by Susan Moon
I sit again—I mean in meditation—but not as much as I used to. I also bow and chant and pray. I stopped taking the antidepressant, though I’d return to it without shame if I thought it would be useful.
I practice curiosity. Curiosity doesn’t sound like a very spiritual quality, but I mean it so. What is it to be born a human being? What does it mean to be embodied in your separate skin? There are many paths out of the delusion of separation besides having a boyfriend—things like writing and swimming, for example. And there’s studying this human life. You could call it Buddhadharma, or you could call it something else—it doesn’t matter.
I’m now willing to admit that I sit zazen for a reason: I want to understand who, if anybody, I am and how I’m connected to the rest of it. And yes, I want to stop suffering and I want to help others stop suffering.
I’ve gained some confidence from surviving those terrible years, and the older I get the easier it becomes to follow the good advice of the bumper sticker: “Don’t believe everything you think.” There’s steadiness in age.
You Can’t Take It with You
AND WHAT YOU LEAVE behind should be sorted into boxes and neatly labeled.
The old house I’ve lived in for over thirty-five years has an attic, right under the roof. I can stand up easily under the peak, but the roof slopes down on the sides and I have to be careful not to puncture my scalp on the sharp ends of the shingle nails that come right through from the other side, as I’m foraging for a pair of mittens in a box of snow clothes.
To get to the mittens I might have to push aside boxes of books and papers, my grown sons’ childhood collections of bottle caps and souvenir spoons, the pinhole camera I made in a weekend workshop, a box of vinyl record albums, or my rusty bookbinding tools. When I’m downstairs in the relatively uncluttered living room, I can feel these possessions pressing on me from the other side of the ceiling. They are heavy and growing heavier; I fear they are making baby boxes at night when I’m not looking.
Every few years I make a stab at it. This time I’ve hired my niece to help me. We pull the boxes one by one from the shadows, and we sit on milk crates and examine the contents. Some of the boxes are chewed at the corners and one has a nest made of a shredded high school yearbook. The rats were persuaded to depart years ago by an exterminator, at no small expense to me, but we find a few unsprung traps, still baited with dried-up peanut butter, in the corners of the eaves.
From a box full of unsorted letters I pull one out at random; it’s from a homesick child at camp. I lose my bearings, the past tugs at me. Do I owe it to my children to keep these things? Do I owe it to my children to throw them away? Feeling weak and demoralized, I label the box: LETTERS TO SORT, and my niece pushes it back under the eaves and pulls out the next one.
When I was a child, I played in my grandmother’s attic, dressing up from the costume trunk and playing with the old doll’s house. When my grandmother was a child, she played in that very same attic—it was her grandmother’s attic. After my mother died, my siblings and I had to deal with the contents of the attic—boxes of letters that went back five generations and a trunk of antique dresses. We gave the letters to a historical library, and the dresses we brought to a family reunion, where we had a fashion show. We older ones watched while the young women of the family—nieces, daughter-in-law, nephew’s girlfriend—walked out one at a time onto our makeshift runway in the middle of the living room and modeled the dresses: Cousin Lizzie Wentworth’s taffeta traveling dress, Grandma’s flapper dress, Aunt Bessie’s purple lace ball gown. They sashayed, they paused, they held up their trains, they lifted their chins coquettishly, and they brought the old dresses to life. When they returned to their various homes they took with them the dresses they wanted.
I watch the various ways my contemporaries cope with objects as they get older. One friend, each year at her birthday party, requires of her guests that they choose one of her books to take home. A negative example is provided by the friend who can’t stop acquiring things. He loves tools of every kind, and whenever he drives past a broken toaster oven, he stops to put it in his trunk. “But you already have a broken toaster oven!” I exclaim.
“I can fix it. Someone might need one.” His friends now give him their broken bicycles and old lamps, saving themselves the trouble of carting them to the dump. There’s only a narrow path through his living room, between piles of things he’s scavenged from the curbside trash. Sometimes, it’s true, he fixes an old weedcutter and gives it away, but he himself admits that the situation has become unmanageable and he’s almost given up trying to gain control.
My sister sold her house in Berkeley a year ago. She put all her possessions in storage except for what she could fit into her car, and she drove with her dog to New Mexico and rented a tiny house in the desert. She likes the simplicity of her life there. She has pointed out to me that I could put my belongings in storage, too, if I want a simpler life. I wouldn’t even have to go to the trouble of moving—I could just stay on in my nice bare house. But there’s the cost of storage to consider.
I have posted a sign on the wall over my desk: “Don’t think for a minute you’re not going to die.” Believe it or not, this sign makes me happy every time I notice it. It invigorates me, like a slap on the back from an old friend, reminding me that I’m not dead yet.
A couple of years ago, I joined a group called a “Year-to-Live” group. Ten of us and our skillful leader met once a month for a year, pretending we only had a year to live, in order to practice being fully alive, not sweating the small stuff, letting go of extras.
One of our last assignments, to help us practice letting go, was to give away something that was precious to us. After all, we’ll have to give away every last thing in the end. We each drew our secret Santa name out of a hat. I liked Michael, the young man whose name I drew, and I walked around my house with him in mind, looking at the special objects on shelves and windowsills, and I finally settled on a Japanese tea bowl. My grandmother had gotten it long ago in Japan, and it always sat with pride of place on the mantelpiece in her living room. When she died, I asked for that cup. My mother was at first reluctant, feeling the cup should stay in its spot on the mantel, but my sister persuaded her, saying, “Give it to her! She’s a Zen Buddhist—she needs a Japanese tea bowl.”
Before I wrapped the tea bowl up for Michael, I felt the cool round clay in my hands and admired the mottled brown glaze one last time. It was a stretch to let go of it, but that was the point, wasn’t it? Generosity surged in my breast; I was proud of myself.
At our final meeting, we went around the circle opening our gifts, and each giver told the story of the object. Michael loved the bowl—he said he looked forward to drinking tea out of it. I was the last person to open my gift, and it turned out that Michael, by coincidence, had drawn my name. My gift from him was a smooth stone about two inches wide with the word gratitude and a daisy painted on it. While Michael told the story of how he had bought the stone one special weekend when he and his girlfriend were on a yoga retreat in the desert, how that was the very day they decided to marry, how he always kept it on his altar, I was thinking, “Gratitude indeed! So this is what I get in exchange for an ancient Japanese tea bowl!”
Deeply shocked by this upwelling of mean-spiritedness, I placed the gratitude stone on my own altar at home, thinking to keep it there as a training device until I could look at it and actually feel gratitude. I reminded myself that the stone was probably just as precious to Michael as the tea bowl was to me. But it wasn’t working—the more I looked at it the less grateful I felt, and it was a relief, finally, to give it to the Goodwill store along with some old sweaters. I’m OK about the tea bowl though.
The Zen poet Ryokan lived in a simple hut in the mountains of Japan. The story goes that a thief came to his hut one evening and found nothing to steal. Ryokan came home and caught him. “You have come a long way,” he said to the thief, “and you shouldn’t leave empty-handed.
Please take my clothes as a gift.” The bewildered thief took the clothes and slunk away. Ryokan sat naked, watching the moon, and wrote the following poem:
The thief left it behind:
the moon
at my window
When he was an old man, Ryokan and a young nun named Teishin fell in love, and they exchanged letters and poems. In Ryokan’s very last years she moved to a hut nearby and took care of him. After Ryokan’s death, their correspondence was published along with his collected poems. Luckily for us, Ryokan must have kept all Teishin’s letters in a shoebox in the corner of his hut.
My niece and I have looked inside all of the boxes in the attic. Some we got rid of entirely. Some we condensed. All are labeled, even if only with the words PAPERS TO SORT. I may have another crack at them one of these days, but in the meantime, I’m letting go of letting go. And inside each box of papers I’ve put a note that says, “Feel free to throw this away.”
The Secret Place
WHEN I WAS A CHILD, I found a secret place in the bayberry bushes. It was summer, when my family floated free from the known world, the world that was measured by carpools and sidewalks, and went to the seashore. I was lonely there, alone in my separate self, in my dungaree shorts, with dirty knees and poison ivy between my toes.
I would put my jackknife in my pocket and wind my way through a scratchy gap in the bushes into a clearing the size of a small room, an almost flat place on the flank of a hill, overlooking Menemsha Pond. The bayberry bushes were taller than I was, and my parents couldn’t see me from the house. They didn’t even know the secret place existed. But I could see far across the water to the shimmering dunes of Lobsterville.
In this bushy room I practiced cartwheels and handstands, turning the world upside down. I sat on the grass and whittled sticks. I could see time passing by watching the sails move across the pond.
Back in the house, my father was depressed, shut up in his study writing something all the time. My mother tied her hair up in a bandanna and tried to keep us kids from bothering him. My little sisters chased each other around the house, screeching. I felt the tension of our family life, a sadness I couldn’t cure, couldn’t even name as sadness.
I lay on my back on the ground that was crunchy with lichen, while the sky did cartwheels around me. As the day came to an end, the sun’s light turned a thicker and thicker yellow, and clouds rushed away from me into the void on the other side of the horizon and disappeared. This daily ending, staged with the smell of the bayberry and the crying of the gulls, gave me a lump in my throat—a shout I couldn’t shout out.
I had no playmates my own age and we had no near neighbors—my schoolteacher father liked to get away from people in the summer. My sisters were considerably younger than I was, and they were occupied with each other. But it wasn’t just someone to play with that I wanted—it was being part of something bigger than me.
I read Howard Pyle’s Robin Hood and made plans to start a Robin Hood club when we got back to town in the fall. My friends and I would learn to fight with cudgels, and we’d defend the little kids in the neighborhood against the bullies. I would be Little John, who was big and kind, my favorite of Robin Hood’s band. I found a big stick of driftwood on the beach and practiced air-fighting with my cudgel—I made it sing as I swung it through the air.
Books from the public library were company. One summer I went through all of Louisa May Alcott’s novels, in their plain cloth library bindings stamped in gold on the spine. I went kite flying with Jo and her boys in Jo’s Boys, and then with my own family in what’s called real time, on a day when my father wasn’t so depressed. He was the captain of the kite, a big green one we called the Green Dragon; he was a sailor, and this was another kind of sail. We got the kite aloft, and it grew smaller and smaller as it rose closer to the half moon. Then my father held onto the spool of string and we walked down the hill, climbed into the rowboat, and pushed off from the beach. My father let me put on garden gloves and hold the string while the kite pulled us, frictionless, across the pond. It was magic, as if God himself was up there in the air pulling us along, though my parents didn’t speak of God.
I wondered about God. I wondered who I was and what I was doing there. Why was there only my one small self inside my head, serving a life sentence in the solitary confinement of my skull, looking out of my eye sockets? It didn’t make sense.
The summer I was ten I had insomnia, although I didn’t know that word, and I was afraid I was going to die for lack of sleep. I lay in my bed listening for the ship’s clock as it chimed the watches of the night. Eight bells for midnight. The worst thing about the loneliness was that it was unspeakable. I couldn’t describe it or explain it. Nothing was wrong, but I was lost. Two bells meant one in the morning. I tiptoed into my parents’ room. “I can’t go to sleep,” I said.
I wanted to get into bed with my parents, but I didn’t dare ask. I was too old. My mother told me to imagine sheep jumping over a fence and to count them. It seemed like a dumb idea that had nothing to do with the fear that kept me awake, but I was willing to give it a try. “If you get up to a hundred sheep and you’re still awake, come back,” she said.
I did—I got to a hundred, easy. “Could a person die from not sleeping?” I asked my mother. “No,” she said, “No one ever died from not sleeping. Why don’t you read your book, sweetie?”
Back in my bed I read Under the Lilacs, about an orphan boy and his dog, and how they ran away from the circus. Four bells for two in the morning—I saw the curtains shifting like breath in the moonlight. Six bells for three in the morning, as the moonlight faded and pulsed again in a silent, scary whoosh—caused unbeknownst to me by a passing cloud—and then I must have slept, because I never heard the end of the night watch.
In the morning I walked barefoot to the secret place, watching out for poison ivy. I wanted the soles of my feet to be as tough as an Indian’s by the end of the summer. There had been a light mist in the night, and so the pale green lichen was wet and soft. I imagined myself an orphan in the wilderness. I would have to gather berries and build a shelter for myself in order to survive. I made a little one first, for practice. I snapped off some twigs from the bayberry bushes and whittled away the little bumps. When I had a nice pile of smooth twigs no more than six inches long, I constructed a lean-to with them, using long grass to join the twigs at the joints. I put some stones and shells from the beach inside it, to serve as chairs and tables for the fairies. I didn’t exactly believe in fairies, but I assumed there were unseen forces in the universe and I wanted to contact them. They were either very small or very large.
When I lay on my stomach and stuck my face into the sweet-smelling grass, I saw a little red dot that revealed itself to be a spider when it crawled up a blade of grass. To that spider I was as big as a whole world. Then I rolled over on my back, being careful not to crush the spider, and looked at the clouds—the layers of them, some so far up that they made the near clouds seem to move in the opposite direction. Compared to them I was a little red spider. I was microscopic and huge at the same time.
I practiced handstands, and the more I practiced the longer I could stay up. I liked the part where I kicked up the second foot, when the momentum took over and inverted the world. In those days I didn’t need a wall to practice against, as I do now in my yoga class. I wanted to be able to walk on my hands. I could take the first step—could pick up my right hand and quickly put it down again a few inches forward before I fell—but I wanted to take a second step with the left hand. Patiently, I practiced. It seemed important. When my shoulders got tired, I sat on the grass to rest and rearranged the fairies’ furniture in their lean-to. “OK, fairies,” I said. “Watch me walk on my hands.” I swung my feet up against the sky and this time I took two steps with my hands before I came down. I gave a whoop. Robin Hood would be proud of me. Maybe I’d even join the circus.
My parents didn’t worry that I was wandering around exploring the natural wor
ld by myself; they knew I would follow their only rule: not to go swimming alone. The only other local hazard was poison ivy. They didn’t know I was full of longing for something I couldn’t name, because I didn’t tell them.
“Susie! Time for lunch!” came my mother’s voice. The other world was calling, the middle-sized world.
As I get older, I find myself coming back to childhood’s yearning. I both seek solitude and fear it, just as I did at ten. Upstairs in my study in the quiet house, I’m drinking my green tea and sitting sideways in my favorite chair, with my feet hanging over one arm like a teenager, looking out the window at the redwood tree. I’m wondering who I am and what I’m doing here in this bag of skin, as the old Chinese Zen masters called it. Why am I still the only one inside?
Twice, I wasn’t alone in my body. I could feel the company inside as I watched the bulge of a foot move across my belly. I liked having someone else with me, for a change, in the small apartment of my body, though of course I liked it even more when each of the babies came out to meet me.
If I had a partner I expect it would take the sharp edge off the longing, but I’m talking about something other than being single here, a more essential separation; I’m not talking about being alone in my bed—that’s another conversation—but about being alone in my head.
I sit in meditation at home and I go out to sit with others in Buddhist practice places. Sometimes I sit in the teacher’s seat, sometimes I sit in the seat of a student, and always I sit in longing. In that slow turn between the outbreath and the inbreath, the question sometimes arises: “How do I get out of this separate self?”
In the Zen tradition we usually face the wall and so can’t see each other. When I sat recently with people from the Theravadan tradition, we sat in a circle facing each other with our eyes closed. I snuck a peek at the others, all of them seeming to sit so peacefully, and I thought, “What are they all doing and how do they know how to do it?” A wave of longing vibrated in my blood like a shot of brandy, and I felt hot prickles all over my skin. I said to myself, “Hello, longing. I know you.” And in that moment I suddenly felt happy. I liked the prickles. And for the hundred thousandth time, I returned to my breathing, letting the air in the room come into my lungs like the tide—the same air that was flowing in and out of all the other bodies in the room, joining us together. Longing is its own satisfaction. It’s already complete.