Caveat: how to know when your nap is finished

Being convalescent from such major surgery, I find myself (re-)discovering and mulling over very simple truths and ideas.

For example:

Q: How can you know when your nap is finished?

A: You wake up.



pictureI have been reading a book by the Vietnamese monk, Thich Nhat Hanh, The Heart of the Buddha’s Teaching. It’s not as “mainstream” nor as syncretistic as many of his books – it’s a genuine introduction to Buddhist practice and goes into some detail on the doctrines and dogmas that embellish the history of the tradition.

He’s doing a very good job of addressing one of my primary complaints (or frustrations) with how Buddhist practice is often presented, which is that it seems “obsessed” with suffering, and my feeling that all that dwelling on suffering can’t be good. It was one of the things I least liked about my 10 days as a Buddhist practitioner at the Vipassana retreat in Northern Illinois in December of 2009.

The monk writes, “Our suffering is holy if we embrace it and look deeply into it. If we don’t, it isn’t holy at all. We just drown in the ocean of our suffering.” (p. 9). Later he elaborates: “It is true that the Buddha taught the truth of suffering, but he also taught the truth of ‘dwelling happily in things as they are’ (drishta dharma sukha viharin). To succeed in the practice, we must stop trying to prove that everything is suffering.” (p. 23).

Nhat Hanh goes on to use the metaphor of a mother with a crying baby. What does a good mother do with a crying baby? She holds and soothes and comforts it, while carefully analyzing and solving the possible causes of the crying: hunger, discomfort, frustration, insomnia, disease, etc. Likewise, our suffering is to be recognized and then held and soothed but also analyzed, like a mother with her crying baby.

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Caveat: 홍삼

pictureKoreans love their ginseng (인삼 [in-sam]). It’s a matter of both tradition and national pride (not to mention a profitable national industry, too), and they strongly believe in ginseng’s curative and health-supplementing properties – and then there’s the aphrodesiac cult that surrounds it.

Yesterday when visiting Curt, he bought me a gift of Red Ginseng Extract. The “red” in red ginseng (홍삼 [hong-sam]) refers not to a subspecies of the plant but rather to a result of a specific curing process involving steaming and sun-drying.

The extract comes in little foil envelopes, which you open and then you squeeze the juice out into your mouth. So I got a “one month” set, 30 individual-dose envelopes (see picture below) that I’m supposed to take once-a-day. I opened and took my first extract this morning.

Like most forms of alternative medicine, I harbor my scepticisms. But red ginseng as an anti-cancer agent actually has a double-blind-study paper trail (mostly the work of fanatical Korean scientists trying to justify their traditional medicine – but still) where at least some of the studies have not been rejected on methodological grounds by the established global medical community. And there’s not any evidence of harm from red ginseng. So I figured, what the hey – I’m becoming Korean, right?

Straight up red ginseng extract has a strong earthy taste. I have sometimes described it as “dirt flavored.” Being charitable, I would describe it as similar to the aftertaste of strong maple syrup, but with absolutely zero of the sweetness. It’s not horrible, anyway. I had some red ginseng flavored cooking vinegar that went well in certain savory concoctions that I used up a few months back.

Anyway, because Koreans take their Red Ginseng so seriously, it comes packaged (and priced!) like a luxury good (see picture above). I think Curt spent way too much money on this gift – let’s just say, it’s more expensive than an outpatient visit to the cancer hospital by a factor of about 500 (see yesterday’s post).

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Caveat: After Exhilaration… Exhaustion

After the exhilaration of the first two days of post-hospital wears off, I begin to feel the tiredness lurking beneath. After pushing too hard, maybe, today, I feel downright exhausted. The kind of “you’re sick and recovering exhausted” that could be a bad flu but in this case is rather more and less than that at the same time.

pictureStepping out from my apartment, while waiting for Andrew to run back up to get something he’d forgotten, I saw a cicada (right). It was making that mesmerizing loud “weee-wan-wan-waaaan” sound of Asian cicadas.

I stopped by work (KarmaPlus) this morning and straightened accounts with Curt some, and dropped in for 5 minutes with my HSTEPS class, to prove I was alive. I was pleased to be with my students, some of whom I’ve known more than 2 years now.

Then we went to the hospital for an outpatient wound-redressing and short consult. Total charge, after insurance: 200 won (18 cents?). Golly, let me see what I have in my pocket for that.

I learned that I had mis-learned the 10th floor resident doctor’s name, whom I’ve been calling Dr Suh in this here blog – it’s in fact Dr Seok. I learned it when I tried to give him a thank-you card. Oops. I will correct it in the record, but leave this mea culpa here. He is a very kind young man. And I feel like an “old man” that I have to say “kind young man” that way, rather than just “kind man.”

Then, ambitiously, Andrew and I took the bus to Bucheon to see my friend Peter. I thought, how tiring can that be, taking at bus to Bucheon? Once there, very hungry, we splurged on pizza. Which was great – it turned out to be one of the easiest things to eat given my current mouth complications, much as I suspected. The combination of long morning plus bus ride plus heavy lunch, however, left me exhausted. We lounged around Peter’s apartment for a few hours and ended up just coming home.

Now I’m going to take a nap.

Peter’s apartment building allows access to the roof, so despite the smogginess of the day, I took some pictures (below). The building has a rooftop garden.

Looking north (toward Ilsan, way out of view here).

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Looking west.

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Looking south(-ish … maybe more like southeast).

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Looking east.

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Looking at Andrew and Peter.

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Looking at a charming rooftop tree.

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