Loss and coping ...

Pets down to two

In the course of this year, I lost pets to illness.  One loss may have been through poisoning.

Phoebe may have been poisoned -- she became ill and utterly unable to control her movements very, very suddenly.  Much later I discovered a box of automatic dishwasher soap had been chewed into and some had spilled out onto the floor of the cabinet.

Because I cared for Phoebe the best I could she lasted a week. The damage was too severe for her to survive, though, and at last it was mercy that she went.

A note on my care of Phoebe. She was completely unable to take any ordinary food and never drank. I made apple juice for her and put it into an eyedropper and gave it to her drop by drop. At least it kept her hydrated, and with a little sugar getting into her system.

Phoebe's balance in life was I guess like this: she was the most motivated escape artist and explorer, as well as being the most aggressive with the hamsters. I guess she lived a shorter life because she was so prone to exploring and testing limits.

Shasta went much more naturally and peacefully. She didn't live as long as some hamsters do, I guess, and had some funny thing amiss with her hind leg (she ran 'lopsided') for a long time before her end. When she lost the ability to move her hindquarters at all, I had time to prepare myself for her departure. It didn't seem like a painful end for her.

Piper got ill very suddenly and died the next day. It wasn't even 24 hours between onset and death. I believe that she contracted a bacterial infection.

Integrated Pet Management

I have pets.

I keep beautiful little pets.  I have three Gerbils -- the Charmed Girls.  I also have two Hamsters, both females.  One is a mellow older girl who came to me through adoption.  The other is a young, big, pensive, troublesome lovely creature from a communal pen at a pet store, pulled up from among the odd mayhem of 50 or so napping, squirming, waddling hamsters.

My pets are a wonder and a source of pressure on me. The pressure is that of constant re-adjustment of my plans and investments (of time, primarily,  and of creative efforts and of routine husbandry).  I have had any of them only since early December (2014).

These small beings are regarded by some humans as the most trivial kind of commodities -- hardly more significant than bundles of toilet paper or cartons of motor oil (but a bit more work to ship around from producer to retailer).  A strange way of not-seeing, to me.  A very real moral and spiritual blindness.  One that marks a vast impoverishment and tends to perpetuate further penury.

These fellow-ones are learning from me.  I can see that if I look with the heart's unclouded perception.  Oona MacTuna (the younger hamster) is watching, testing, hesitant and distant but lured by curiosity and need for that touching of life upon life that we call interaction.  Shasta BoogieBear is fully engaged.  She's a character, and demonstrates the true potential for responding to human affection.  She's immensely gratifying.  The g-girls are more ...natural-animal, as I think of it.  They are gregarious and a bit more self-sufficient; used to living as a group, sleeping in a pile; yet they too are learners and teachers.

Nothing about this is as dualistic, as minimalized, as reductionist as the principles of "what is a human person, what is an animal, what's the difference, what makes animals do as they do" that I was taught.  Not only are these not merely animate, organic toy-objects, but the relationship is not one of simple provider/owner to consumer/owned, either.  Not only are these not simply unconscious puppets ruled only by this (actually poorly understood) thing called instinct.  These are people.

My pets are naturally motivated to try to teach me.  I think all happy creatures are happy to demonstrate, to offer teaching.  Maybe they perceive me in this way:  as a strange, sort of colonial or composite being, a bunch of different creatures all living inside one skin.  Clearly I am very confused; they merely have to observe with their senses and animal connected-awareness to perceive that.  What I need according to their innate sense of rightness, is to be more integrated, less in conflict with myself.

And yet.  This composite nature, and the internal conflicts that are unavoidably implied, is the gift of humans as well as the illness of humans.  We maintain a constantly shifting, usually out of balance relationship to life, that nonetheless leaves us unparalleled capacities, potentials.  We often maladapt, but adaptation is still our outstanding accomplishment.  We lack the grace in living that many animal creatures demonstrate;  our modes of being in the world are befuddled, half-crazed or worse, wearied by dissipation of life force, drained by focus on mirages...

And yet.  From within our composite beings we draw forth what karma and conditions mandate, and strike upon surprising, unpredictable new solutions to the challenges that are posed to us.

And pondering my teaching and learning,  I must mention individuation.  The best moral reason for humans and non-human persons to closely coexist, to be in domestic arrangements or daily interactions, may be this: we provide for animals an opportunity to partake of more of life's possibilities (in compensation for the holistic existence of life in nature that we deprive them of), and this leads to the phenomenon (one best seen obliquely, in the peripheral vision) of individuation, on which the one-of-type-ness of the creature in its human-free life is pulled into a sentience that is more individual, idiosyncratic, and maybe more self-aware.  Less interchangeable with the others of its kind; more of a singular thing.

There is no limit to what an animal, a pet, can be taught be us.  We limit everything in both directions.  We can learn nothing from them, or a great deal (primarily about ourselves, in the end, although the practical understanding of the species that we can acquire through attentive observation is a very valuable and great kind of knowledge).  We cannot know the limits to what they can learn from us.  We cannot directly ask them what they've learned, obviously.  And yet by extending our sense of potential, by expansively practicing patience and consistently setting a direction, we can allow pets to enter into new behavioral interactions with their physical environment, with us, and with each other.

And yet.  What cannot be done is to push an animal in a direction that is truly contrary to their nature.  This is a distorted and misguided thing to attempt.  They can do many things that we teach them directly and deliberately, but only if these things are somehow an outgrowth of their nature.  The value of some things --the tricks, the games-- that are taught to animals is hard to assess;  but the negative value of abuse, of distortion, of setting of directions towards the degraded, is unmistakable.

So my pets and I meet again and again, and often, it seems (especially with the more solitary hamsters, who as adults do not characteristically set up living arrangements with others of their kind) ...it seems that each encounter is a little unexpected, a kind of momentary surprise, followed by that flash of recognition from them that is one of our great and primary rewards for keeping them around ...oh, she knows me.  She knows me.  I am a welcome thing in her world.

SWA'ering Not Recommended

SWA is Southwest Airlines.

This post isn't about their prices, destinations, hubs, routes, or in-flight service. Frankly, if that stuff is what you think of as "really important" or "relevant to my interests", then get the f*ck off my blog right now. It is about their gross misapplication of FAA regulations, and the now-apparent collusion between FAA-authorized "federal air marshalls" as a "facility" Southwest abuses resulting in extremely egregious violations of the civil rights of some of their passengers. By the way, I have a question that someone can perhaps answer:

Is an Air Marshall essentially a rent-a-cop?

I ask because when I was forcibly taken off of SWA Flight #4838 on Tuesday night upon arrival from Denver, without any realistic facsimile of a vague shadow of provocation, I had the impression that I was being roughly restrained by a security guard, not a peace officer. In fact, as this experience unfolded, I used the spiritual or "mind-observation" training of a Buddhist practitioner to notice (but not be controlled by) my fears; and it was not until I was put into a car driven by a real policeman, a Baltimore PD officer, that I felt 100% better.

By the way, I used no profanity (SWA-ering) towards any person including in-flight crew (FAs) or airmarshalls (FAMs) or any other officials, at any time, before or after being taken into custody. I did, in fact, speak audibly though, to at least 15 feet from my person (much more loudly, to at least 100 feet, once on the terminal concourse gate area with the handcuffs on and witnesses numbering the hundreds) ...I spoke about civil rights, about the irony and significance of this event taking place the day after we commemorate the achievements of Dr. Martin Luther King, about non-violent resistance, about the specific circumstances, about my name and my home city and so on.  It was like Robin Williams in performance. Utterly spontaneous, unrehearsed. I still cannot believe that I could do that, all without offering physical resistance as I was essentially "being arrested."

I was not charged with anything by any Federal or State agency.  This is convenient for SWA, because now they (think) that they will not have to answer challenges in a criminal proceeding. Think about that, truly. It is to Southwest's apparent advantage in pursuing this incomprehensible policy, to not have me or you charged, or truly "arrested."

If you grasp this point, you will really begin to see that these people need now to be forcibly restrained by the instruments of our social contract.  There are very recognizable historical instances of entire communities of people going collectively out of their minds together. Salem, Mass.: the Witch Trials.  Southwest as a "business organization" -- a kind of communal entity -- has collectively gone insane.

Southwest Air seems to be the worst airline out there, but I don't travel by airline much. I hadn't taken it in a long time, and if I had not needed to make same-day, got-to-get-home flight arrangements in Denver to get to Buffalo, and the only option was Southwest, I would not have cared to specifically choose them. I said: "great, one stop with a change of planes, I'll be home by 11:30 pm." In other words, I had no advance negative expectations about Southwest -- preconceived negative expectation can add to negative stress, as we all know; you start out from a place of disadvantage in a mental sense and just have to work so hard to get even "ok" as you go along. But that wasn't a problem here.

Anyway, you've read my story. A few final words now.

Don't be a SWA'er. Not because I think I'd like them to make one less fare's worth of income today (someone else who has not read this blog will absolutely take the seat you have decided to not purchase, yes, true).

Don't take Southwest Air because they are a real, imminent and present danger to your emotional and physical security, and have gone to that "place" of extreme corporate corruption that we sometimes see businesses do. Look, yeah, I don't believe in corporations, and that isn't the point of this blog. But by the way the most I will ever say of any corporation is "oh, they're ok." Because a corporation is not really a "they." It's a thing, not even a real thing, but a highly abstract thing; and what the thing is, is a means by which individual actual human beings can fool themselves into thinking they can avoid personal responsibility for their own choices, their own actions. Look it up. The point of "incorporating" is to indemnify executives and officers of the corporation against personal loss in the event of catastrophic business failure. It also provides certain benefits in terms of making the corporation into a pseudo-entity that can be conceptually treated as if it was "a person" for the purposes of legal proceedings. But it isn't a person or anything like it. Saying "loyalty to a corporation" for instance, is just incredibly ignorant and twisted. Only actual beings are worthy of our loyalty (and only real values and principles are worth dedicating ourselves to).

Don't take Southwest Air and furthermore don't ignore that they are operating this disaster-assured business in the country we call our home land. Don't tolerate them. There are things that are understandable but not forgivable. More than a decade after the 9/11 world-changing calamity, some job tension for in-flight personnel on planes is understandable. Dangerously prone to making unsound decisions is unacceptable; and collusion between a federal agency and a public transport (licensed air carrier) is unforgivable. Require that some folks lose their jobs, their livelihoods, their self-respect, over this. That's called justice. It means "everyone cannot have everything exactly the way they want all the time." These SW Air executives need to have everything taken away from them. It's called justice. And stopping the doing of harm is called righteousness. Both are central Buddhist tenets.

You think you'll go wrong if you decide to stand on the side of the Buddhist teachings?  As many people already think, these teachings are an extremely rational and empirically verifiable system, based on a paradigm of causality (cause and effect). It's a really good bet in a world where almost nothing can really be taken for granted anyway.

OK, do take Southwest Air. Don't be a SWA'er. Don't swear. At all. But do not go quietly. If you take Southwest and you become or witness one of your fellow passengers becoming one of their now practically random victims (of human rights violation), speak continuously (don't try to crack jokes, though ...and try to check the faces of people around you -- even the hostile, fearful ones -- every few seconds if you can stand that ...and try to remember that there might be a reachable human being behind many of those faces, and that this "reasonable" and "rational" Buddhist approach is ultimately based completely [in the final sense] on faith ...and so the humanity in those around you might re-awaken at some moment, when you need it to ...). Don't take SWA unless you think you might be ready to exceed every concept of yourself (if you are sure that you are, you are most likely not ready). Which it is potentially possible for any of us to do, at any time.

High on Jinks (a poem)

Do you really know what FLOTUS thinks?
All the little guys are high on jinks
Bombers on the go and TV-in-the-know

But do I really know what FLOTUS thinks?

Sandy crappy towns with veiled eyes cast down
Jeeps and caravans and suspicious oil cans

But do we really know what FLOTUS thinks?

​POTUS on the stand and we all know the Man
Doin' what he can with a line drawn in the sand

But can I really know what FLOTUS thinks?

​    -----  *** somian *** ------
    --- 23 september 2014 -​--

© 2014 Sören Andersen

Actor Worship

I'd like to offer kudos to a woman who I think has redefined her profession. Nobody can tell me different. I am in reverent awe. 

Tatiana Maslany. THANK YOU FOR Orphan Black, for Sarah, Alison, Cosima, Helena, Tony ...and ...even for Rachel ;-/