Mystery Photo Explained.

        I am preparing a Powerpoint talk on Buddhism at the request of a book club that I attend at my current church in my home community. I do not claim to really know or practice Buddhism to an adequate degree, but I have also attended weekly meetings to a meditative and spiritually seeking group of folks of various religious backgrounds and traditions which does have some Buddhist leanings and which meets in a local Mindfulness center which is Buddhist. I therefore know enough that I want to try to give at least an idea of the basics belief system of Buddhism. Some of the more esoteric ideas about non-self and the lack of a belief in an actual personified deity seem quite alien to our Western patterns of religious thought. Yet Buddhism and at least one of its regular practices, that is various forms of meditation, have gained a foothold in Western practices. Meditation indeed has a multitude of benefits both for mental health, and even for physical health. Such a practice is easy to establish but perhaps somewhat difficult to stick to. The group I am giving this talk to is strongly Christian, actually the local equivalent of the Church I grew up in located in a small town in northern Illinois. The congregation of my new church is fairly intellectual and well educated and some of them are curious about Buddhist traditions. As I say, I don't know much, but I think I know more than my audience.

         Buddhism is older than Christianity, with the Buddha's life occurring at about 500 B.C.E. For 400 years, his teachings were not even written down because the Buddha himself discouraged recording them. For several centuries the sutras, ie the teachings, were memorized and orally transferred by monks dedicated to such an occupation. However, once their written recording occurred, another 2 millenium's passage has led to multiple lists of beliefs, many interpretations, and blosoming of numerous different sects of practice. It may take a lifetime of study to fully understand all these variations. Still there are some very basic beliefs mostly in numbered lists that pertain to all Buddhist beliefs. My plan in my talk is to present some of those basic belief systems.

         A significant resource for me has been Thich Nhat Hanh's book: "The Heart of the Buddha's Teaching: Transforming Suffering into Peace, Joy, and Liberation." Thich Nhat Hanh, affectionately called Thai or Thay, was a Vietnamese monk since age 16 who is credited with bringing what he called "Engaging Buddhism" to the West. He had to leave Vietnam during the 1970s due to the Vietnamese War and its aftermath. He established a retreat center in France called "Plum Village." He finally had a very disabling stroke, but was able to return to his home city of Hue, Vietnam and died there in 2022. He has written many books and his style of teaching is very approachable and very easy to read.

         Of course, during my many world travels, my husband and I visited several countries in East Asia where Buddhism is a significant if not the dominant religion. We visited several places in India important in the Buddha's life and saw the monuments there. In China, after supression of significant Buddhist presence during the Revolution, Buddhism is being allowed to return, though it is still heavily monitored and controlled by the Comunist Party. Buddhism has been historically and still is a strong presence in both Cambodia and in Thailand. And of course, Tibet is the source of one very large and prominent variety of Buddhist thought. I have a multitude of photos of all these places. Therefore, I plan to intersperse these photos amongst the lists of the Buddhist belief system numbered bullet points.

         Hence I came upon some photos of the Potala Palace in Lhasa, Tibet. This imposing structure on a hilltop in the middle of the capitol city of Tibet. It was the home of the Dalai Llama before he was exiled from Tibet to Dharamsala, India, by the Chinese takeover. It also was home to multiple monks, with multiple shrines and memorils and relics of many boddhisatvas throughout Tibetan Buddhist history. I have always said that after visiting Tibet, I understood the strong presence of spirituality there of whatever kind. At the altitude of Lhasa, oxygen is scarce. The landscape is harchnd austere. And it is so very different a culture from what we know in the West. Yet the people are so friendly and outgoing, that one can't help but feel an opening of the heart, and a sense of peace and wonder.

         So here is a photo, your Mystery Photo, of the Potala Palace in the center of Lhasa, Tibet.

Mystery Photo Reinstated

In my past as the author of this blog, I occasionally tried to stump you with a photo from somewhere in my husband's and my world travels. Well I am no longer making such long jaunts, and my husband has moved to another realm, but here is one of my husband's photos from a very famous city in the world. I really think that this one should be pretty easy. Watch for an upcoming blog with more photos from this great city.

Censorship in 2023: I am angry!

I am very disappointed, offended, insulted, angry. Well, I have gotten some of those feelings out into these words and feel very slightly better. As a physician I know that bottling up and burying feelings of anger and frustration are not good for our physical health. But I never thought I would be faced with such a cause for all this frustration in 2023 in the United States of America. I have been a user of Facebook for many many years. Most of my blogs here are informational and sometimes personal, but I like to think usually examples of fairly OK writing and my hope was always that they would provide some value to others by representing both educational topics and just topics about living life during the last 13 years of my postings. I wrote a blog here, the one previous to this one, dated May 2023, entitled Delinquency. In it I apologized for not having posted in a long while. I also like to use these blogs aa an oral history of a time that was very trying for our world with Covid 19 and the results of this epidemic and also justaposting these historical times with my own personal trials of the last several years. I tried to post a link to the blog of May 2023 just now and it was censored by Facebook. I invite you to read this previous blog. It is the one just prior to this one that I am writing right now. I don't feel that it was exceptionally political. In fact I think it was rather factual. I would suspect that at least 2/3 of our current population in the United States if not more would agree with my concerns. It was not judgmental, it was not derogatory. It was as far as I can tell not racist, or homophobic or any other type of ...phobic. But Facebook judged it not fit for public consumption and censored me. Until I erased it, I was not allowed to post anything further on Facebook. Any way that I tried to get the link into a post on Facebook as I had done in the past, was censored. Finally I entered an incomplete link asking readers to guess the rest of the link so that some might find their way to my blog. Just as an aside, in the past I have done this many times, and there has been no problem Also in the past when I posted very frequently on the blog, you could find that blog just by googling "Renaissance Woman Retired" and the link would come up. Now since I have not been posting very much, that is no longer the case. More importantly, I would like my current readers here to read that former post at blogspot, and tell me what needed censoring there. I am just curious what my readers think. What did the current AI of Facebook identify that was unfit for general consumption? Yes there is a fairly dismal look at some of the current affairs around the world. So are we not allowed to look at bad situations, or negative outcomes? Are we expected as writers to only state "apple pie in the sky" pollyannaish views now? Is it a fact that human beings can't take a critical look at what is happening around our country, in our cities, at our border, and indeed in the world? If that is so, I feel we all have a lot to worry about. This post is critical and negative and so I am sure that Facebook will not allow it to be posted, so I will not even try. Therefore, I am resorting to my old standby, blogspot, to allow me to vent my frustrations. I think we have a lot to worry about here.

Delinquency is My Middle Name.

What can I write here? An apology to any of my readers that are still out there? Some excuses. Annoying affirmations. I don't know. I guess I will just stick to the facts: I have not posted here in over 3 years. So I will just deal in hard on facts! The fact is that we are now beginning the 4th year in Covid. Certainly things have improved a great deal. We are not only no longer in a lock down. We are no longer wearing masks. And most of us are now not consciously trying to avoid people, or trying to stay six feet away from others when out and about. I just returned from a trip from my home in Wisconsin to visit my younger son's family in San Clemente, CA. Flights are very crowded now, ie full planes on almost every route. Rarely do you see someone wearing a mask in the airport and I saw no one else on my flight wearing a mask of any kind, regular cheap around the ear kinds, or N 95 masks. There just are none. I did wear a mask on the way out because I didn't want to get there for my several day visit and then start to get sick. The one time that I got Covid in August of 2022, I came down with symptoms 24 hours after the known exposure so I knew it could happen rapidly. And I wore the mask on the return trip from CA just because it wasn't a significant discomfort on the way out so why change on the way back. And getting Covid is still an annoying discomfort. You need to isolate still. I as a physician do not feel I can go out to public places and be close to others unless I have turned from positive on the home testing devices to negative. The one time I got Covid, I just had maybe 4 days of significant symptoms but it took 11 days for me to turn negative. That is very annoying because I just felt I had to stay home. Covid is still around. Every few days one hears of someone we know that has been ill. Yet when I ask my surgeon son about the situation in the hospital, he answers that it is normal. Everything is running as smoothly as before Covid, though there are still some precautions being taken. Elective surgery is still precluded in the presence of Covid positivity in the patient. And there are still some cases of severe SARS (Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome) in the ICU, but mostly in patients with other compromising illnesses. Visitors to outpatient care now often see a posted notice that wearing a mask is optional and there is no longer a greeter asking every person entering the clinic a group of questions about recent possible symptoms of any Covid like illness. Our society as a whole still shows signs of what we have gone through. Many businesses and restaurants in particular have closed. People now have discovered multiple different ways to go shopping, to do business online, even to seek medical consultation online, and certainly there is evidence that the long shutdown of schools have left our young people at least a year behind in their schooling if not more. We still do not know the social scars that the absence from school has caused. Our society seems still somehow anxious, fearful, angry, lacking civility, and common decency, and crime rates have skyrocketed. There is dramatic inflation that is slowing the economy. In person retail has been irreparably damaged in many ways. Small colleges are closing because of multiple effects: smaller enrollment, inflation of costs, and who knows what else. There have been a tiny number of bank closings, but these have been explained away as caused by poor management, and the government has extended FDIC coverage to all patrons of those couple banks. Our country is engaged in a proxy war in Ukraine and our enemies around the world seem emboldened. The causes of all of these crises and others are multifactorial and can not be entirely blamed on Covid though it no doubt has had some effect everywhere. How do we individually and societally deal with all of these changes and our current collective malaise? There is no easy answer. But I think that we need to return to some of our former values. Church attendance is reduced. Small kindnesses and politeness, and deeper compassion seem hard to practice. There are occurrances of road rage, of airline passengers just totally losing control of their emotions and striking out at others, of course, the crime waves in cities, and other examples demonstrate our collective anxiety and even despair. So we need to return to what could be called "Church" practices, no matter what the exact spiritual tradition or belief system. Almost all world religions have practices and rituals that reach beyond the individual and express caring, compassion and concern for others. We need to start practicing those traditions again. After 50 years of my life, while educating myself, raising a family, maintaining a household while working fulltime as a physician, I had ceased going to church. I always had an active spiritual practice but it was irregular and not based in collective society. I meditated, attending a spiritual seeking group weekly, and read a lot. But I was not a participating member of a large traditionally practicing religion. Within the last year I have returned to a church similar to the one in which I grew up...a Protestant sect, called Congregationalists, which is mostly baed on Calvinistic thought, but has not succumbed to mergers with other Protestant denominations. I have found a very accepting and welcoming community in that church and have become significantly more involved in the activities there. I think that has helped me with some of my pessimism about the current state of affairs around the world. It is good to have at least weekly attempts to find goodness in people and to find hope that the current cycle is a passing phase of humanity's existance and to return to acts of kindness and good deeds for our fellows that hopefully will turn us all around. For me at least, this has helped. I don't have any other magic ideas. I think everyone has to find their own best pathway but I think that many of the traditional ones used in the past would work for each of us. We must remember that the causes of our current societal malaise is multifactorial and very complex. No single solution will work to solve the ills but I think that small steps that are familiar to each of us individually, especially those with which we grew up, will help us cross the bridge to some sort of world change that is better. We must hope and build faith that this will happen. I myself plan to continue to update this old fashioned blog with some new posts that hopefully will be worth reading. A lot has changed in my life in the past 3 years and maybe just reading about some of my experiences and how I handled them will be of some help to my readers. I hope so.