17
Old Zendo
I’m back in the old zendo, the one on Cerro Gordo Road in Santa Fe, adjacent to the stupa. A square room, white-plastered adobe walls, wood floor, a skylight overhead in the center. I’m sitting in the corner on a Thursday night. The sitting has already started with six people. But this is not the old Zen, not strict. I can find my place even though I’ve come in late.
In 1984 Baker Roshi taught here. Philip Whalen, the great poet/priest, would sit opposite me; Issan, who eventually became the abbot for the San Francisco Hartford Street Zen Center, with his head shaved, was to my right; a stodgy, delightful woman named Miriam Bobkoff sat diagonal to me in black robes. An ex–prize fighter, muscles bulging, sat a few cushions away, and also a young man with a long beard named Robert Sycamore. Baker had recently resigned from San Francisco Zen Center for indiscretions that at the time were unclear, and this was the part of his group that had followed him.
In 1984 I had just returned to New Mexico from practicing at the Minnesota Zen Center. Wherever Zen was, near where I lived, I went.
Besides, I liked Baker. I was not part of the brouhaha and felt comfortable continuing to like him. I was in that heaven place before my own perfect teacher’s betrayals were discovered. At that point I ignored—or tried to ignore—anything that got in my way, not knowing then that the obstacles were part of the way and I needed to figure out what—or what not—to do with them.
Now it’s twenty-four years later, mid-March. The wind is moaning outside. The wind will go on well into May. Spring is a miserable season in New Mexico. But you should have seen the twilight as my ten-year-old Volvo bumped along the dirt road. Soft, gray-blue, and big. Tentative, lonesome, home.
The day before, our small group had messed around with a koan about mending. Two Zen friends from old China have a discussion, and you almost think one of them gets it right, but then you realize it’s not quite like that. You can’t hold one side and forget the other.
I left the Quaker Meeting House on Canyon Road, where we have these koan salons every Wednesday afternoon from three to five. It has nothing to do with the Quakers—they lend us this beautiful but cold room. And we sit huddled even though the heater—too far away—is blasting.
Joan Sutherland, who leads these salons, hardly says a word, but this time out of frustration I turn to her. “Speak or we won’t come back.”
She laughs but gives us a heavy hint.
I’m suddenly desolate. It makes the koan worse, even if I understand better. My whole body wants to be involved. It is like pointing out a person across the room and saying, “Someday you’ll love him.” No help at all. I have to find my own way to him and into love.
The rest of the group was delighted by the help.
I was miserable. That’s how I ended up the next night in the zendo. I don’t usually go on Thursday nights. I was hungry and at the same time felt trapped.
Not only had my mother died in December but the man next door to me died the next day, and my landlord in the house behind took his last tough breath a few weeks later, and a forty-eight-year-old I cared about in New York surprised me and died too. All at once no one was sick and got better. They stopped breathing for good.
You would have liked Sandy, the ninety-four-year-old retired surgeon I paid rent to. He’d pass my kitchen door in the passenger’s seat—Louise, his wife of forty years, drove their station wagon—and I’d come out and lean into his window, and the three of us would chat.
“Do you see that bird’s nest on top of that telephone pole?” He pointed.
I’d have to squint hard. “Yes, you’re right. Wow.”
He was clear almost to the end. I’d stop by, bring watermelon—his favorite—out of season, while he was propped up in bed reading the New York Times.
Gone now. A rush of death in a month’s time.
It was the forty-eight-year-old in New York who was the hardest for me. I’d walk down Camino del Monte Sol at the edge of the road and whisper, “Adele, I am so sorry,” and there was no consolation. My stomach in a tight fist against that other place that I feared was no place, only a hole a body is dropped into. No more Natalie. Or Mr. Digneo next door.
I remember going to Baker during retreat. “I get sick of my thoughts, but every time I become present, the fear is so great it drives me into panicked thoughts again. I’m afraid of being nothing.”
“That’s the main dilemma for most of us.”
Another time, after I learned my teacher in Minneapolis was going to die, I went to Baker. He had experienced the death of a teacher when Suzuki Roshi died and passed the lineage on to him. “How did you handle Suzuki’s death? I’m going to so miss Katagiri.”
“Oh, I didn’t miss him. I had to step up and do his job.”
“You didn’t miss him?”
He shook his head.
I left that day thinking, That’s not me. My heart was so broken, but I miss that time. It was good to love someone that much.
Now I’m caught in the dark web of a koan, a conversation, an interchange from more than a thousand years ago.
I’m missing the point of the interchange because my mind is too complicated. There’s no trick. It’s right in front of me. I can’t see it. You say water and I hear mud. You say dead and I say wake them up. I say I am sixty years old and I don’t accept it. Then I have a huge sense of urgency. I have to fill in every inch of the next ten years. And the anxiety intensifies. Where will all of this lead? I suspect the truth is not one way or the other. It is both: I am alive and I will die.
18
Lost Purse
“I have something you want,” a woman called out in the last moment of a weekend writing workshop in Lenox, Massachusetts.
Jerking my head to the left, I found the body to the voice—in her fifties, short-cropped salt-and-pepper hair, slightly built.
“You found my purse?” I squealed into the microphone. The purse was small, gold, knit by a friend. I use it to hold my room key and loose change at these gatherings.
I had lost it the day before when I went swimming, plopped it someplace and forgot it. Peeled off my shorts and dove into the wide August lake surrounded by tall trees with my friend and coteacher Sean Murphy. We had to swim far into the interior before the bottom was clear of sharp weeds clawing at our bare legs.
“Look, a line of ducks.” I pointed as they passed by.
Sean spit out some lake water. “Geese, Natalie, Canada geese.”
I looked toward shore. The lifeguard was bent over a computer on his lap. “What if we drown?”
“Two women are swimming out even farther—one’s already gone under.” Sean’s dry silliness kills me. I laughed loud and long. The lifeguard almost looked up—but didn’t.
This was summer. The way it’s supposed to be—water and green and a close, pale sky. How it was when I was young.
As we swam back to shore, I noticed the lifeguard had fallen asleep, his chin collapsed on his chest. Even my screaming in half-glee, racing with Sean, passing over the weeds again, did not stir him.
We grabbed our thin white towels, walked off to sit under a silver maple, closed our eyes, and followed the breath for a half hour—all the way in, all the way out, the sun and leaf shadows playing over our bodies.
I was oddly moody walking back down the dirt-and-pebbled path. “Do you feel how soft the air is?” I said a few times. I was trying to get at something.
Two days before, we had flown in from New Mexico, with its sharp, dry light, changing planes in Baltimore, landing in Albany, an hour and a half from this retreat center. I let the late eastern thick season seep into me.
I missed going to my family plot on Long Island. It had been two years since I had bent over the stones of Rose and Sam Edelstein, my grandparents; and Benjamin Goldberg, my zany, adored, difficult father. I’d only had a single visit with my mother’s stone, Sylvia Helen Goldberg, beautiful, and dead four and a half years.
I wanted to
call my father Papa, the way he called his Russian immigrant father. “Papa, come swim with me. We’ll eat chicken sandwiches wrapped in waxed paper on plaid wool blankets, soft and hot from the sand.”
How does one deal with the known world when it is swept away?
. . .
“My purse.” I reached for my hip. “It’s gone.” I looked down. “I left it either at the beach—or at the café before we left. Remember? I got a Popsicle.”
I headed up the hill and Sean went to search the lakeshore.
Nothing.
We announced it that afternoon to the 150 students. The institute’s assistant went to inquire at the lost and found.
“It will show up,” someone said.
It didn’t until this last morning.
The student who had found it was sly. “You owe me something.”
My mind raced. “Come up here.” I motioned, catching on.
Sean said, “See if the twenty is still in there.”
“You want to know the secret of writing, huh? What I promised? The bounty I offered.” She was kneeling next to me now. I was quiet, looking for words. “You know I wrote a 250-page book to answer that question.” She didn’t budge. “Out in March 2013.” My little joke didn’t make a dent. I wasn’t getting away that glibly. The class was dead still.
I took a leap. I turned to the class. “Why don’t you give me the answer? All of you—see what comes from the bottom of your mind. Wait. Let it come to you. Receive it.”
These easterners are scruffy, tough, critical, literary. It’s their facade. Win their trust and they turn belly-up, like puppies, or cavort like sweet lambs. My tenderness for these students at that moment, as they sat with closed eyes, searching inside themselves for the answer, was so profound I could hardly breathe.
We will never be in this configuration again.
I’ve taught so much over the last thirty-five years—all over the country—and in France and Italy too. The students come and go, sometimes returning after many years. They seem younger than they used to be. I have to be willing to say good-bye over and over—not hold on to any of them. Freedom to come and go. As my Zen training says, “The door swings both ways.”
And yet, some students stay. They take on the practice in their core, show up at every retreat, come consistently every December and August for ten years running. I get to know these students, and a genuine teacher-student relationship—in the old style of Zen, face-to-face—develops.
I wasn’t available for this at first. I was in my thirties when my first book came out and still so much a student of my own teacher. I wasn’t sure how to handle so much energy coming at me. So I was strict, boundaried—and brittle. But if you managed not to be deflected and came again and again, I softened.
My longtime students used to pull new students aside. “Stay away from her outside the class,” they warned. “She’s a bitch.” But I felt like they would eat me alive.
A long time passed before I realized my own teacher was simply human. When I finally did, I was free—and full of gratitude. The wide gap closed.
At the end of retreats even my most dedicated students forget to thank me. They gush about the cooks, the assistant, even the groundskeepers—and I sit in the circle, holding the emptiness at their backs, and no one notices. I hope for their sake they notice before I die.
It’s not unlike our attitude toward our parents. Mostly we don’t notice them. And when we are young, it works well that way. They are just there. A friend told me recently that she was driving her sixteen-year-old daughter to yet another ballet class, and right on Berger Street, on the east side of Santa Fe, she had a meltdown. Clutching the steering wheel, she cried, “Amanda, will you ever say you love me? Will you ever say thank you?”
The daughter turned and looked at her as though she were crazy.
My friend said to herself, Now, Susan, pull yourself together.
Buson has a haiku:
In the autumn wind,
I think only
of my parents
I assume his parents were dead. If his parents were alive when he wrote it, I would be doubly impressed with his meeting life with life when it’s happening, right here. But he met his emotion in any case.
“Okay, ready to tell me?” I asked the students.
“Give us another minute,” someone called out.
“Ohh-kay.”
Lunch will be soon. Then I will drive four hours to the Cape, where I’ve never been, to do a solo retreat at a cabin in the woods. Recently a good friend died, and another I’d worked with for twenty years had colon cancer.
I thought parents were the big deaths, and once those were over I could relax. No more deaths for twenty years.
Not the case at all.
Recently I admitted I had nothing to write about—the well was dried up. A week alone? I’d made the plan months ago. I was beginning to dread it, even panic. How long had it been since I was totally on my own for a week? At age thirty-three, when I was a young poet, I went to Michael Dennis Browne’s cabin in northern Minnesota and wrote for three weeks, living on bananas and chocolate chips.
In two more months I’d begin a yearlong sabbatical. No teaching. I wasn’t sure that, at sixty-six, I’d ever teach again.
“Now are you ready?” I asked.
The student next to me nodded. “I found your purse hanging off a slat on the white fence by the lake. I went swimming early this morning, and when I came out, I saw it. I thought then, What is the true secret for me?” She clutched her breast and said, “I have to trust myself.”
Immediately a few students yelled out their versions: “I have to have courage.” “Speak from my heart.” “Know myself.”
I crinkled my nose and shook my head. “No. No. No. Not even close. It’s not about how you feel.”
At this point they were beginning to push in on me, getting up from their chairs. “What? What is it?” Hurrah for the determination of easterners.
I mouthed slowly, word upon word: “You. Have. To. Pick. Up. The pen—and write. Just. Write.
“For years, that’s all I’ve been saying. If it’s hot out, write in the heat. If it’s cold, pull on a sweater and write. Cut through, immediate. Act. You don’t have to change a thing. Writing doesn’t ask you to be any different from who you are right now. Not better, not more.”
They all fell back in their seats. After a long silence, feet, hands, notebooks began to shuffle. It was time to go.
“I’m sorry I didn’t see it when I went back,” Sean whispered. “I looked and looked.”
“You were not meant to see it. She had to find it. It was perfect.”
19
Another New Year
I wake up this first bitter-cold day of the New Year, the streets an ice sheet, and recall my dream: Small mice are marching across a flower-wallpapered bedroom with an unmade mattress on the floor, and my friend Sean Murphy sits curled up around his guitar in a wooden chair, weeping that his father never asked him to play, and this New Year’s no one did either. I clutch his hand, comforting him, at the same time commanding the cats to catch the mice. No one is listening. The cats do not scare the mice. The mice keep coming.
I lie in bed in my home in Santa Fe with the dream all over my face—the linoleum floor, the woman in the next apartment with bleached-blond hair dropping off her yellow cat, the brick tenements through the window, how very large and empty that dream apartment of mine is.
The night before, at ten o’clock, I had snapped my Yaktrax to the bottom of my snow boots and trudged under a full complement of stars in a black sky to Upaya Zen Center across the road, where seventy of us sat for two hours, then listened at midnight to 108 bells ringing out the year, followed by a short talk by the roshi (my dear friend Joan Halifax) and then tea and cookies in the kitchen.
I ate way too many but insisted this was just what I needed. At the time I meant the cookies, but really it was sitting still in the dark zendo, breathing with others
, coming together in this sober way on the last night of the year. More than deep or spiritual or any of the words one would imagine with a statue of Manjusri—his sword of wisdom slicing through ignorance—on the altar and candles flickering, what I felt was relief. To stop at the end of a hectic year that I was trying so hard to rein in, then surrender to, wondering what this human life is all about.
My mind wandered to the actress I had met at the same New Year’s Eve sit three years ago. How much I liked her, how she looked both beautiful and tired. I’d heard a few months ago that she had breast cancer. At any age this is bad, but in your seventies—even if you got the best care and survived—it was a big toll on an aging body.
That evening I told her how I loved her Broadway performance.
“Did you really? Why didn’t you come backstage afterward to tell me?”
“It never occurred to me.” I didn’t think you could go backstage. I loved her innocence and insecurity—and that her vulnerability remained after all of her years of fame.
Lying in bed thinking of all the chemo, the visits to doctors, the exhaustion, blood tests, worry, hope, phone calls, antiseptic hospital—“It’s about death, isn’t it, Nat?” I said to myself. “Either way, no matter what, there is death at the end.”
My mind flew back to ten years ago: a sawed-off shotgun at my neck. “Give me your purse.” The front door to the apartment building an arm’s length away, nine in the evening under the front porch light. I fooled him and gave him my athletic bag instead, clear and unafraid—but on the other side of the door, back in my small rented living room, I was shattered, hysterical, terrified. All weekend I did not leave the apartment, and that Monday morning I had to appear at 5:00 A.M. in front of the Zen teacher I’d come back to the Twin Cities to study with. There was a plan to receive dharma transmission, permission to teach in my old Japanese teacher’s lineage. He had died ten years before. I was in my early fifties, still working out his death, thinking that if I was in his teaching lineage he’d be able to meet me on the other side. The silver death plane would land and, voilà—he would be standing at gate 57, waiting for me. It was naive, stupid; I hadn’t thought it all through. Deeply entangled, I’d hauled my ass—and my furniture—once again to the upper Midwest in my blind drive to work it out.
The Great Spring Page 14