Alana's Dharma Blog

Yesterday, I finally had my long-suffering, cracked tooth extracted. It had been all panic leading up to the extraction: I feared the pain, I feared infection, I feared catching covid all masks-off-vulnerable in the dentist’s chair. But the tooth had reached the end of its life, and an infection of a top molar could endanger mine, so it was, at long last, so long tooth.

After she had pulled it out, the dentist asked if I wanted to see the tooth, and I reached-out my hand to take it from her. After so much worry, the extraction had been painless, anticlimactic. That tooth so unassuming to look at now, was the cause of so much suffering. Or was it? As I considered the tooth more closely it dawned on me that the tooth was the cause of my pain for sure, but I was the cause of my suffering…

So let’s back up a second here for some context.

The tooth had hurt me for years, anytime I chewed on the right side of my mouth, it sent an electric shock of searing pain straight through my jaw.  Just before Covid struck I had a root canal, it seemed clear to me straight away that it didn’t work –I still had pain –but my dentist encouraged me to give it a few months to ‘settle’ before I decided to pull the tooth.

And then, there was Covid.

Long after the dentist opened, long after the whole world opened, I was still locked down in fear of Covid. Nearly 18 months with no one but Eric, avoiding even medical care to protect myself, my body. The whole time, the tooth didn’t just physically hurt, it threatened. I spent every day awaiting, dreading, the moment of imminent tooth failure. And now that failure had come, exposed me to pain, exposed me to risk, all I felt was relief that this tooth I had clung to, obsessively worried about for so long, was finally gone.

The thing is, its not just my tooth, its my whole body that I slave over, stress over, obsess over, all as I wait for its imminent failure. That was the reason for the whole 18-month Covid lockdown. This is my life. Will I feel similarly relieved at its end? And if so, why do I do this to myself, why cling so tightly to this body, when like clinging to the tooth, it causes me suffering and stress?

I suppose, much like with the tooth, I cling because of what I imagine the future will be. For the tooth I clung to avoid a nightmarish future of painful extractions and Covid catching. A future that never did come to pass.

I think without this body, I will never get all the futures I fantasize about –no post covid celebrations, no travel, no family reunions, no long life with Eric, no happy retirement. Of course, even with this body, those may never come to pass.

I cling to this body because I think I need it to become, to actualize what I imagine, to satisfy my desire, to satisfy me… but then why hasn’t it worked yet? If this body really could be satisfying, could make me self-actualized, could definitively confirmed and affirm me, why hasn’t it stepped up in the last 40ish years?

I cling because I think I need my body for the thing that happens next. But can I really need something, once I lose it, for what is next? What is next happens without it.

For all of my imaginations about this body, about all the future adventures we will have together, the only experiences that I can guarantee are ones I don’t want — sickness, pain, death. All I do is cling to the uncertainties between these definites — illness, aging and death — and with that clinging I create suffering far greater than the constant pulsing pain of a cracked tooth.

I was sitting in the kitchen while Eric was preparing lunch, watching as he tossed the shrimp peels, the lemon rind, the parsley stems, into the trash. Eric loves to cook. He derives so much of his value — his sense of identity — from his ability to feed and nourish others, to prepare food as delicious as it is wholesome. Cooking isn’t just what Eric does, Eric IS A COOK.

The scampi was, as most of Eric’s meals are, delicious. But, as I was cleaning-up, throwing away the remaining waste, I got to thinking: If a chef claims the finished meal, don’t they also need to claim the waste? The trash? The rotting parts? The shit? How can just one part of the meal, one part of the ingredients, one state of the food, reflect the chef?

The more I thought on this, the more clear it became — the scampi, all rupa, reflects only itself. It is nama that is a choosy narrator, curating a story, claiming the parts to ignore, and the parts to highlight. To be a chef we must claim only the delicious meals, only the tasty parts of a meal, only the peak moment of food, the rest is discard like the shrimp peels and the lemon rind. Incidental. Passing parts of the story. The compost heap is not us, it is not what we claim, its organization and ordering not a sign of our status as a great arranger.

My body of course is just like a meal: If my body really reflected me, why are there so many moments I am embarrassed by it? Why the dissonance between the wrinkles I see in the mirror and the me I imagine myself to be? Why would I pluck and discard the gray hairs –not me/not mine — while carefully washing and conditioning all the brown ones that are left? There is a disconnect between how I see myself –the me I want to be, the body I believe in my heart-of-hearts represents me, reflects who I am, stands-in so the whole world can see ALANA — and, well, reality.

The evidence is actually there, abundant, as plain as the compost bin after a meal, I just choose to ignore it. I am strong (ignoring those times I am recovering from injury, or ill, or have been out of the gym too long). I a beautiful (ignoring the pre-Botox state, the blemishes, the dark circles on sleepless nights). I am buttoned-up and pulled together (ignoring rumpled clothes after a flight, matted hair when I get up in the morning, the stench of my body after a hard workout). I am on top and in control, and this body reflects this deepest of identities and personality traits. Only the recalcitrant wart on my right big toe, the uncontrollable fall allergies, the tooth pain, the fact that I have been locked away from family and friends for over a year fearing a virus that can kill me, beg to differ; these tell a tale of an Alana decidedly out of control, of this body and the world it inhabits, its just that my choosy narrator decides to ignore all this.

I so deeply want this body to reflect me, to shout to the world who I am. I take every incidence of ‘success’ as proof  that I can force this body to conform to my will, my desire, my sense of who I am. I look at the post botox state and think -Eureka!! This here proves I am beautiful, I am in control, ignoring the very clear evidence that the fact I need botox in the first place clearly proves otherwise.  I pretend sometimes is proof of control. I pretend there is affirmation in the moments that a particular arrangement of rupa conforms to my desires.  I pretend that I can claim a state of something while disowning other states. I pretend I can carve out meaning — identity — from the passing states of the rupa I claim, wildly believing there is significance to the momentary impact I can have on these things. Alana, The-Beutiful -Botoxed- Great-Arranger.

Of course ‘I know’ all objects are just 4 elements. The meal, this body.  On some level, I know there is no way to shove identity into cracks between water, fire, air and earth. But still I think I can overlay meaning on top –this body isn’t me, but it can represent me. And there is of course truth to this, what is a representation after all other than something we imagine stands in for something else? My choosy narrator gets to choose. Its just that imagining something represents something else doesn’t mean it REALLY DOES. A hint that this is true is that both the object we imagine represents us, and our imagination itself changes, there is not some immutable pairing between fixed imagination and fixed object.

For a long time, I imagined going back to SF. I imagined it was my home, an SFer was who I was. SF was my future. But as fire season started getting worse, it began to dawn on me, as an asthmatic, that SF couldn’t be my future, it couldn’t be my home. It ultimately strained credulity for me to believe that a place inhospitable to my living and breathing could be who I was.

At 20 I never imagined that my 40 year old body, with its gray hairs, and sagging breasts, and eye crinkles, would represent me. To 20 year old alana, today’s body is some middle aged woman. But my imagination has, reluctantly, painfully, with much dissonance and disappointment, ultimately shifted as the body shifted.  What choice did I have? Form is not obligated to take the shapes I imagine it takes, to follow my sense of self, my desires, ultimately it is me and my own imagination that must adjust. If I fast forward a little, I consider a dying body, a corpse, the inevitable end for this body. Much like SF, there will come a point that it strains credulity to believe that this shifting, decaying, sack of skin and bones can represent me, can be me.  But, as my clinging testifies to, I am not there yet…

Right now, I am just sitting around waiting for this body to break and die. To reach a point where it is an inhospitable place to live, to breath in. To no longer be able to build my fantasies of a future life around. And while I wait, I will pay for my ignorance — my denial of the truth — with the labor, born of clinging, to preserve; the agony of loss when those efforts to preserve fail; the thousand daily embarrassments, disappointments and disgusts as I reconcile myself, again and again, to a body that simply won’t, can’t, be the reflection of me that I want it to be.

It was early 2021, vaccines came on the scene, and a faint light at the end of the Covid tunnel came into view. For over a year, I had almost totally isolated myself, I had practiced will, patients and fortitude in the name of protecting and preserving my health. Just as the world was starting to seem like it could be a safe place once again, I got quite a rude awakening; it turns out that even with isolation, even after vaccination, safety was nowhere to be found…

I had a series of health scares and one body part after another was sickening and breaking, threatening to be the death of me. It started with a broken tooth, not so bad. And then a finger that randomly turned blue and triggered a cascade of labs and blood work that showed I may have/will develop and autoimmune disease. And finally there was the suspicious growth that looked to my doctor like cervical cancer…I waited for testing, waited for results, my rheumatologist told me I just needed to wait and see if I ended up developing lupus, or mixed connective tissue disorder, or some other terrible, debilitating, degenerative disease. It dawned on me that this whole life is sitting around waiting to break and die.

Needless to say, this was a period of extreme stress. It was a period of close inspection of my body. It was a period where I really started considering the intersection between my body and stress, the dukka of rupa, the fear from form. For all of Covid, I had waited for safety, I had fantasized about the freedom a vaccine would bring. It turns out, there is no safety to be found for a breakable body and freedom isn’t an escape from the bondage of my living room, its an escape from the bonds of my deeply delusion views. In this next chapter, I share the contemplations that took shape in the early days that I realized I was just waiting to break and die.