Death sentence

My mom has been dealing with her kidney cancer in the best way she knows how. At times, she's driven to helpless despair when she realizes that she has no control over her own life, but at times, she is freed from awareness of her condition, conversing about mundane topics. She's still walking on her own and taking care of some household chores, but she seems to tire easily. She still goes to work two days a week. Overall, an uninformed observer might say that she's doing pretty well.

When my brother and I told dad about our upcoming travel plans, he pulled us aside, and in a hushed tone, sealed her fate. "The doctors say she has at most a few months, more likely, a few weeks." At that moment, the faint glow of hope flashed into a deep, empty blackness. My ability to naively silence the truth, the morbid inevitability that she will die, suddenly vanished. Such certainty, such coldness. The tears in his eyes confirmed his words like the smash of the gavel. It has been decided.

May we spend our remaining time wisely.

Lawns

An odd symphony, a mix of several monotonous hums that alternately approach and recede, fills the air. The smells of cut grass and motor exhaust waft in through the open windows, forcing me to recognize that it's Tuesday; the gardeners are here. Watching them swiftly move from house to house, I think about the time, effort, and resources put into the upkeep of the shimmering green lawns that they tend, and wonder where the tradition of keeping a neat little patch of grass in the front yard came from.

A quick glance at wikipedia satisfies my curiosity. Predictably, the history of the lawn can be traced to England, where plentiful rain watered the grazing fields for various livestock, which kept the wild grasses of the "lawn" trim and neat. In the 17th century, lawns became an important element in the gardens of the elite, who had their labor-intensive gardens maintained by paid laborers. The infatuation with the low-cut, green patches slowly spread to all classes of people, firmly entrenching the lawn's position in the minds of westerners as an essential part of the garden. Thanks to industrialization and complex irrigation systems, a spacious, lush lawn occupies the front and back yards of my parents' home in arid Southern California.

The seemingly thoughtless acceptance of the lawn's place in the garden, particularly in places unsuitable for water-hungry grasses, intrigues me. In Los Angeles, to keep lawns green in the middle of a desert, households use an average of 500 gallons of water a day, a third of which is wasted in the form of runoff (according to this interesting LA Times article). To speed up work, gas-powered tools, both noisy and polluting, are employed to keep the grasses clean and pretty. A crude calculation shows that lawns occupy somewhere around five percent of the LA metropolitan area, perhaps significant when considering urban sprawl. At such an environmental cost, what value do lawns bring?

Many people argue that they provide psychological comfort and provide space for children to play. The beauty of a lush green lawn gives a sense of home, or perhaps one of an oasis, buffering the mind from worldly troubles. Not to mention that children can be let loose on the forgiving surface. However, these lawn advocates implicitly downplay the beauty of gardens made with local vegetation and ignore the possibility of using public parks. Regardless, even if the benefits do outweigh the costs, Americans have so thoroughly supplanted (?) lawns in their front yards that they cease to be aware of them at all. Like so many other luxuries we take for granted, they have become an accepted necessity in our lives, and we are forced to seek further novelties in a never-ending cycle of wanting, getting, and then forgetting; a vain attempt to satisfy our all-important and never-ending needs. (hmm, sort of random)

Maybe I'm taking it too far in suggesting that it's a result of a deeper problem, our inability to question our innate, nagging demands; our busy minds that can't see through the untamed thoughts and desires to the reality that stands before us. (fix that) Maybe it's a much simpler issue. Still, I think it's worth a thought.

A house has a garden, and a garden is a lawn.




(join me here on my quest to convert a portion of my parents' back yard lawn into a vegetable garden! [ADD LINK])

will you make me sad... or happy

In The Monk and the Philosopher, Buddhist monk Matthieu Ricard discusses the subtle points of Buddhist thinking with the philosopher Jean-Francois Revel, who is also Mattheiu’s father. Towards the middle of the book, a dense 330 page dialogue between father and son, they argue the flaws and merits of Buddhism’s approach to solving social ills such as war, poverty and disease. Revel is quick to point out that Buddhism’s approach is more passive than the one taken in the West, where problems are tackled head-on using technology or by leveraging political power. Ricard counters that many of the problems can be solved from within, to which Revel objects, particularly in the case of illness.

Ricard’s arguments in the discussion of the solutions to war were particularly thought-provoking. His father asks how Buddhism would bring an end to armed conflict, to which Ricard replies, “…outer disarmament can only take place through inner disarmament. If the individual doesn’t become more peaceful, a society that’s the sum total of such individuals will never become peaceful either. … To think otherwise is surely utopian.” I find this particularly striking, since at first glance, it seems quite the opposite; the suggestion that every individual in every nation must go through a self-driven process of introspection and spiritual learning before peace can be achieved seems fairly utopian. However, this is a viewpoint in which I find much truth. How could anyone expect peace between nations, states, tribes, or even neighbors when all parties involved have not developed their compassion to a level where it rules over anger, animosity, and jealousy? Hateful thoughts lead to hateful deeds; this cannot be denied.

The argument conjures up my personal perception of the West’s general viewpoint concerning conflict -- that as long as man exists, there will be war. Greed and animosity will persevere for as long as humankind; we will never see an end to strife. However, I would like to add a conditional statement to that view, that there will always be war only if individual people do not make a conscious attempt to express love rather than hate, or gratitude rather than jealousy. If we trust the ancient wisdom of Buddhism and its science of happiness, we know that the path to individual happiness involves undertaking those very efforts -- elimination of animosity and ignorance in favor of compassion and wisdom. Therefore, however unlikely it may be that all humans simultaneously begin to practice Buddhist ideals, it is not unreasonable to assume that if we all make an effort to be individually happy, the horrors of war would become a thing of the past. All we need to do is to make an effort towards real happiness. I cannot conceive of a task for which we should have greater motivation, considering it is our own condition -- misery, happiness or something in between -- that we decide.

Certainly a logical argument, anyways.