/ Rio / Leave a comment

The violence has to stop. You don’t end violence by being violent, by encouraging violence or supporting violence, you end it by making a commitment to non-violence regardless of fear for you own safety, the opinions of others, and your own comfort and prosperity.

/ Rio / 2 Comments

The Birthday Post

Today I am turning 66 years old. It’s not a big deal except I never thought I’d live this long! I must say, I’ve always loved my birthday.

One of the stories my mother told me frequently, one of the rare stories she told me where I somehow made her laugh, was once when I was playing alone in the basement (as per usual) she came downstairs and said, “I have a surprise for you! Today your father is staying home from work!” and apparently, I said, obviously disappointed, “I thought you were going to tell me it was my birthday.”

I don’t know quite what to make of that story except that it proves that from an early age (post talking and pre memory) I loved my birthday.

But not parties. I hate parties. Even now I hate all birthday parties.

It’s like inviting strangers over to trample all over your flower beds, or in my case one year, draw pubic hair and nipples on all your Barbies. I didn’t have a lot of friends but I usually had one friend and they hated birthday parties as much as I did (hence the friendship).

So now I have grandkids who have parents who throw MASSIVE PARTIES for them sometimes in LOUD ARCADES. Honestly, at times CHEMO THERAPY felt like a more bearable assault on my senses. But I learned early that face painting at these events helped me focus and could allow me to be “at the party” without dealing with the chaos all around.

It’s partly how I became “Rio The Clown”.

My daughter texts me, “You don’t have to come if you don’t want,” meaning to my Granddaughter’s party.

For my birthday we are going to a nice restaurant for lunch, on the lakefront, a part of my new city that I haven’t been able to get to on my own as there is no bus. I am excited.

This morning I am doing one of the things I love to do, write, and better yet, I’m not alone as I am running the clock for a Breakfast Sprint with the SFF group of Toronto with one of its members (and my friend)! Yay!

One of my other favourite things to do is a day long zen practice and for many years I had the pleasure and joy of having a practice interview with my then teacher, Shikai Zuiko Sensei. She died during the pandemic. We were no longer teacher and student but the last time I saw her, after the first few moments of sitting across from her, it was as it always was, sitting on the zafu across from her, a remarkable gift.

I remember every birthday she’d remind me, “Thank your mother because she did all the work on the day you were born”.

And it will be something I do today. I will thank my mother.

I know all these things I write here may seem to be more permanent and real because they are written down. I am not talking about the “truth” though I have tried to be clear and honest always, maybe writing a memoir can’t help but be a bit of conceit, after all, I am still barely an adult. But none of what I write can compare to how real this moment is. Always renewing itself, always reborn as this moment.

I have my hands on the keyboard. Wrists rest on the ergonomic supports. Index fingers reassuringly register the bumps on the F key and the J keys. All the other fingers fall on their “home keys”. A map of the keyboard arises in my mind, but it isn’t a visual map, it is a spatial map, a proximity and associative map.

If my hands believed they held a world, who would be the letter Q?

And did you get that? I managed to fit in a Star Trek the Next Generation reference!

Happy Birthday Me!

(Thanks mom for birthing me.)

The Clear Button

/ Rio / Leave a comment

a short story

As soon as she woke her first thought was always which button to push.

She liked The Blue Button because that would dispense the blue pill which gave her a blue-sky way of looking at things. She’d settle back into her soft chair and imagine all the possibilities. That was good for half a day.

She liked the Green Button too because that pill made her feel fresh and she could run around and clean: Get all the food waste in the green bin, dishes in the dishwasher, laundry sorted, what needed to be presoaked, soaking. While the machines were going, she could shine the shiny surfaces, re-organize her drawers and then, once the laundry was done, iron smooth everything that could be ironed. She had a really good time. The green pill gave her a feeling of accomplishment that would last for two days.

The Black Button dispensed the black pill which made her sleep a deep, solid sleep that she knew she really, really, really, times ten to the power ten, needed. And sometimes that was good for a week.

She liked all the buttons. She liked all the pills.

She especially liked the Purple Button saved for special occasions and weekends because it dispensed the purple pill that made her see gods and goddesses and flowers taller than tall buildings and giant butterflies and herself as the beautiful creature that was made of pure love—The Pink Button, that dispensed the pink, silly-laughing pill for long chats with friends—the Checkered Button was for the checkered pill that made her smart so she could fix things and sell them on-line when she needed extra credit for shopping—she liked The Red Button because of the red pill, but she was shy so it was discretely hidden under her bed.

But then there was The Clear Button. She had never pushed it. She wasn’t sure why except it seemed more dangerous than anything she could ever do in her entire life, even more dangerous than going a whole day without pushing any buttons at all.

She thought, perhaps, maybe, she’d seen someone do this—push the clear button, but it was hard for her to think about because, whoever they were, they were gone. Simply vanished. As if some gigantic hand just swooped in and removed them.

No. She would not push the clear button.

She would push the Green Button.

After taking the green pill she re-potted her potted plants and she went on line and ordered more. Then she ordered a yoga matt, signed up for some on-line classes in meditation, donated to a charity and as soon as everything was delivered (rush) arranged all her new plants and the numerous bronze statues of various deities in front of the clear button until you could no longer see it. She felt a great sense of spiritual calm and accomplishment that lasted for two days. On the third day she pushed the black button.

A week later she woke and before getting out of bed, she thought about the clear button. She wished she could remember who it was that she had known who pushed it. It was like an itch in her brain. There was no pill to take care of the feeling. No button to push.

She sat up, swatting away the enormous fronds of greenery. She crawled under the low hanging foliage and arrived at the alter of the numerous deities and knocked them aside and found the clear button and pushed it.

And nothing happened.

There was no clear pill.

She just sat there.

Original Face

/ Rio / Leave a comment

“Show me your original face, the face you had before your mother and father were born.”


It is a Zen koan.


The circumstances of our lives lead to this and that, and on, and on, in all directions. And when we hear of the direction some people’s lives take, we have to wonder. For example, how could an old man go into a dance hall and kill a bunch of old people, his peers, while they were doing nothing other than just learning to ballroom dance? What brought him to such a state of congealed anger that he could do something so terrible?


When I am looking forward to my children’s future and the lives of their children and then looking back to when they were new babies, and then thinking of all the life that was before, all the family stories, all of that, and trouble and struggle and sorrow well I know anything can happen.


And yet here I am. Here you are.


My house of cards will be swept away. It has been swept away before, more than once. And it will go along with the last breath of air from my lungs, just as it should. Trying to try to carve any history in stone or lock into a belief for the future, horrible or wonderous, these things are all delusions and all evaporate in the brilliance of this moment.


“Original Face” is not your face or my face. It’s not even what we think of as Buddha, or Jesus or God. It is when this house of cards falls away and we wake up as a human being here, before all our thinking about it.


I woke up this morning early, thinking I would try to sleep longer because I have a busy day ahead. I’d not been sleeping and was just mulling over things, lying in bed. In the dim light of my room, through the bedroom door I saw, in the dim light of the living room, the framed photo that hangs on the wall in the dining area.


Suddenly I saw my life, viewed from one room looking at another room and through that room to another, on and on and ending with a photograph hanging on a wall that I couldn’t even see. It might as well have been a portrait of an artist, or a pipe, or temple.
But I understood.


So, I got up and did what needed to be done. And then I wrote this.

Words about dying and not dying

/ Rio / 4 Comments

I went to bed last night thinking about my granddaughter who is at an age when a kid likes things to be cut and dried. At least that was what I have observed from the many four-year old’s I’ve known.


Right now, she seems interested in death. She asked me if I would die. She knows her other Grandmother died. The cat Penny died. She even made-up song about “Dieing Dead”. So I told her everyone dies but usually not until they are old.

She asked me, “Why are you old Nana?”

“I’m old because I’ve lived a long time.”

“Because you haven’t died?”

This is why I love four-year-olds. They will address the elephant in the room. They will even play with that elephant.

In the spirit of playing with the dead elephant in the room, I came up with the following list of reasons people die, maybe not for a four-year-old but to just put things in perspective for myself.

Reasons people die:

  • Sometimes because they’re old and their body is just worn out,
  • Sometimes because they’ve been really, really sick and their body can’t work any more.
  • Sometimes, even though their bodies might keep going a long time, they need more and more medicine and care and even if they have those things most days it still just hurts too much, in their body and in their emotions and they want to die.
  • Sometimes because they think they’ve done everything that they could in their life and there isn’t much more and no one they love to do it with, and that is harder for them than not dying. This happens too often even though sometimes they’re still young and don’t know that things are always changing. And if they can just hold, on for bit more things can change for them too.
  • Sometimes it’s an accident that is nobody’s fault.
  • Sometimes there’s a war or a disaster and they can’t get to someplace safe. (Sometimes the war and the disaster happen in their own house.)
  • Sometimes it’s because they are reckless and do dangerous things, or angry things, or stupid things.
  • Everyone dies. But it is important to remember, if you are reading this list, you are alive and you have breath in your body. Even if it catches as you inhale. Feel it.  Even if you say to yourself, “this is a sad breath” or “this is a difficult breath”. You can Be Present. It is a wonderful thing peculiar to being alive.

I think about people I have loved who have died. I can remember the sound of their voice and how it felt when they walked beside me, so clearly, I can talk to them and feel comforted.

The hardest part of loving some one who has died is missing them. So, thinking about how some might suffer when I die makes me sad. But when I think about those I’ve loved and when I remember them and experience that feeling of closeness, I can hope the same for any who might miss me.

I try to share laughter as much and as often as I can with everyone so they will remember that sound more than anything else. As for the rest, not my problem.

This is how I think of my death on a good day:

I enjoy naps. I really feel good just lying down and falling asleep in the middle of the day. And I’m never scared about bad dreams because everyday my nap comes with a soft sort of dream that is in all my favourite colours. During these naps I don’t know what is going on in the world around me at all, and when I wake up, I feel happy.

I have no reason to think that my death will be any different though I don’t really think I will wake up in a different place. But maybe… And perhaps I’ll wake up to the news of my death (?!) and then chose to ignore it and go back to sleep.

I hope my last thought won’t be that others will grieve greatly. Maybe if they read this they will realize they shouldn’t.

My death won’t be for a while. Yay! So there’s time to work on not suffering in life, even if it sometimes hurts, which sounds crazy, but there you have it. Work on it. Right now. As they say in Zen “don’t waste time”.