by Susan Moon
And still I sat there, staring down my mind. I had come by choice to be alone on Shimmins Ridge, like a monk in a Chinese scroll. “What is it?” I shouted. “What is it?”
At last, twilight was gone. I went down the steep stairs and lit the lamps and ate my rice and beans in a time that was no longer in between, a time that was simply night.
Evening after evening, I sat there with my demons, asking: What is it? Finally, I saw that it was nothing. It was OK. I began to believe that I was sitting in the lap of Buddha.
As the quiet days went by and I opened to my surroundings, nature helped me understand that I was not alone. Bats, quail, woodpeckers, deer. When the crickets are singing and the leaves are whispering, you feel the vibrations of all the life that’s passing through you. Even the rattlesnake curled up on the outdoor shower platform in the sun provided a certain amount of company as it rattled at me before slithering away into the woodpile.
One afternoon I was on the porch doing some yoga. I was feeling good and strong and enjoying myself, but noisy planes kept roaring overhead. I love the silence of that place, and I was annoyed by the unusual disturbance. When I finally looked up and paid attention, I saw that there were huge billows of smoke wafting toward me from the valley below. I realized with a shock that there was a forest fire nearby, and these were forestry planes. I couldn’t tell where the fire was because of the trees, but it looked like the smoke could be coming from the little valley right at the bottom of our dirt road. I got anxious. If the fire was down on Covelo Road, it could tear its way up through the dry trees on the ridge in a flash, and Satchmo and I would be done for. So we got into the car to drive down the hill and check it out. But the car wouldn’t start—the battery was dead! If only I had parked the car at the top of the slope I could have put it in second gear and rolled down till the engine caught, but I’d tucked the car into a parking spot off the road.
I had a bad moment then. I thought about the Oakland fire, and the people who died because they couldn’t get down from the Oakland Hills. I thought: my family and friends will be so annoyed with me if I burn to death because I drained my car battery with my laptop!
I knew my uphill neighbor was at work in town, so Satchmo and I walked to the next-nearest neighbor’s house a mile down the road, but he wasn’t there. I was probably the only living person on Shimmins Ridge. We walked another mile down to the bottom of our dirt road, and by that time I could tell by the smoke that the fire was on the other side of another ridge. What a relief! Down at the bottom, on the paved road, I found some neighbors at home—in the country, people two miles away are neighbors—and the other neighbors on my dirt road who hadn’t been home were there, too, and they were all sitting around drinking beer on a weekday afternoon.
They told me not to worry about the fire—they had gone online and found out it was across the highway. I said I had a dead battery, and one of the guys offered to drive me up the hill in his truck and give me a jump start. Then they gave me a glass of water, and we chatted for about half an hour, and nobody did anything about giving me a ride. I didn’t say, “When are you going to give me a jump start?” I wasn’t in any hurry. It seemed that nobody was. More hummingbirds than I have ever seen at once were buzzing around a dozen feeders, and I watched them. I hadn’t talked to anybody for two weeks, so I was in some kind of altered state anyway. I was content to wait. But I was struck by the fact that if somebody back in the city, back in Berkeley, said they’d give you a jump start, they wouldn’t just keep sitting there for another half an hour as if they hadn’t said it. Finally the guy said, “OK, let’s go,” and he drove me and Satchmo up the road in his pickup truck, and started my car.
It was a humbling experience. I had been feeling so proud of myself for being a pioneer woman taking care of herself in the wilderness. I had been annoyed with the planes—those manifestations of technological pollution. Then suddenly everything flipped, and I realized that even there, on retreat in the woods, I was completely woven into the tapestry of human society. I was grateful that the Forestry Department had planes to put out forest fires and that there were friendly people at the bottom of the road who could give me a jump start, and I saw that my whole retreat was resting on a foundation of human goodwill and human society.
Near the end of my sojourn, I had a severe relapse of loneliness. As it happened, I left the cabin for a day and a half to go to the memorial service of a dear family friend. I took Satchmo back to my sister’s in Berkeley and joined with people I love to celebrate the long life of a man who had devoted himself to art and family. Afterward, I drove north again, dogless, for the final week of my retreat.
When I got back to the cabin that evening, I fell apart. I was by myself again, without even Satchmo to keep me company. It was twilight, and I’d forgotten what I was doing there. I compared my life to my deceased friend’s—he had always made art, always loved and lived with family. All my worst fears and all my regrets about being alone flamed up again, and I thought I might not be able to last the week. I sat in meditation, and I cried.
The next morning, still crying, I walked, I meditated, I made lentil soup, and I cleared some brush. As I sat in the twilight that evening, looking out at the oak tree shining in the last light, I reminded myself of what Norman had said in our last phone conversation. It’s natural to feel sadness at the ending of the day, and it’s natural to feel sadness on parting from loved ones. Impermanence is sad, but when I beat myself up with regret, I’m robbing myself of the life I’m living right now: the Spanish moss on the oak branch, the crickets’ chant, the smell of lentil soup on the stove. I felt . . . a shift, a lift, a clicking into place. In the next couple of days, my loneliness fever broke, and I returned to myself again.
One morning as I was returning from a long walk, I looked up and there was the gibbous moon, just past full and nibbled along one side by the passage of time, floating in the bright blue sky above some digger pines. It was suddenly the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen. I felt as though the moon was having a party and had invited me to come.
I believe now that I’m OK in a way I didn’t believe it before. Now, when the twilight sickness comes again, as it surely will, I hope I’ll know, even in that sadness, that I’m alone with everyone.
This Vast Life
EVERY MORNING, I vow to be grateful for the precious gift of human birth. It’s a big gift, and it includes a lot of stuff I never particularly wanted for my birthday. Some of the things in the package I wish I could exchange for a different size or color. But I want to find out what it means to be a human being—my curiosity remains intense even as I get older—so I say thanks for the whole thing. It’s all of a piece.
In thirteenth-century Japan, Zen Master Dogen wrote, “The Way is basically perfect and all-pervading.” I’m already in it. We are all in it; we are made of it.
When my granddaughter was just over two, I visited her and her parents in Texas. She doesn’t have a lot of ideas yet about how things are supposed to be, or what’s supposed to happen next. She’s glad to be alive. I was babysitting for her one afternoon, and part of my job was to get her up from her nap. I was reading in the next room, and I knew when she woke up because I heard her chatting away to her bear. I lifted her and her bear out of her crib and we went downstairs. While I fixed her a snack of crackers and cheese, she danced around a purple ball that was lying in the middle of the living room, singing an old nursery rhyme that she had learned in her preschool: “Ring around the rosies, pocket full of posies, ashes, ashes, we all fall down.” And then she sat down on the floor—kerplunk!—laughing. She was fully present, fully joyful. Actually, the song she was singing is a very old chant about the plague, and the last line about the ashes refers to our mortality. But she wasn’t worrying about that.
In his poetic essay “The Genjokoan,” Master Dogen wrote, “A fish swims in the ocean, and no matter how far it swims, there is no end to the water. A bird flies in the sky, and no matter how far it fl
ies, there is no end to the air.”
When I get unhappy about something in my life, I think: “Wait, no, this isn’t the right life, it isn’t what I want, I need to find the edge of this life and leap over the fence into a different life.” But that’s not how it works. My life is vast. I can’t find the edge of it, just like a fish in the ocean or a bird in the sky. There’s no getting out of this life, this ocean, this sky, except by dying. If I try to change oceans, I’ll never find my way or my place—there’s no place else to be but here, in the big mystery of it.
It happened that only a few days after visiting my granddaughter I visited an old friend in his eighties who lives in an assisted living facility. He’s a Catholic priest and monk who has dedicated his life to solitude and spiritual study. He’s well read in multiple spiritual traditions, including Zen, and he is an important mentor to me. For many years he has been leading me in an ongoing conversation about prayer, mysticism, and spiritual inquiry, through correspondence as well as face-to-face visits.
He’s not well physically, he’s weak, on oxygen, and confined to a wheelchair, but his mind is fine.
He told me, “If I’ve died before, I don’t remember it, but I recognize what’s happening—that’s where I’m going.” Years ago he had a coffin built for himself by a carpenter he knows. It stands upright in his little apartment like a roommate, a reminder, keeping him company. He sits at his table and looks out the window at a pear tree, and watches its leaves turn, and fall, and bud again. He watches the seasons, the whole universe, in that pear tree. He reads, he prays, he receives an occasional visitor. Like my granddaughter, he is completely present in his life. Like Dogen’s fish, he is swimming around in his ocean, and there is no end to the water, even in this tiny apartment.
Moments after I entered his room he was talking to me about Isaac of Ninevah, the eighth-century Syrian hermit, whose writings he had been reading when I came in.
Like my granddaughter, he, too, is singing his version of ring around the rosies, dancing until he falls down and turns to ashes.
In between that toddler and that old man is a span of over eighty years—and most of us, in those intervening decades, tangle ourselves up in knots over the things we don’t have that we want, and the things we have that we don’t want. We run around trying to fix things, in our personal lives and in the life of the planet. It’s a good thing we do, because it’s actually our responsibility to fix things; we need to fix the plumbing, for example. The toddler and the old monk aren’t fixing the plumbing. They need us to take care of them, but we need them, too, to remind us that everything is already taken care of.
I like to think about how we are completely held by the atmosphere in a literal way. The air that surrounds each of our bodies, that flows in and out of our lungs, is not nothing. It’s thick with molecules, and it fills up all the gaps and cracks between us and the other bodies and objects around us: the furniture, the walls of the room, the trees outside, the buildings. There’s no empty space. The air is fluid, making room for us, so that each of us inhabits a nook that is exactly our size and shape. The air kindly moves with us when we move. It’s like those soft rocks you can find on the beaches of northern California that have tiny mollusks living inside them in the holes they made for themselves. We’re all connected, molecule to molecule. I’m held by everything that’s not me.
The last meditation retreat I attended was beside the ocean, and while I was sitting I listened to the surf. The surf is the sound of the ocean breathing. It’s never still. Sometimes the sea is so loud and crashing that I crave a little silence, and so I listen for the silence between the waves, but just as one wave recedes from the shore, flowing back down the sand into the ocean, getting quieter and quieter, just before it gets silent, the next wave always breaks. The ocean never stops breathing because it’s alive. As I sit on my seat in the zendo, following my breathing, I follow the breathing of the ocean, too, and I begin to breathe in rhythm with the ocean.
The sound of the ocean is the sound of time passing, the sound of one moment giving way to the next. Each wave, each moment, is a gate that I pass through into the next moment.
And even if I’m not sitting by the ocean, one wave of my life is still followed immediately by the next, with no completely quiet place in between.
I love the vow: “Dharma gates are boundless; I vow to enter them.” I keep giving myself away to the next moment, and the next moment receives me. I just have to step through.
Acknowledgments
I AM GRATEFUL to my editors at Shambhala Publications: to Dave O’Neal, who encouraged me to write the book in the first place, and to Emily Bower, whose skillful and supportive responses have helped me give it shape.
Many thanks to Ellery Akers, Sarah Balcomb, Mary Barrett, Andrew Boyd, Susan Butler, Louise Dunlap, Barbara Gates, Fanny Howe, Bonnie O’Brien Jonsson, Linda Norton, Susan Orr, Bob Perelman, Nora Ryerson, Prue See, Barbara Selfridge, Gail Seneca, Francie Shaw, and Jeff Sharlet for their editorial suggestions. Thanks to the members of my Crones Group, Melody Ermachild Chavis, Annette Herskovits, Cheeta Llanes, and Judith Tannenbaum, for thinking and talking with me in a focused way about getting old, and to all my other friends and relatives who have been part of that ongoing conversation. Thanks to Blue Mountain Center, Glenstal Abbey, and the Berkeley Public Library for giving me beautiful places to work.
Credits and Permissions
The poem by Izumi Shikibu in the chapter “In the Shade of My Own Tree,” translated by Jane Hirshfield and Mariko Aratani, is from Women in Praise of the Sacred (p. 59), edited by Jane Hirshfield, copyright ©1994 by Jane Hirshfield, reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers.
The poem by Sumangalamata in the chapter “In the Shade of My Own Tree” is reprinted from The First Buddhist Women: Translations and Commentary on the Therigatha, p. 59, (1991) by Susan Murcott, with permission of Parallax Press, Berkeley, California. www.parallax.org
The haiku in the chapter “You Can’t Take It with You” is from One Robe, One Bowl: The Zen Poetry of Ryōkan, translated and introduced by John Stevens, First edition, 1977. Protected by copyright under the terms of the International Copyright Union. Reprinted by arrangement with Shambhala Publications Inc., Boston, MA. www.shambhala.com.
The quotations from Dogen in the Introduction, “Where Did I Put My Begging Bowl?,” “For the Time Being,” and “This Past Life” are from Moon in a Dewdrop, ed. Kazuaki Tanahashi (San Francisco: Northpoint Press, 1985).
The quotations from Robert Aitken and Alice Hayes in the Introduction are both from the Winter 2001 issue of Turning Wheel (p. 21).
The Dogen quotations in “Leaving the Lotus Position” and “In the Shade of My Own Tree” are both from Dogen’s “Fukanzazengi” in The Heart of Dogen’s Shobogenzo, trans. Masao Abe and Norman Waddell (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002).
The quotation from May Sarton in “In the Shade of My Own Tree” is from “Rewards of a Solitary Life,” New York Times, 1990.
Verse at the beginning of “Exchanging Self and Other” is from Shantideva, The Way of the Bodhisattva, trans. Padmakara Translation Group (Shambhala Publications, 2006), verse 120, p. 126.
The story in “Grandmother Mind” about Dogen’s student is told by Taisen Deshimaru in “With Grandmother’s Mind,” published on the website of the New Orleans Zen Temple, www.nozt.org, and originally published in Deshimaru’s book, Le Bol et le Baton (Paris: Albin Michel, 1986).
The quotation from the Prajna Paramita Sutra in the chapter “I Wasn’t My Self” is from The Perfection of Wisdom in Eight Thousand Lines, translated by Edward Conze (Portland, Maine: Four Seasons, 1973), p. 135.
Excerpt from Taking the Leap by Pema Chödrön
eISBN 978-0-8348-2101-9
1
FEEDING THE RIGHT WOLF
As human beings we have the potential to disentangle ourselves from old habits, and the potential to love and care about each other. We have the capacity to wake u
p and live consciously, but, you may have noticed, we also have a strong inclination to stay asleep. It’s as if we are always at a crossroad, continuously choosing which way to go. Moment by moment we can choose to go toward further clarity and happiness or toward confusion and pain.
In order to make this choice skillfully, many of us turn to spiritual practices of various kinds with the wish that our lives will lighten up and that we’ll find the strength to cope with our difficulties. Yet in these times it seems crucial that we also keep in mind the wider context in which we make choices about how to live: this is the context of our beloved earth and the rather rocky condition it’s in.
For many, spiritual practice represents a way to relax and a way to access peace of mind. We want to feel more calm, more focused; and with our frantic and stressful lives, who can blame us? Nevertheless, we have a responsibility to think bigger than that these days. If spiritual practice is relaxing, if it gives us some peace of mind, that’s great—but is this personal satisfaction helping us to address what’s happening in the world? The main question is, are we living in a way that adds further aggression and self-centeredness to the mix, or are we adding some much-needed sanity?
Many of us feel deeply concerned about the state of the world. I know how sincerely people wish for things to change and for beings everywhere to be free of suffering. But if we’re honest with ourselves, do we have any idea how to put this aspiration into practice when it comes to our own lives? Do we have any clarity about how our own words and actions may be causing suffering? And even if we do recognize that we’re making a mess of things, do we have a clue about how to stop? These have always been important questions, but they are especially so today. This is a time when disentangling ourselves is about more than our personal happiness. Working on ourselves and becoming more conscious about our own minds and emotions may be the only way for us to find solutions that address the welfare of all beings and the survival of the earth itself.