Throwing up at Mass Eye and Ear

My teacher Sophie’s hard day in Boston

Sophie shares a pillow with a tip for the maid at AC Hotel, Cambridge

To hear the related 5-minute audio file that I uploaded today as my Morning Journal flash briefing for Alexa devices, please click on the play button:

An exercise in staying with the mess

Yesterday while Darlene was getting an eye exam at Mass Eye and Ear in Boston, I settled in with my tech toys for a quiet hour of waiting. Sophie lay in her black travel bag on the chair next to me.

She soon became restless, pressing at the sides of the bag.

Despite the heavy rain, I suspected she needed a visit to the sidewalk to do some business. Afterward, she was quiet for a while but then began whimpering. I took her out of the bag and put her on my lap, hoping to comfort her. When I saw her shoulders heaving, I set her down on the carpet where she threw up.

I daubed some of it with my handkerchief, then approached the receptionist desk. “I’ve made a mess,” I told the young man on duty. “Would you have some paper towels I could use?”

He brought a long tail of paper towels to me. I cleaned stuff up, and Sophie once more quieted down. Then she became restless again. We took another trip into the rain, where she let go from the other end. It wasn’t pretty.

What surprised me about our adventure at Mass Eye and Ear was how not unpleasant it was. I love our four-and-a-half-pound dog. I knew she was in real distress in a strange place. I forgot to be disgusted. I stayed with the mess and cleaned it up as best I could.

Yesterday evening I attended a session on Buddhism and the 12 Steps led by a friend of mine in Lexington. Twelve of us sat for about 20 minutes in person at a church and online by Zoom. John’s dharma talk included a quote from Joko Beck’s book, Everyday Zen: Love and Work, published in 1989.

“If you want your life to truly transform,” Beck wrote, “you do this by just staying with the mess.”

She went on to suggest that if a practitioner is patient in the messy room of his or her life, they might notice they’ve left a window open, and a little bird comes in briefly. If you’re still, the bird might return. “If you’re hospitable, it might even come and live with you once in a while, for a week or so.”

In my case, it’s a little dog that came to live with us in the early days of the pandemic. She’s still here, teaching me.