Nine months after I moved to Boulder, I left for Minneapolis to get married. Neil, the man I had been with since Taos, wanted to move there. It was his hometown and he could work for his father. I was too much in love not to go with him. He went ahead and I followed a few months later. As I drove my car across Nebraska, I remembered what the palm reader outside of Albuquerque had said a long time before: “You’re going to go some place you’ve never been before. Where you know no one. Into the deep north. You’ll do this for the love of a man.”
Minnesota was certainly as far north as I had ever been.
Part Three
I KNEW NO ONE IN Minneapolis when I moved there except Neil, the man I was going to marry. I was thirty years old. We had a small wedding in my father-in-law’s backyard. The wedding cake was chocolate. I liked that. The trees were deep green—it was late spring—and the sky was gray. During our marriage ceremony, a vase of gladioli fell over. I wore a gardenia in my hair, and as the judge spoke our vows, I heard a semi rumbling in the distance.
That summer was humid, full of mosquitoes. We lived in the lower half of a house in the Cedar-Riverside area, an old hippie and radical student ghetto. A Mr. Steak sign blinked across the street next to a Mobil gas station where I went to purchase chewing gum. Down the block was a Pontillo’s pizzeria.
I spent the first months in Minnesota in a daze, walking to the North Country food coop, down cement streets, past St. Mary’s Hospital, Augsburg College, and brick and shingled duplexes. Electric pink petunias grew all over the place, and peonies, zinnias, columbines—I learned all their names. This was a civilized place, square lawns, gardens along house foundations, one-way street signs, posters for concerts and performances stapled to telephone poles. I could hear the hum of Interstate 94 nearby and a few blocks away was the Mississippi River. The Mississippi River! I thought. Home of America and Huck Finn. I walked there often, staring down at it, trying to make it more than a river, trying to give it the essence of why my grandfather packed up and left Russia for these United States.
Before I moved to Minnesota, I had heard that there was a Zen center with a Zen teacher in the Twin Cities. People in Boulder told me the teacher’s name was Katagiri Roshi. A few knew him, said he was strict—and good. I gulped. Zen? I had heard it was hard, austere, tough. The colors were black and white. Zen was Buddhism from Japan. The meditation room in Boulder had gold and orange and red. It reflected the Tibetan culture.
Eventually, for Buddhism to take root in the United States, it would have to become American Buddhism. That would evolve slowly. It would grow to include feminism, gay and lesbian culture, psychology, apple pie, African-American spirituals. It would be up to us to figure out what was essentially American, what was culture, and what was Buddhism, to taste its essence beyond Tibetan or Japanese culture, but first we had to sink into Buddhism in the culture it had lived in. Japanese and Tibetan cultures came with Buddhism to America; they were inseparable. You could not pull Tibet out of Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche, yet he had adapted to America. He wore suits, spoke English, drove a car. In his very body, Tibetan Buddhism was moving slowly over into American Buddhism, because he had planted his body on American soil.
For me, Buddhism was Buddhism. I wasn’t interested in the cultural part. I just wanted it; a light had been lit. I wanted to do formal sittings with other people. This determination was important when I moved to Minnesota. I didn’t say to myself, “Well, I don’t know. I like Thailand. I want to study Thailand’s Buddhism,” or, “Gee, I took refuge with Trungpa. I’ll be with him forever, stay loyal even though he is a thousand miles away and I can’t study directly with him,” or, “I don’t know. I’ll see just how hard this Katagiri Roshi is. If it’s too hard, I don’t want to do it.” I wasn’t fussy about the form. I trusted in something essential about it.
I’ve watched meditation students come and go. They use anything as an excuse—“My knee hurt,” “The teacher said he instead of she,” “The schedule just wasn’t good for me.” There is no excuse: If you want it, go for it. Don’t let anything toss you away. The other extreme is to accept blindly everything a teacher does: He’s sleeping indiscriminately with the women in the community and you think, “Well, it’s part of the teachings.” It is best to stay alive, alert, trust yourself, but not give up, no matter what the situation. Get in there, stay in there, figure it out. If we want the teachings we have to let ourselves be hungry. If a green pepper is offered, eat it. If it’s steak, devour it. If it’s something indigestible—a turd, a cement block, a shoe—figure out what to do with it, but don’t back away.
It is the same for writing. Some people write for fifteen years with no success and then decide to quit. Don’t look for success and don’t quit. If you want writing, write under all circumstances. Success will or will not come, in this lifetime or the next. Success is none of our business. It comes from outside. Our job is to write, to not look up from our notebook and wonder how much money Norman Mailer earns.
Just the fact that Katagiri was called “roshi,” Zen master, meant that his authority had been bestowed upon him. This helped me to trust him as a teacher. He was connected to a lineage that reached all the way back to Shakyamuni Buddha. He didn’t just wake up one morning and say, “Okay, now I’m a Zen master.” He had training; he was on solid ground. His position was not based on his individual human ego.
There have been many self-declared gurus in America. On what basis do they anoint themselves? A momentary flash into the cosmos? It takes a lot of work and a foundation to maintain a deep insight in your daily life and then be able to transmit it to your students, but America is hungry and we often don’t care about quality. We are quick to make someone a teacher. There are individuals with tremendous charisma, but unless they are rooted, grounded in a lineage, unless they are connected and answerable to other people, that energy can go amok. Hitler had charisma; so did Charles Manson. But it was unrooted and, therefore, dangerous. Rajneesh, who owned a hundred Rolls Royces and had a community in Antelope, Oregon, probably had a deep enlightenment experience, but he didn’t back it with practice, a way to digest it in his daily life, a way to transmit it to all his cells moment by moment. It wasn’t grounded.
I didn’t know whether I’d like Katagiri—that didn’t seem important to me, my individual likes and dislikes. I knew that he knew something, and that if I surrendered, didn’t fight the form of the teaching, I could learn something. He was tough? I’d learn the tough form of Buddhism. Of course, I didn’t understand all this that first day I encountered him, but just as with writing, I wanted something and wasn’t sure of what it was I wanted. I just had energy, a direction, and determination.
On a Thursday morning three weeks after I moved to Minneapolis, I looked up the address of the Minnesota Zen Meditation Center in the telephone book: 3343 East Calhoun Parkway. I copied the address on a slip of paper and stuck it in my pocket. I was standing in our black-and-white linoleum kitchen. The kitchen cabinets were white, but held darker shadows. The sky was still gray outside. I learned that the Midwest had predominantly gray days. I walked to the corner bus stop at Twenty-fifth and Riverside, and when the bus pulled up, I told the driver, “I want to go to Zen Center.”
“What?” he said. He had red hair, brown eves, and was clean-shaven.
“Zen Center,” I articulated. I naively thought everyone would know about it; after all, even people in Boulder knew about Katagiri.
He shook his head. “Never heard of it.”
I pulled the address out of my pocket. “Here it is.”
“Oh,” and he explained the buses and transfers I had to take. It was on the other side of town, a long way away by bus.
I stepped down from the bus and walked home. This wasn’t going to be a casual trip. I called Zen Center on the phone. They told me Roshi lectured on Wednesday evenings and Saturday mornings. I decided to drive over there on Saturday. I would go over the route with my husband. I was having a terrible time with the
Twin Cities’ freeways. The day before, I had been lost for an hour only ten minutes from our house. I was looking for the Minneapolis public schools’ head office. I needed a job and was once again trying teaching. As I got in the car, I remembered my mother’s constant encouragement for me to get a teaching certificate in college, because it was “a good job for a woman, something you could always fall back on.” Here I was, suddenly doing what she had said.
Zen Center was an old house on Lake Calhoun. There was no sign outside, just a number. I went in through the back door, walked downstairs to the basement where you took off your shoes and hung up your coat, and then came upstairs to what used to be a big living room when it was a single family dwelling. Now it was a zendo, a formal place to do zazen, a form of sitting meditation where you let go of thinking and return to the present moment.
The walls were bright white, the floors bare wood with black cushions aligned in rows. I followed someone else who bowed, then entered the room. I bowed, then found a cushion to sit on. I looked around. There was a small wooden altar with a small statue of Buddha and two narrow glass vases of sweet peas with one purple columbine on either side of the statue.
The room was quiet. I heard footsteps on stairs, then Katagiri Roshi appeared at the entryway in black robes, bowed, and went to the altar. He lit incense, did three full prostrations on a brown zabuton, a soft mat, in front of the altar, and then sat down on a zafu. A bell was rung; we lifted white chant cards and chanted how wonderful and rare it was to hear the dharma, and that we should listen and remember it.
Then Katagiri began to speak. He was vibrant and seemed to be beaming, even though he wore a serious expression. I think even then, the first time, I noticed how beautiful his feet and hands were.
I listened hard to what he talked about; I didn’t understand it, but it felt true. I remember I even asked a question at the end. He turned his head, smiled sweetly, answered it, and I still didn’t understand anything. I left and felt like a motor in idle.
I went a few more times. I still only understood a few things Roshi said, and there was no one else to explain anything. I got the sense that you shut up, sat, bowed, drank tea, took off your shoes, chanted the Heart Sutra: No eyes, no ears, no nose, no tongue, no body, no mind; no color, no sound, no smell, no taste, no touch. I never heard the Heart Sutra before. It seemed odd. What the hell did it mean? I had a tongue and I had a body. Form is emptiness, emptiness itself is form. It seemed peculiar to me, but I found myself curious, intrigued. What’s going on here?
In the second lecture I went to, Roshi kept repeating, “Mountains are mountains. Mountains are not mountains. Mountains are mountains.”
“What were they when they weren’t mountains?” I asked. Everyone laughed. I was serious. I was trying to figure this out.
Roshi answered me, but I don’t remember the reply. I don’t remember it because I didn’t understand it. I didn’t understand anything: You could donate money for the lectures or not donate money. You could pay monthly dues or not pay monthly dues. You could come to Zen Center or not come. You could volunteer to help with a rummage sale or not volunteer, and everything was black and white, black and white. Even when Roshi lectured, everyone sat in zazen, their legs crossed, their hands linked together in their laps. They looked straight ahead, not at him, and even though sometimes he was hilariously funny—he’d talk about how to eat a pickle silently— no one laughed. A few smiled enigmatically.
I called Zen Center one day and asked for an appointment to see Roshi for an interview. Roshi answered the phone, said to come over that afternoon. I dressed up and drove there. Now I knew the route. Take 94 west to Hennepin, left on Hennepin to Thirty-fourth, down that to dead end, park, walk through alley to Zen Center, and enter through back door. Roshi came down the stairs for the interview wearing jeans and a green tee-shirt that said, “Marcy School is purr-feet.” His younger son went there. I had nothing really to say to him. I think I was looking for a spark, some action, an entry in. I think even more I wanted some recognition. I wanted him to be interested in me. I wanted some attention.
This was the hardest part for me. You came and went at Zen Center and no one paid attention. No one asked me if I was going to return or told me they were delighted to see me. I was alone again; it was just like writing. There was no one over my shoulder cheering me on as I wrote. It all had to come from within.
“I wanted to know if you would be my teacher,” I said to Roshi.
“Yes,” he nodded.
That was it. That was too easy. No struggle. No demands. No fight. How could he say yes? He doesn’t know me, I thought. How could I ask? I don’t know him. I wasn’t sincere about it. I didn’t know what it meant to be sincere about it. I didn’t know what it really meant to be a student or to have a teacher. Yet, often we are not connected with the depth of what we are doing or how sincere our hearts are. Something had bloomed in me in front of that sixth-grade class back in Albuquerque and it was continuing almost on its own.
We think we know what’s going on, that we have control of our lives; we make plans, have date books and schedules, and then we turn around to see ourselves and realize our lives have their own composition, their own movement. Just recently I had this experience: I had planned for six months to go this December to India and as my brain made a budget and travel plans I noticed my body was moving toward being at Taos Pueblo for Christmas Eve. I even heard myself say to a friend in California, “Yes, I’ll be here over the New Year,” as though a part of my life moved in its own dream. I did consciously, finally, drop the idea of going to India in an instant one afternoon as I put a bag of groceries in the back seat of my car. Suddenly, it seemed obvious. I wasn’t going. Nothing in me wanted to go this December except my head.
In the same way, I lived my life in Minneapolis consciously trying to adjust to the Midwest, to buying a kitchen table for our duplex, to a marriage that was no longer in the hippie world—suddenly this man I had slept with for years was my husband and he had a full-time job, he left every morning for work. And at the same time the dream of my life was moving like a huge ocean in unfathomable waves. I had just asked Katagiri Roshi to be my teacher; and though I wasn’t aware of it, it was a deep request.
After a moment with nothing else to say to Roshi, I left and almost forgot about speaking with him, except for a thin strand of embarrassment, its color green, that I could glimpse out of the corner of my eye. I was embarrassed because somehow I knew I had been arrogant. I didn’t know then how to meet Roshi eye to eye in an ordinary way. It was a big yes he responded with, though he did it quietly, quickly, directly. He was smart. He embraced all possibilities: that I might drop him the next day like a hot tomato or flower twenty years hence as a great Buddha. (He did actually tell me years later his response to that meeting: “I thought to myself, oh, she’s a stubborn one.”)
The next time I met with Roshi, I was going to interview him for the Zen Center newsletter. Nancy James, the editor, had called and asked me if I would do the interview. She thought it would be a chance for me to get to know him. I agreed to do it, but I wasn’t very interested: Roshi had yet to captivate me. The morning of the interview, I woke up obsessed with what color material to get for curtains. After all, I had just gotten married and we were making a home for ourselves.
I drove to Zen Center to interview Roshi with that curtain obsession blazing in my mind. I planned to get the interview over with and then rush to the fabric store.
I parked in front of Zen Center and dashed out of the car. I was a few minutes late. I was halfway up the walk when I realized I’d left my notebook on the front seat. I dashed back to the car, grabbed the notebook, and ran to the back entrance of Zen Center. I flung open the door, spun around the corner, and came to a dead stop: Roshi was standing in the kitchen by the sink in his black robes, watering a pink orchid. That orchid had been given to him three weeks before. Someone had brought it from Hawaii for a Buddhist wedding I had attended. It was st
ill fully alive.
“Roshi,” I said in astonishment and pointed at the orchid.
“Yes.” He turned and smiled. I felt the presence of every cell in his body. “When you take care of something, it lives a long time.”
My mouth fell open. Suddenly, I didn’t know anything, but for a moment I knew I didn’t know anything, and that was a great opening. This human being before me was present. We could say, “Be here now,” my generation, but I’d never encountered anyone before who was present, so I’d never had a real vision of what that meant. Roshi was just there, every cell of him. His foot wasn’t back in his childhood, thinking about his grandfather’s green Plymouth; his chin wasn’t remembering how good that sugar cookie tasted a week ago. All of him was gathered in this moment and concentrated on the flower before him. That kind of presence was like a brick wall and I slammed against it, shattering all my disparate parts: the yellow curtains, my marriage, the Minneapolis expressway, my upbringing, my years of sitting in Taos, my notebooks and poetry; all went rolling on the floor.
We sat down at the kitchen table and I asked him the questions Nancy James had asked me to ask. He was funny. When he couldn’t remember some information, he banged his head with his hand, as if to get that machine—his brain—working. I remember I paid a lot of attention to his arm. His arm seemed so vital, radiant. It was all there. I never thought of an arm as not being there before, but this arm had life in it.
Later a dancer at Zen Center told me that one evening she came to a lecture because a friend wanted to come. She said she didn’t know what Roshi was talking about but that his presence was even thing she tried to achieve as a dancer. She kept coming back and eventually became a Zen student.
That morning Interview with Roshi was my true meeting with him. The gap closed between my conscious and unconscious mind. I saw who he was, a glimpse of him anyway; all of me saw it. Though even then I didn’t know what it was, I knew it was good to be that startlingly present. And in seeing it, that possibility awoke in me. I had a vision of something whole.
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