Long Quiet Highway

by Natalie Goldberg

  Often Roshi repeated a saying by Dogen, “When you walk in the mist, you get wet.” You might not understand everything, but just by being here, you absorb the teachings.

  I recited a poem to my perturbed writing students:

  No applause

  No criticism

  Not such a bad

  audience—the apple orchard.

  (John Brandi, The Crow That Visited Was Flying Backwards,

  Tooth of Time Books, 1982)

  After our first year in Minneapolis, my husband and I left the Cedar-Riverside area and purchased a duplex with Paul Johnson, an old Zen student. Neil and I lived in the bottom half. It was six blocks from Zen Center. Neil was also practicing, and both of us wanted to be able to walk there. That year I was given the job of Zen host, which meant I took care of all guests and visitors. I was happy to have that job. Paul, with whom we shared the duplex, became doan. He was in charge of the zendo and was there almost every day.

  Whenever a guest came, Roshi inevitably asked Paul to take care of that person. When I would see Paul at the house, he’d mention the guest and what he’d done for them.

  I became exasperated. Why didn’t Roshi send them to me? After all, wasn’t I the host, didn’t I have that position? I went and visited him in his study.

  “You know, Roshi, you should send people visiting Zen center to me. I’m the host. Don’t send them to Paul.”

  He looked at me, his head to one side. “It’s okay to do nothing,” he said, and nodded.

  Roshi was so ordinary, it was hard to copy him. Usually when we emulate someone we try to take on their qualities. When the Beatles became popular, many people got Beatle haircuts. Trungpa Rinpoche drank a lot, there was a lot of drinking throughout his community.

  Roshi’s favorite place to eat out was The Embers on Hennepin Avenue. The Embers was a chain restaurant like Denny’s. Who in our hip natural-foods, macrobiotic generation wanted to eat there? Once, when my friend Kate and I ate dinner at their apartment above the zendo, Roshi asked us if we wanted wine. Yes, we said. He brought out a gallon box—not even a bottle—of Gallo and put the glasses under the nozzle and out poured some red liquid. Who wanted to copy that? He drank an occasional beer at parties. He ate meat. He had been married for decades. He had two sons who did well in school and he loved to watch TV. He was ordinary with this one difference: He had been a Japanese Zen monk since he was eighteen. For three and a half years, he had studied at Eiheiji, the monastery that is the main training center for Soto Zen, where the ashes of Dogen, that great Zen teacher from the thirteenth century, were kept. He had taken vows to help all beings. He continually told us, “Our goal is to have kind consideration for all sentient beings eveny moment forever.” And when he talked about sentient beings, he included the chair, the pen, the floor, a table.

  A friend of mine from Santa Fe went to visit him when she was up in Minnesota.

  She said to him, “I’d like to study Zen.”

  He said, “It’s no big deal. Here’s a book.” He lifted a book off his desk. “You can either fling it down or place it down, like this.” He demonstrated placing it down. My friend said the way he placed it, the book became a real being.

  “That’s all,” he said, and smiled.

  The tricky thing about Roshi was, the things that were extraordinary about him, you couldn’t copy. They came from within him. What you wanted in him had to come from within you. You could get up at four-fifteen A.M. a few times to get to the zendo by five to sit with Roshi because you wanted to be noticed by him or to be with him, but you couldn’t keep it up for those reasons, especially since it didn’t impress him. Finally, you had to give up all that. You had to do it because it came from inside you, because you wanted to do it, whether he was there or not. And then it even became empty of that. You just did it because you did it.

  I had lunch with a friend yesterday at Pasqual’s in Santa Fe. Over delicious chili and squash soup, she bemoaned the fact that she couldn’t manage to write. I told her she was lazy, that she just had to do it.

  She tried to reason as a way to encourage herself. “You mean like I go to the gym regularly to exercise, so I have a healthy body and look good, and I go to twelve-step meetings so I can learn to be a kind person? I manage to do those things regularly. I could go write to—”

  “Exercise your brain,” I interrupted. I shook my head. “Just do it for no reason. For no purpose.” I took another spoonful of soup. “Writing’s not gonna save you, help you. I know of no one who has improved as a person because they wrote. They just used up some paper, felled more trees.” I paused again, this time to think. “You know, Margaret, you’re already a kind person. You go to the twelve-step meetings because you like them.” I picked up the water glass. “My body’s gonna fall apart whether I exercise or not. You should just write and not think about it so much.”

  Recently I had some old Zen students to dinner in Taos. Stanley, who is seventy, told us of his first encounter with Zen.

  “I was already forty. It was the early sixties in San Francisco. I was a beatnik then, living with a poet. I felt really lost and I think I was probably clinically depressed. I couldn’t hold down a job. I had this friend named Susan who was dating this guy named Dan. Susan called me one day and asked me what I thought of Dan.

  “ ‘Well, I hardly know him,’ I said. ‘Why don’t I call him up and get together with him and I’ll tell you what I think afterward.’

  “ ‘Okay,’ she said.

  “So I called Dan, I thought we’d go shoot some baskets or have coffee. He suggested we go meditate with this Japanese man and he’d pick me up early the next morning. Well, I’d never meditated before, but I was game, so I said yes.

  “There were five of us there and Suzuki Roshi. It was just at the beginning. No one knew much about Suzuki then. Dan showed me how to sit. I couldn’t get my knees down, and through the whole forty minutes I sort of bounced. I don’t know what it was.”

  He demonstrated to us how he sat with his knees up and how he bounced. We laughed.

  “When it was over and Dan and I were back in the car, he asked me, ‘Well, what did you think of it?’

  “I told him, ‘Oh, it was okay’—and I knew I’d just found what to do with the rest of my life.”

  I grew quiet after Stanley told that story. That’s how it was in Zen. You’d feel uncomfortable sitting, knees up, you’d bounce, and then know you’d found your life’s path. It didn’t make logical sense. Something else besides the rational mind was at work. Something quiet, direct, and true, the way being in the presence of a forest feels.

  Yesterday I wrote sitting outside at a small card table on the mesa, near my house, facing Taos Mountain. I usually write in cafés, but yesterday morning I wanted to be alone. I spooned cooked oat groats with maple yogurt and a dollop of peach preserves slowly into my mouth. A slight breeze blew across my face and the flies buzzed but didn’t bother landing. It took me about an hour to settle into writing that morning and then I enjoyed myself. When I stopped at twelve-thirty, I thought, now this is the life. How could I ever have thought writing was bothersome? (The day before I had once again thought of getting a plumber’s permit and giving up being a writer.)

  I walked to my car to drive into town. Wild rain clouds suddenly appeared over Taos Mountain. Everything became still. I stopped. I didn’t hear flies, distant cars, a plane. Nothing. Then I remembered: Today was the solar eclipse. A man about a quarter of a mile away, standing in front of Kit and Judy’s house, was the only other person around. I yelled to him, “Is it happening? What are you doing?”

  “I have a device...” he yelled back. He was holding something in his hand and beckoning me.

  “I don’t have time. I’ve got to get into town,” I yelled. It was a quarter to one. I had a lunch date at one. It took at least fifteen minutes to get there.

  But this was the famous eclipse! I had heard people were gathering in Mexico and Hawaii, but I hadn’t paid
much attention. People were making predictions: the end of the world; the beginning. I thought it no more fantastic than the miracle of the sun rising every day. But here it was right now, happening! Spontaneously, the man on the mesa and I ran fast toward each other, jumping over sage bushes. Of course, I had to see the eclipse. He handed me a tin coffee strainer and a piece of paper to put underneath. If I held them the right distance from each other, I could see the moon’s shadow blocking out half the sunlight through the holes of the strainer.

  “Wow,” I said. I looked around. It was still, and way in the distance—fifteen miles away—I could see a ranch house. Usually the sun is too bright, but with the half light, things never seen stepped forward. I didn’t know this man. He was visiting next door. We gave each other a big hug. Something great was happening. I ran back to my car and flew into town.

  I parked at Doc’s. He said he could change my oil while I ate.

  Doc’s wife said, “You’re eating at Lambert’s?”

  “Yes, it’s my favorite,” I replied.

  “They don’t have beans and tortillas,” she said in disbelief. She has lived in Taos all her life. Lambert’s serves nouvelle cuisine. I went next door. Mirabai was waiting for me. She had studied writing with me when she was twelve years old, back in the seventies, at DaNahazli, the hippie school in Taos. It was when I was just beginning to develop writing practice. We worked together for three years. I remember it was her group that taught me straight honesty. Mirabai had been writing ever since. Now I was treating her to lunch for her thirtieth birthday.

  I leaned close after we ordered our food.

  “You were at the beginning of the lineage. And you’ve carried it on. All those kids I taught—you kept going and that’s what matters.” I paused. “Thank you. It makes me happy.” At the time I said this, I had been teaching writing practice for many years, and I had linked it to the long lineage of Zen. Sitting across the table from Mirabai, I felt the space across eighteen years.

  The waitress put our plates before us.

  “You’ve already written a novel. We’re peers now. Anyone who writes a novel, they’ve gone beyond teachers. Just keep going, no matter what.”

  I noticed Nancy Jane, my acupuncturist, in the next room. When the waitress asked if we wanted dessert, I said, “Oh, no,” and glanced over to the other room, “but please, Mirabai, get something.”

  The waitress went down the list: white chocolate ice cream with pecans, strawberry shortcake, lemon tart, chocolate mousse in raspberry sauce—bingo, I thought and kept my opinion to myself—and prune cake. Mirabai said, “I’ll have the mousse.” Mirabai was a smart person. I was happy.

  The waitress brought two spoons and placed the mousse between us. I pushed it over to Mirabai and said, “I’ll just taste.” I ate more than half, the dark chocolate color intensified by the red sauce intensified by my acupuncturist in the next room. Each time I took a bite, I licked the spoon clean, placed it before me as if I hadn’t been using it, and wiped my mouth with the white linen napkin, so if Nancy Jane walked by, it wouldn’t look as though I was partaking of dessert. Mirabai shook her head and smiled. I was her old teacher up to my old tricks.

  After lunch, I walked to the post office.

  The whole day felt huge to me, open, endless, forever. Yet it was ordinary. I eat at Lambert’s often. People have thirtieth birthdays. I’ve had good mornings of writing before. Strange light happens frequently in Taos. Still it was enormous: Mirabai had continued to write from that seed planted when she was twelve years old. I didn’t know when I taught back then that anyone would continue—they were all so young—or that I would continue so many years later. We hope for these things, but moment follows moment. Things are unpredictable, lives unfold as days do, and have their own composition.

  It was enormous for me to have found Katagiri Roshi in that cold northern state, but the daily life of sweeping the zendo floor, lighting incense, walking to the zendo to meditate was ordinary, sometimes boring, and sometimes I wondered what I was doing there, what I was doing with my life. Yet our lives are big. We may decide to become an engineer and end up a poet.

  I know even Roshi sometimes questioned what he was doing in Minnesota with these conservative students. Once in a lecture he told us, “During the last sesshin, while we were sitting, I found myself thinking, is this all I’m going to do with my life: just sit?’ Then I caught it. Another thought.” He showed us how he waved the thought away with his hand and laughed.

  But through his Zen practice, he had a way to understand his life. Not wanting to sit was just another thought. He did not get tossed away by it.

  Recently, I sat a sesshin with Sekkei Harada Roshi, from Hoshinji, a monastery in Japan. He is considered a great Zen teacher, and this was his first visit to America. Someone asked him, “Even though judging mind is troublesome, we still have to discriminate—choose a job, a partner, a place to live. How should we do this?”

  Harada nodded. He said, “Yes, I, too, am a man of many delusions. For instance, several times a year I have to travel to Tokyo. You can get there from the monastery either by plane or train. Sometimes even to the last minute I cannot decide which to take.” There was a pause. Then he added, “But I am not perplexed by it.”

  Suzuki Roshi once said about questioning our life, our purpose, “It’s like putting a horse on top of a horse and then climbing on and trying to ride. Riding a horse by itself is hard enough. Why add another horse? Then it’s impossible.” We add that extra horse when we constantly question ourselves rather than just live out our lives, and be who we are at every moment.

  My marriage was somehow slowly disintegrating after two years of being in Minnesota. Our time was probably up after we left Taos, but the love was strong, and it lingered and carried me to Minnesota, where I met my Zen teacher. Our education doesn’t prepare us for this continuous coming together and parting. Instead of letting go after Taos, Neil and I married and I thought marriage would last forever. I would be safe. I would get to keep our love. My mother and society told me it was forever and I wanted to believe it, though divorce was all around me. I continued to practice Zen, deepen my writing, and battle my husband. Our lives were turning. We had different destinies, different needs—it was too hard to carry our old hippie lives from Taos into the hazards of the city—and neither of us wanted to face it, so we fought instead, tried to get the other to do what we wanted.

  I went to Roshi about it. “Roshi, he makes me so mad. What should I do?”

  “You have already let him know what you want. Now keep quiet. Take care of your life, take care of your writing, take care of Neil’s life and,” he paused, “hopefully he’ll see into your heart.” He laughed. “If he’s not too ignorant.”

  “What should I do?” I scrunched up my face. It was inconceivable what Roshi said. Keep quiet? I was furious and heated up a lot of the time.

  “You want me to tell you again?” he asked.

  Yes, I nodded.

  “Okay, take care of your life, take care of your writing, take care of his life, and be quiet,” he said.

  I was incredulous. “What should I do?” I asked again.

  “You want me to tell you straight?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Keep your mouth shut,” he directed me.

  I was stung, insulted. I left quickly and refused to visit him for quite a while. I’d never heard of such a thing. I was mad, why should I shut up? Several months later, I realized Roshi gave me the only advice that would have worked, but I was too angry at the time to be able to understand it, much less carry it out. The only thing I knew to do when there was trouble was to dive in. To step back was inconceivable. And I realized he never said not to say how I felt. I needed to say it, then be quiet.

  But instead, Neil and I kept fighting. In one dramatic moment, I yanked the wedding ring off my finger, flung it into the toilet, and then flushed. Both Neil and I stood over the bowl, aghast, watching the water swirl, disappear
and then rise again calmly—without my gold wedding band. Another time, I threw a beautiful chocolate birthday cake I’d made for Neil face down on the linoleum floor. My emotions and his were all out, raging, unbridled will against will. We crashed through our marriage. What Roshi asked, “Keep your mouth shut,” or just being quiet, was impossible for me then. I could not be quiet; I was a wild bull. I had no refinement, care, mindfulness, or understanding.

  I understood Roshi’s advice too late. Four months after that meeting with Roshi, Neil and I separated. The pain of separation sobered me.

  It was only then I realized that if I went to Roshi for advice, I had to follow it—whether I immediately understood it or not—for at least six months. He had something of value to say. Otherwise, why go to him? His advice about my marriage had been wise. I couldn’t hear it when he gave it, but later I carried it within me.

  I’d begun to trust in his way. He came from such a different angle than I had ever known. But slowly, slowly, I was learning that angle, learning through the suffering in my life, and through time, experience, mistakes, coming up against him, running away, coming back.

  Roshi told me that he was lonely as a Zen master, but that he didn’t let the loneliness toss him away, it was just loneliness. I realized that I was growing used to the loneliness of being a writer. It came with the trade. I no longer ran from it, but the loneliness of being separated from Neil was another matter. I’d come home at night after teaching poetry in a public school and sit down on the couch. I’d just sit there. There was only me. The empty house stunned me. Now I had two lonelinesses—of work and of love. I’d always lived in communes and communities before I met Neil, so I thought I’d do that again.

  “You need to be alone,” Roshi told me. “It is the terminal abode. You can’t go any deeper in your spiritual practice if you run from loneliness.”

  I listened to what he said. I remained in the lower half of our duplex on Emerson Avenue, while Neil lived several blocks away in an efficiency apartment.