Allthingsvegan

I started bereavement counselling in April, a session a week for eight weeks. It came to an end yesterday with my final session. I didn’t go into counselling expecting that it could in some way ‘fix’ me- there’s no cure for bereavement, grief and loss. Isaac’s death will always be there and that’s that in a way, what we have to do is learn to live with it and try to find a way to rebuild our lives without him. Bereavement counselling also isn’t the type of counselling where there is a flash of light as everything shifts, or falls into place or suddenly a new path becomes clear- at least that’s my experience. It has been a weekly opportunity for an hour to talk about ‘it’- Isaac, grief and loss, life going on and all the other stuff that starts to bleed in- with someone who is trained to listen and to prompt and question (at times). It’s been useful as somewhere to drop all my emotional stuff once a week. I think I’ll miss it now it’s gone but am probably better equipped to manage without it. It has helped me untangle some of the thoughts, find my way through them- and my counsellor has been really good at helping me do that. 

Our bereavement counselling has been provided by MacMillan. Their counselling (staffed by volunteers mainly) is available for any adults who have suffered a bereavement, it doesn’t have to be cancer related. I don’t think this is widely known. The occupational health team connected to my workplace didn’t know this. This also confirms to me the state of affairs at the moment. My referral for counselling to our local health care trust brought me to an assessment quite quickly but I was then advised that an appointment for counselling through the NHS could take ‘up to three months’- they don’t have the staff or the budget to see anyone quicker than that unless they are suicidal. Charities like MacMillan step in to the gap of an underfunded and under resourced NHS.

One of the most unpleasant side effects of grief, particularly present back in the period from January through to April, was a series of flashbacks I suffered. When Isaac died the three of us were with him. The consultant who had seen many people die from Covid told us what would happen and it was largely as he described. In Isaac’s last hour we were sitting on his hospital bed with him. I was sitting facing him, holding his hands and looking at him. When the moment came I was right in front of him and with him, looking at him. For some time afterwards, I would unexpectedly get flashbacks to the moment he died. They started happening on Tuesdays- Tuesday was the day he died- and would often come when I was driving. For an instant I was back in the room, holding his hands and looking at his face. I would smell the room and feel the pain. They would pass fairly quickly but for the moment the flashback was present, it was deeply unsettling and very unpleasant. I started to dread Tuesday mornings. Once it got past 12.45pm (the time he died) I would be ok, it would pass, but then I’d be waiting for the next Tuesday. When I started counselling in April I described all of this in one of my early sessions (the woman I spoke to from occupational health at around that time said the flashbacks were 'rather concerning' and commonly associated with PTSD). A few weeks ago, on an evening in early May as I pulled onto the motorway to drive to Tuesday night 5- a- side, I had a horrific flashback, the full on ‘back in the room’ experience. It left me short of breath, completely overwhelming me, knocking the wind out of me. Luckily the motorway was quiet and it passed quickly, I focussed on the road and sort of pushed it away. When I pulled in at the car park I got my phone out and wrote it down as a note, just described what had happened. I talked about it at counselling two days later and last week we went back to it and discussed strategies for dealing with it. We talked about it again yesterday and the realisation I haven't had one now for some time and about how I'd deal with one if I did. I haven’t had one since that one in May. Maybe the counselling, the talking, the passing of time and the acceptance has helped. 

I don’t mind some of the aspects of grief. That sounds weird I know. As time goes on and the raw, physical pain lessens, redcues as a permanent feature of living, as a day to day emotional state There are times and triggers when the crashing waves of grief and loss still come. Visiting Isaac’s grave does it. When we go, the sheer enormity of what has happened, of him dying, hits me anew (not every time but most). There are little things that trigger it: a photo popping up in my social media memories; the memory of somewhere we went or something we did; an encounter with someone who we haven’t seen since he died or who didn’t know; a memory of him randomly crossing my mind. When it comes I let it happen, I don’t try to suppress it. I almost welcome the fact that even now, nearly seven months on, it can poleaxe me, take my breath away, cause me to gulp and well up. It provides a link to him. I can feel it and then come up out of it, almost like diving into water and then getting resurfacing as you get through the surface and breathe air again. My counsellor described finding something to ground yourself at these moments, something tangible. The pain feels real and then it passes. 

Counselling has helped me with all of this. There’s no cure for what’s happened. It becomes a matter of accepting it and finding ways of coping. I’m relieved the flashbacks seem to have gone for the moment. Some of the other physical symptoms remain- the tinnitus is still present first thing in the morning and at occasions where it’s silent and I suddenly notice that my ears are ringing. My jaw clenching and tooth grinding is still there but also lessened, less acute than before. Sleep is still a bit hit and miss at times. But we agreed yesterday at the end of my final session that I've made progress- the fact that other, day to day stuff has become a bit more pre- occupying suggest that I'm moving on in some way, thoughts of Isaac and the grief are not ever-present like they were. She said there's still a 'heaviness' about me but I've come a long way from the person who turned up at the first session back in April. And that is good. 

There Goes The Cure

This 1993 song by One Dove with Andrew Weatherall on magic dust sprinkling  and production duties suggested itself to me while writing this post. Listening to it as I finished tidying the post up I thought it might be too close to the bone, and lyrically it is almost too much... 

'One cut too many/ One more life to go... losing a shadow/ Losing another soul/ So many echoes/ He's gone'. 

Tears come, again. But it fits very well and with those pianos and the post acid house/ comedown production, and that part where the dubby bass pushes its way through especially, it also feels like dawn has come and there might be a way forward after all. 

 
I’m sure that many—if not most—of our good-looking, high IQ readers have seen quirky documentarian Jeff Krulik’s underground classic “Heavy Metal Parking Lot,” a short movie shot outside a Judas Priest concert in Landover, Maryland that exchanged hands...

 
A few years ago I bought a “vintage” copy of Esquire (September 1971) and much to my delight, tucked inside was a small insert of a dozen or so pages intended to guide the incoming collegiate freshperson on cultural matters such as books, movies, and music. I’ve taken the trouble to...

Ven. Benkong Shi wants to make "life release" more humane.

By Konchog Norbu

Here’s a confession: I’m an unreconstructed birder (the term our tribe prefers to “birdwatcher”). Even as I type this I’ve got one eye on the feeder outside to see if any new species pops in. I bought fancy software to keep track of the lists of what birds I’ve seen where (you don’t even want to know how much my binoculars cost). I’ve gotten up earlier to see the springtime courtship display of the Greater Prairie-chicken in Oklahoma than I do most mornings to meditate.

I can’t explain why, but birding has been my main pastime (okay, obsession) for the past 17 years. As such, I’ve developed a wary view at best of the Buddhist practice of “life release”—reciting a blessing liturgy and setting animals free into the wild that would otherwise have remained in human captivity or killed. I’ve seen goldfish giddily dumped where they’ll become pond-dominating carp, and farm-raised game birds unboxed into areas where they’ll be coyote chow before sunrise, only to have my objections dismissed because it was “only the blessing that mattered”. I got a little more encouraged, however, by an article published in the latest Audubon magazine (“A Buddhist Ritual Gets an Ecologically Correct Update”) about how some Buddhists are beginning to engage in this practice in a much more sensitive and humane way.

To be an accomplished birder, you need to spend a lot of time outdoors, feeling the daily and seasonal rhythm of a wide variety of habitats. You become hyper-aware of not just the birds, but the whole interconnected web of life around you. When you scan a Maryland wetland, say, or a Rocky Mountain juniper forest, you know what fits and what doesn’t. And it begins to matter to you.

Thus my distress a couple years back when pieces began to appear in major media outlets–Scientific American, Agence France-Presse—detailing the sharp criticisms environmentalists were levying at some Buddhists for their practice of “life release.” (See our post, “Re-releasing live animals: is it safe?“, from July, 2012, when a similarly critical article about the practice was published in Conservation magazine.)

Throughout the Chinese-speaking world and Southeast Asia in particular, ransoming the lives of animals is an ancient way that Buddhists seek to gain positive karma, and especially to counteract health obstacles and untimely death. It’s become a hugely popular practice in recent years, with two serious negative consequences that subvert its original, compassionate intent: alien species are being released into habitats where they wreak havoc on native ecosystems, and eager entrepreneurs are capturing the same distressed animals (especially birds, including near-endangered species) to be crammed together in tiny cages and “freed” again and again.

The situation in Taiwan became so bad—tens of millions of animals reportedly dying annually in unsuitable habitats—that the government is considering imposing heavy fines, or banning unauthorized rituals altogether.

Some Asian Buddhist immigrants have brought this type of life release practice to the West. Non-native fish and snails are nudging out indigenous species and carrying the risk of disease around Vancouver, for example, while a Central Park pond and the East River in New York City have been infested with alien red-eared slider turtles set free by local Chinese Buddhist communities. With this sometimes-illegal practice is drawing the attention of environmental authorities, Audubon reports that one Chinese Buddhist monk has hit on a clever solution.

Ven. Benkong Shi and the community of Manhattan’s Grace Gratitude Buddhist Temple have been forming partnerships with local wildlife rehabilitation organizations, who rescue injured wild animals, nurse them back to health, a release them into the habitats where they actually belong. Ven. Benkong and his flock tag along, perform the traditional blessing for the animals, and make an offering to the rehab groups. He calls it “compassionate release” and his ambitions for this approach to the merit-making practice aren’t small: “My ultimate goal is for every Buddhist temple in the United States to have a rehabber or conservation group that they support and use to educate their community.”

It should be said that many Buddhist communities in the West are engaging in the practice of life release in a thoughtful way, taking care that healthy animals are being released back into their original environments in such a way as to ensure their survival there to the greatest degree possible. One instance is the annual Canada Day tradition at Nova Scotia’s Gampo Abbey in which they buy a boatload of live lobsters and then charter the boat back into the waters of the Gulf of St. Lawrence so they can ensure the lobsters are returned to their proper place (buying a lobster at the supermarket and then tossing it into the sea will almost certainly kill it due to the abrupt difference in temperature and salinity).

Then, here’s a video of Dzigar Kongtrul Rinpoche’s Guna Norling community in (appropriately named) Salvador, Brazil getting down and dirty to release clams and crabs that would have been boiled alive for dinner, back into their mangrove swamp home:

(To hear Konchog Norbu discuss the connection between Buddhism and birding, click here to stream his conversation with fellow Buddhist birder Radd Icenoggle on the More Than Birds podcast.)

Photograph by Matt Carr, via Audubon magazine.

When I declared, regarding Miley Cyrus’ twerking during the VMAs, that I could care less, apparently, the universe took note. Seeing headlines, tweets, etc. regarding Miley’s latest live performance, part of which was censored for her reportedly smoking a joint on stage, the whole of the cosmos has found a way to make me care even less, despite writing a whole couple of sentences about it. The Most Intentionally Funny Video of The Day, however, has helped blocked out today’s celebrity white noise.

Today’s MIFV was submitted by Alex Winfrey and is a mini-doc on what it’s really like in the afterlife if you’re a ghost somewhere in Ohio.

Here’s the previous pick for MIFV, in case you missed it.

Per usual, I’m taking submissions for the MIFV like the one featured above. I love finding new, hilarious videos from people hundreds and thousands of miles away, so please do send your videos so long as they follow the rules below.
-E-mail embeddable video link to thecomedybureau@gmail.com with subject line “MIFV Submission”
-Videos must have been posted online (i.e. have a time stamp that says so) within exactly two weeks from when you submit (i.e. videos uploaded more than 14 days from the day when you submit will not be up for consideration)
-Don’t add any cover letters or explanations; please just send the link

Ram Dass has spoken four words to me so far, and the cosmic humor has already begun to flow. Some initial audio trouble has just been resolved, and the famed spiritual teacher’s voice has materialized from my laptop, kicking off our Skype session with an unforgettable opening line:

“Can you hear now?”

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In an almost mythical ABC After School Special from 1987 titled The Day My Kid Went Punk, a wholesome all-American family (with Love Boat‘s “Doc,” Bernie Kopell as the worried dad) has to deal with uh… tragedy when their “normal” son starts wearing black lipstick, cuts his hair into a Mohawk and generally goes for an extreme “Goth Eye for the Straight Guy” make-over…

“Nice kid. Quiet. Plays classical violin…”

“Oh, really? Well a Ziggy Ziggy Sputnik lookalike is sitting outside in the lobby for us hire him as our daycare counselor.”

“Who are you talking about? Who is Ziggy Ziggy whatsit?”

Just the above image made the viral rounds a few years back, but this is the longest clip yet of this elusive bit of cult TV to appear on YouTube. Who has the entire thing?