Your Existence Gives Me Hope

I’ve just gotten back from an eight-day silent meditation retreat at Spirit Rock Meditation Center in Woodacre and, naturally, came back with some big life questions to ponder, such as what if someone invites me to dinner at a fancy restaurant? What would I wear?

What I pretty much wear all the time is loose cotton pants that I make myself and, these days, a t-shirt, which is generally navy or yellow, because those colors go best with the colors of my pants, which are mostly medium blues and kelly or olive greens, with some forays into red/pink/purple. My mother made me the pattern for the loose pants about eight years ago, when the loose pants era began.

Accordingly, my closet contains nothing but loose cotton pants, t-shirts, and some men’s button-down shirts left over from that era.

So I asked my mother what I would wear if I got invited to a fancy restaurant and she said, “Oh, I don’t know—baggy high-water pants and a t-shirt?” That was quite funny. She said I could have a saying printed on the t-shirt to suit the occasion, something like, “Down with money.” Then, not apropos of the preceding, she offered to send me her old exercise treadmill in many small pieces to facilitate shipping. “Get yourself an arc welder,” she advised.

I also called Steve Harriman with the clothes question on the theory that he has observed lots of dressed-up women and because he knows and appreciates me (as I do him; I love Steve Harriman), and he and his wife Julie had plenty of good advice. I knew he’d be the right person to ask.

With that resolved, I went out to Papalote to get a burrito. Around the Mission, someone has lately spray-painted a lot of romantic slogans onto the sidewalks using various stencils: “I’ve waited my whole life for you.” “This time itll [sic] be different.” “Your existence gives me hope.” I like them, but, predictably, not everyone does and yesterday I saw that someone had scrawled a response with a thick black marker: “Fuck off!”

Someone else had gotten very organized and made his or her own stencil for use near these sayings. It says “Shut up honky” and has a graphic of a steaming pile of dog poo.

I had left Tom in charge of Thelonious. On a previous occasion, I came home to find a dreadful smell in my apartment, very like shit, but I could not locate its source for some minutes. Finally I discovered that Tom, instead of flushing the cat poop down the toilet, had carefully placed it in the little brown paper bag that serves as the bathroom trash bag. The smell had permeated all the towels and lingered even after I got rid of the poop and changed the towels.

So when I left this time, I asked him to please flush the poop down the toilet, not so much put it in the trash, but please go ahead and just flush it down the toilet if you will. And when I returned yesterday, there was quite a dreadful smell in my apartment, very like shit. “Then what’s that bag there for?” he asked when I mentioned it, which I had resolved not to do, as Thelonious was alive and well and had plenty of food and fresh water. But then it turned out he had made other plans for the weekend we were going to celebrate my birthday, and then I couldn’t resist mentioning the cat poop. (That’s one of those key relationship skills: The Floodgate of Grievances.) In the end, we changed the day of the birthday celebration and all was well.

As for the retreat, it was tremendous, as always. It was mindfulness meditation, which can be deployed in the service of insight or of concentration/tranquility. This kind of retreat was the latter and it was very pleasant and the teachers were wonderful and the weather was idyllic and the food was fabulous (and one of the cooks was kind of cute) and it was just very great. I interviewed with Phillip Moffitt, who is very darling and lovable. (Interviewing is when you meet every couple of days with a teacher for 15 minutes to discuss how things are going.)

My own teacher is Howard Cohn—Howie—and I love him and have been going to his meditation group off and on since 1991. But I’ve noticed that it hasn’t really led to my making like-minded friends, though I like very much the people who go there. Another of the teachers on this retreat was Eugene Cash. The woman who gave me a ride to the retreat mentioned that she thought he, who also teaches in San Francisco, had more of a community thing underway, with more potential to make friends, and it appears that is the case.

I visited Eugene’s website today (the Insight Meditation Community of San Francisco) and will probably go to his meditation group soon, after I get a reply to my email about where to park my bicycle.

Happy Bike to Work Day! And yay for the new bike lanes that I found this morning had appeared on my usual route to work.