, thank the Lords of Kobol.

My sister has always been my ally, and except for that awkward period of hero worship/clothes stealing that happened when we were kids, we’ve always been fairly close. She is the most awesome mom I know–I’ve actually seen her apologize to her kid when she was mistaken about something, like it was No Big Deal. I have no idea where she got that from, our parents never did anything of the kind.

I started on my gender path, and she said in no uncertain terms that I’d have to get a legal no-contact order to keep her away from me; a little thing like gender wasn’t going to get in her way. I do love her. Best person I’m related to, hands down. (Although, except for our 3 other siblings, that’s *really* not saying much. Still, Oldest Brother sets the bar pretty high.)

I love my sister. Everybody has one thing that they value more than anything else, and when you understand that one thing, that person’s life choices make a lot of sense. My sister’s thing: Loyalty.

It’s weird, because I’m not sure I understand where she gets the information she uses to choose where her loyalties lie; but for her, the choices she’s made have generally been good ones, and she’ll stick it out no matter what. No Matter What, unless they try to harm her Family. She gets so very much pleasure from her loyalty, like a feeling that she’s doing something Right and Honorable.

She is. Maybe I should get her a medal.

I’m worried for my brother-in-law, though. I’ve lived with 13 years of chronic pain, pain and sleeplessness and rage and fear; sometimes shaking my ineffectual fists at god, often declaring that there is no such being. I would not wish this on my worst enemy. I would not even wish this kind of pain and heartache on George W Bush, though it’s an occasional fantasy of mine that he feel some pain for all that he’s caused. That’s one of the things about pain, though — it’s not just. It’s not something you get because you deserve it.

But when you have chronic pain, nearly everyone who really sees your suffering will wonder at some point what you did to deserve being in so much pain. I wondered for nearly ten years.

I’m afraid for him, and for her; I’m also afraid for me. *I* don’t want to have to see someone I care about go through this, whatever “this” really is. Everyone involved is scared, and the job I’ve set for myself is (as usual) to go in, be rational and attentive and listen, to try to use the right words to help my sister heal, at least, so that she can continue to be the pillar of strength for her spouse and their 2 kids. To be funny and ease some of the weariness. To install a new window for the air conditioner. Maybe even to make dinner, or let the girls color in my tattoos with felt markers.

It’s good to meet with situations that scare us, to take a deep breath, feel it, and go ahead anyway.

So say we all.

This evening I was talking with the owner of a restaurant I enjoy. He was sad that so many people have been so grumpy lately, presumably because we’re having another June-uary and it’s pretty unpleasant outside. But he was struck by how very much I was enjoying my meal; and I was, very much so. Not exactly a When-Harry-Met-Sally kind of thing, just … smiling, and tasting, and really experiencing the flavors and smells in front of me. I was having a moment of joy, and then another, and another, eating one of my favorite dishes. It’s kind of a fried soft tofu with a sweet onion/ mushroom/ cardamom sauce.

What I noticed, really, was that joy is what makes all the pain worth it. We can’t escape pain, even though we may try very hard indeed, and many of us suffer terribly. Maybe we’re suffering because the clouds rolled in about seven feet off the ground back in October and we haven’t seen the sun in eight months; maybe we’re suffering because we’re afraid of losing something important, that what we have will be taken from us; maybe we’re just lonely.

So with all this pain, all this suffering, why do we keep at it? Do we even know?

Sometimes I don’t.

But this evening, as I relished my meal, I finally understood that the whole point of it all is to remain alive so that we can experience joy. No matter how much we’ve suffered, we can still touch joy–even though most of the time, we can’t hold on to it. That’s the miracle. That’s the point. And it gets to keep happening, as long as we’re open to it.

I’m reminded of my previous musings about gratitude, and how mine is broken. I have been of the opinion for many years now that gratitude is something that, once offered, can later be demanded, and so it has been hard for me to offer it. I think maybe I’ve had the wrong idea all along, that maybe gratitude is really just directional joy. My restaurant-owning friend was so pleased with my enjoyment that he gave me some melon slices as a free dessert, and I enjoyed those, too.

If *that* is gratitude, well, I could see myself really enjoying that.

I’ve personally spent a lot of time and energy grousing about the military, the way they do things, and the damage it’s caused (even to their own troops). I think we need to spend time thinking about war, both specific ones and in general; what is the motivation, and what is the cost? Who really benefits? It’s certainly not the soldiers, even when they can convince themselves that it was a “just” war. Not that I’ve come across any true forms of justice that involve the massive destruction of people, psyches, and noncombatants, but still. As a conversation I was in earlier today concluded, it seems pretty unreasonable that there had ever been a society of humans which dealt well with the kinds of unreasoning violence that are used in war; when trying to take the Other Guy’s stuff (food, land, women…) or prevent him from taking yours, a nonviolent conversation-session over cups of organic, fair-trade coffee sweetened with organic agave nectar falls short of accomplishing the goal.

I don’t have a good answer to the war, to any of them. I don’t agree with most of them, begun and fueled as they are by greed and fear, but I don’t have a better answer than Mohandas Ghandi’s massive protests, which any Subsaharan African, Southeast Asian, or American warlord would completely ignore. Still, it’s important to continue to think about it, chew it over, and come up with answers other than what we are spoon-fed by the media; if we’re diligent enough, we just might be able to avoid being machine-gun-fed further answers.

Garrison Keillor touches on some truths worth ruminating in his essay here: “For the troops to fall into line is a noble thing; for civilians to fall into line is shameful. ”
http://prairiehome.publicradio.org/features/deskofgk/2008/04/01.shtml

Here I am with a new site. It’s been several years since I’ve done much writing, or any blogging; but I’m hoping to be able to start that up again. At the moment, I’m living in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, but the above pic is from my previous home, a small village on the southern coast of the same bay.

That small village only recently got electricity, and doesn’t yet have broadband. Unfortunately, a major travel magazine wrote an article about the place, and you can’t find a decent house to rent for less than $400 US, which makes it significantly more expensive than Puerto Vallarta; these reasons and a few others are what have caused my move.

I hope to start writing habits again once I’m more settled in my new place In the meantime, I’m going to post a few links to things I find interesting. Let’s see what turns up!