Long Quiet Highway

by Natalie Goldberg

  The first day on my way to Zen Center I stopped and picked up some purple violets at a florist’s and brought them over.

  “Go ahead up and put them in Roshi’s apartment. He’s at radiation treatment. He’ll be back in an hour,” one of the Zen students told me.

  I filled a vase in the kitchen and placed the flowers on the coffee table. I looked around. Flowers that people had sent or dropped off were everywhere, on the kitchen table, near the sink, on a dish cabinet, on two window sills. I went downstairs to the basement to help collate newsletters.

  An hour later someone came downstairs. “Natalie, Roshi’s back. He lay down on the couch, pointed at those flowers you brought, and asked, ‘Who brought those?’ When we told him you were here, he told us to send you up.”

  I went up. There he was, on the couch. I knelt next to him. He still looked so beautiful, his face radiated. He took my hands.

  I said, “I’m here to help you now. I’ll be here a while.”

  He nodded. “Dress warm. It’s cold in Minnesota. You can catch a cold. Be careful.”

  “Yes,” I said. I nodded. “Rest now,” and he closed his eyes. I left him and went downstairs.

  On the bulletin board in the basement a small sign was pinned up:

  Just

  to be

  is a

  blessing.

  Just

  to live

  is holy.

  Abraham Joshua Heschel

  I read it every day I was there.

  On the third day, as I left the house, Joni said, “Nat, are you dressed warmly enough? It’s very cold. The thermometer says twenty below, already, and it’s not December.”

  “That’s okay,” I said cheerily, Joni looked at Cary in amazement. I, who was miserable in the cold when I lived there, didn’t care. I was happy. I was near Roshi. If a great light was going out and these were his last days, I wanted to be near him. There was no place else on earth I wanted to be.

  I went over to Zen Center. “Nat, we need help sewing the priest robes upstairs.” I went upstairs. Special robes were needed for the transmission ceremony in a few weeks. I stood in the doorway of the sewing room. It was a square white room across from the kitchen, empty but for a blue carpet and a chest of drawers in the corner. Tomoe was kneeling on the floor across the room near the window, a large piece of dark brown material spread out in front of her. She was stitching. She looked up and across the vast room at me. Oh, no! Here we were, so many years later, the two of us, about to sew again.

  Ten years earlier, I had stitched a rakusu by hand. It was my lay ordination robe. A rakusu is a biblike garment, worn around the neck that symbolizes the Buddha’s robe. It is patterned after a rice field, which holds all of life—water, rice, human beings, insects, sky, sun. It was intricate to sew. I was not a good seamstress. A group of us met twice a week for several months to sew them. The sewing itself was a practice. With each stitch we were to repeat silently: “I take refuge in the Buddha.” I seek protection and sanctuary in Buddhism. I said this in my mind as I lifted the needle’s black thread in and out of the black material on my lap. But I was restless, impatient. Mostly I had no idea about the depth of lay ordination. I did it because it presented itself. Like everything else I figured I’d understand later. One evening, I had finally caught up to where everyone else was in their sewing.

  I held up my black material. “Hey, look,” I said to people at my table.

  Marilyn looked at it. “Nat, the stitches are so big!” They were supposed to be small. I had galloped ahead with my needle to catch up.

  “Oh, who cares,” I said. “It’s all right.”

  At that moment, Tomoe leaned across the table, grabbed the rakusu out of my hand, ripped open all the stitches, and handed it back to me. “Do it again,” she said.

  My mouth fell open, tears stung my eves. I leaned over the material and tried to match the two black cottons together again. I was thick-skinned, stubborn: Over the next few weeks, I finished in time for ordination.

  But here I was ten years later with Tomoe, about to sew. I now understood these were Buddha’s robes we were handling. I would try harder, but I knew in the past ten years I hadn’t become a better seamstress. Except for an occasional button that fell off a shirt, my rakusu was the last thing I’d sewn. I stepped into the room.

  Tomoe showed me what to do. She, too, remembered my rakusu. She brought it up. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t mean to hurt you.”

  “Oh, it was my fault,” I said.

  “No, it was mine,” she said. “It was all my ignorance.”

  It was as though she had turned the whole incident inside out. From the way she said it, I saw that she felt no better or different than me. I was touched.

  Three years after I took lay ordination, I went to Roshi. “I’m ready to take bodhisattva vows.” A bodhisattva is someone who vows to return lifetime after lifetime to help all sentient beings and who does not enter nirvana until everyone goes before her.

  Roshi laughed. “You’ve already taken them.”

  “When?” I asked.

  “When you took lay ordination.” He laughed and laughed.

  Since I had driven to Minnesota, I had a car. Tomoe didn’t drive, so in those first weeks I ended up driving her around a lot on the frozen Minneapolis streets and out to suburban malls I’d never been to before.

  On one drive, she turned to me. “I remember the first time I met you.”

  “You do?” I asked, amazed.

  “Yes, it was at the Blue Heron restaurant.” The Blue Heron was a Zen Center restaurant that I worked at when I first moved to Minnesota. “I looked up over the counter at you”—Tomoe was short, maybe five feet—“and kept repeating my order and you kept saying ‘What?’ You couldn’t understand my English. I thought, She’ll never understand. You were wearing a red shirt and I thought I’d never seen such bright eves.”

  Just then I turned a corner at Hennepin and Thirty-sixth. I gulped. You noticed me, I thought. Someone paid that much attention? “You remembered my shirt color. Wow, you must have a good memory.”

  “When you don’t speak English well and you’ve just come to this country, everything is so difficult, you remember everything.” She also remembered a time she corrected me for eating the gomasio—the salty sesame seasoning used in the formal oryoki meals—right out of the dish. I realized people were paying attention, that all the students at Zen Center mattered.

  I drove Tomoe to buy gifts. The Japanese give gifts for everything. We had to buy gifts for Narasaki Roshi, who was coming from Japan, and his several assistants.

  All of Zen Center was buzzing with preparations for dharma transmission. It was a very formal ten-day ceremony—private, only for the monks and the visiting Japanese teachers—and we had to raise money for all of it. Still, there were days when I was the only one downstairs. And Tomoe and Roshi were upstairs in their apartment, he sick in bed, she busy, busy with preparations.

  One afternoon, Tomoe ran downstairs—I was in the zendo—“Please open this.” It was a bottle. She needed it for Roshi’s lunch. Another late afternoon—I remember how dark it already was outside; the sun so rarely shone in Minnesota; it was late November—Tomoe came down to the office. “Would you write a thank-you note to Milton Clapp? Ten years ago Roshi married him—he lives in North Carolina—and he gave us a beautiful piece of wood. We used part of it then for the altar in the zendo. Now the rest of it is being used as part of a special chair for the transmission ceremony. He should know what happened to the wood and we should thank him again.” Uh-huh, I nodded my head. She went back upstairs. What? I thought. Someone gave Roshi a piece of wood ten years ago and Tomoe’s kept track of it and we’re telling the gift giver what’s happened to part of it ten years later? At the same time, she’s taking care of her husband, who has cancer? I wrote the thank-you note, put a stamp on it, and mailed it.

  Roshi insisted that the ceremony be done with full formality. He wanted
to make sure that his dharma heirs were accepted at Soto Zen headquarters in Japan, where they were quite conservative and bureaucratic. We went along with his wishes.

  For one part of the ceremony, we had to drape the entire zendo in red material. Then, in that new chair built with wood from Milton Clapp, Roshi was transformed into Vairochana, a source Buddha who was able to turn the root addiction of hatred into perfect wisdom. For one evening Roshi was transformed from a seemingly informal, accessible, and down-to-earth person, who at that time had cancer in his human body, into a very formal, symbolic, and powerful person. This was supposed to take place at midnight. It happened at night but earlier, because of Roshi’s illness. I’m not sure about all this, because those who were not monks were not allowed to attend.

  I shared the cooking responsibilities for those ten days with another Zen student. We made three meals a day for about twenty people. We were there from five in the morning until seven at night. Near the end of those ten days, I also taught a weekend writing workshop to help raise money for the ceremony.

  The evening the teachers from Japan arrived—it was a Thursday—we had a formal early tea for them before they went to bed to sleep off their tremendous jet lag.

  Right after the quiet, slow tea, the man I was dating picked me up and we went off to a Rolling Stones concert with fifty thousand people in the Metrodome. That was how I coped with the energy at Zen Center. I juxtaposed the pressure we were under there—my teacher dying, supporting a transmission ceremony that many of us close to Roshi couldn’t participate in, because we were not ordained—with an entry into the outside world that was very different, sometimes very refreshing. I screamed and screamed at the Stones concert. There was a sea of people. I never loved Mick Jagger so much—in fact, in the old days I regarded him as sexist. That night I was with him totally—“I Can’t Get No Satisfaction”—suddenly it was a great Buddhist song and there was Mick, fifty years old, prancing up on stage. He had survived. I loved my generation.

  Being a cook those ten days was demanding. What did the Japanese eat? Each meal had to have three bowls of different food. I remember the steam on the kitchen windows—it was so hot in there, I was wearing tee-shirts—and the contrast of people coming in the back door, stomping the snow off their heavy boots, their faces red, their breath still fogging in front of their mouths. I entered the kitchen in the early morning dark and left in the dark of early evening.

  At moments I caught glances of Roshi through the swinging doors that separated the kitchen from the zendo when he came down for maybe ten minutes a day for a certain part of the ceremony. He didn’t look good. His face was deeply drawn and he was thin. I marvel now at his determination. When you’re that sick, you rarely care about anything. He’d been through another round of radiation before the ceremony in the hope that it would stop the cancer, so he could be there even a little bit. He cared; he kept caring.

  One morning I got tired of the fancy foods we were cooking. I was alone with no assistant for lunch prep. I thought, these are monks. I’ll make them something simple, a monk’s lunch. I baked whole potatoes with the skins on for the first bowl, steamed broccoli for the second bowl, and put some butter and chopped parsley into the third bowl for the potato in the first bowl. No fancy Japanese soy-ginger sauces or French cream sauces. A potato. Plunk in the bowl. American. Midwestern. I liked the aesthetic.

  That night the visiting roshi lectured for the general public. I heard that he lectured about the potato served at lunch. “It is Dogen’s food. Good, simple. The monasteries in Japan have become too fancy.” I heard about that lecture the next day. I smiled. Katagiri Roshi was a Dogen scholar. Dogen was his beloved.

  I did not go to the lectures at night, because I was too exhausted. Cary, too, was coming every day to Zen Center to help with the transmission ceremony. A while earlier, she had sewn monk robes in preparation for her ordination. Because of Roshi’s illness, she was not able to be ordained by him. We would drag home together and sit in their living room, sipping Jack Daniels. Neither of us ever drank, but there we were, staring into space, glass in hand. The enormity of what was happening was too much to digest right then. Our teacher was dying. His lineage was being passed on. We were assistants, not part of it. Joni baked chocolate biscotti and we munched on them. I arrived in Minneapolis having not eaten sugar in two months, but my vow of no sugar fell apart during those ten days. Everything fell apart. There was no more wish in me, nor dream.

  What Roshi worked so hard to bring to America was being formally transmitted that week. I heard he told Tomoe when he first moved to California: “I won’t last long here. It is too hard, but the students in America are eager, serious.”

  What was hard? The language for one thing. English did not come easily to him. American culture, for another thing. It was very different from his native culture and he was being challenged to walk in Buddha’s path of open-hearted acceptance in a very different world. Here is a poem he wrote for the twenty-fifth anniversary of Wind Bell, a Zen publication out of San Francisco Zen Center.

  You are nearly as old as the number of years it has been

  since I came to America.

  I have taught nothing to you at all.

  I have done nothing for you at all.

  But,

  You have done a lot for me.

  I can tell you one thing you have taught me;

  “Peel off your cultural skins,

  One by one,

  One after another,

  Again and again,

  And go on with your story.”

  How thick are the layers of cultural clothes I have

  already put on?

  How would it be possible to tell a story without them?

  How would it be possible to peel off the thick

  wallpaper

  in my old house?

  How would it be possible to ease my pain

  whenever the paper is torn off?

  If I were not to agree with your teaching,

  Believe it or not,

  My life would be drifting in space,

  Like an astronaut separate from his ship

  without any connections.

  Now I’m aware that I alone am in the vast

  openness

  of the sea

  And cause the sea to be the sea.

  Just swim.

  Just swim.

  Go on with your story.

  Dainin Katagiri

  (in Wind Bell, publication of the San Francisco

  Zen Center, Fall 1986)

  Recently I listened to a tape of Roshi lecturing. I was amazed how difficult it was to understand him, how hard I had to concentrate. In the years I was with him I grew used to his English and after a while it was fluent for me. Hearing the tape reminded me of how difficult it was for him. At the same time, how deeply he understood me, Jewish-American from Long Island, feminist, writer, rebel with a hippie past. How hard he worked to penetrate our culture. Yet, I think I wasn’t unique or so different. I was a human being. He understood human beings.

  Suzuki Roshi once said to the early hippies who came to him in San Francisco: “With your dress and long hair and beads, you all look alike. I can’t tell the difference. Shave your heads, get in black robes, and I can see your individual uniqueness.”

  My deep entry into Zen, into my uniqueness, another way of life, was through Roshi. He was dying. Cooking a whole day wasn’t what drained me. It was what I wasn’t doing, what I had no control of: his dying.

  One morning, I had to carry a tray from the kitchen past the zendo to the inside porch. I saw the monks copying long scrolls. They called me over and showed me. The scrolls were the lineage papers. At the top was Shakyamuni Buddha and then a long list of eighty-nine descendants from Shakyamuni down finally, at the end of the long scroll, to “Old monk Dainin Katagiri confers on———”—then there was that blank at the end of each scroll where their individual Buddhist name would be filled in—
“the lineage of Buddha.” Zen was precise. The eighty-nine names listed were not abstract; not the Fifth Ancestor, followed by the Sixth. It was a list of specific Buddhist names. And my teacher was now on the list; he was conferring the lineage. He was passing it on. I heard that at a special ceremony—I was not in the building at the time—each monk mixed a drop of blood with Roshi’s and their blood, mixed in ink, was drawn down the scroll, beginning at Shakyamuni’s name and continuing through every name down to the two of them at the bottom and then back up again to complete the circle. This was how the monk entered the blood line of Buddha.

  Seeing those lineage papers was the hardest moment of being excluded from the ceremony. Roshi was dying. I wanted to be bound to him that way. Blood was life. His life wouldn’t be around long. I wanted to mix our lives. If only he was well enough, I thought. I could talk to him about it, tell him it wasn’t fair. At least my protest would be heard; if he said no, I could accept it. But he was very sick. I had to accept it without speaking to him. I took a deep breath. I accepted it. I wanted to support him, but my heart ached.

  That night when I went home with Cary, we spent a long time in the evening turning the pages of a big Georgia O’Keeffe book they had received as an early Christmas present. It was the one with O’Keeffe’s flowers. Joni sat between us with the book on her lap and we sat on either side of her, eating another batch of chocolate biscotti.

  “There,” I’d point. “There is New Mexico,” and in those pictures my state shone forth. The pink cliffs, the red hills, the bone-dry skulls. I wanted to take Joni and Cary there. It was a spot of light in the dark December landscape of Minnesota.

  That night I realized there were thousands of descendants of the Buddha who did not get formal recognition on that scroll. So many people had passed through Zen Center, seen Roshi, loved him, remembered him, carried the seed. It was in all of us to sprout. I held that in my heart. I, too, am in the lineage of Roshi, I said to myself. I practiced with him. He taught me how to be a Buddha. I looked across the O’Keeffe book. Cary, too, I said to myself. In order to ensure the lineage, a lot of flowers have to be pollinated, not just twelve.