By the time I was dropped off at the foot of Phillip’s driveway, the sun was setting. Nora and the kids were just getting into the jeep to head to the Taos Plaza Theater where they were going to see The Ten Commandments. Like a zombie, I climbed into the backseat with the girls. Eric sat up front with his mom, and off we went.
No one spoke for a long time. Finally Zoe leaned over and whispered in my ear. “The day before Phillip died he had a dream. You were sitting behind him on his motorcycle, and he drove it really fast through the big window of his shed.”
Thanks a lot, man, I muttered in silence. You left me to clean up the broken glass.
“This is for you.” Zoe pulled a small sandalwood box out of her jacket. I opened it. In the light of the setting sun I saw Phillip’s cherished thunderbird ring, inlaid with red coral. Zoe slipped it onto my middle finger and then handed me the box. I leaned my head onto the shoulder of my boyfriend’s little sister and shuddered with sobs. I was trying to cry quietly, because I didn’t want to upset Phillip’s mom. My own little sister grabbed my hand across Zoe’s lap and held it tightly all the way to the theater.
I will save this ring until I am grown up and give it to the first guy I ever have sex with, I decided. It will be my virginity present.
This little pact with my dead first love brought me a certain comfort. I clung to that ring as if it were a life jacket tossed out to me as I bobbed alone in the middle of an apocalyptic sea.
6
LAMA
While Mom was trying to fill her Matty-shaped emptiness with Ramón, Dad was slaking his thirst for their dead son with vats of cheap red wine and also some whisky. I burned alone in the fire of Phillip.
There may have been others who were incinerated by the death of my first love—his own mother and father, for instance; his sister and brother; his best friends, Hunter and David; and all the girls who wished he had been their boyfriend and maybe didn’t understand why he would pick me—but no one spoke of him much. Or they only dropped small crumbs of memory here and there, as if by accident, which I snatched and gobbled, making a fool of myself. Wasn’t anyone else starving for Phillip? People spoke sideways about death, heartbreak, about longing. I wanted a full-body encounter with the truth, even if it killed me. Especially if it killed me. Being dead seemed way more interesting than my messy little anguish.
Meanwhile, the dream that had caught me up in its clutches last spring kept dropping down and engulfing me. I would be in the middle of flipping french toast for Amy and Roy on a Sunday morning, and the smell of cinnamon would trigger the switch. Suddenly everything was lit up, as if a fire were burning holes in the fabric of the air, and I could see through to the other side—or tiny, fast-moving glimpses of the other world—much more real than this one. So real that my regular world was becoming the dreamscape, and I was trapped in between. I could not cross over to the true place, and I could never again believe in this one.
Purgatory—even more excruciating than loving a boy who was dead, who died before I had the chance to make up with him, to wrap my arms around him and squeeze hard, to brush and braid his black hair down the long line of his rib cage, to try the whole giving-up-my-virginity thing again. This time I would not be such a baby. I would be brave and take him inside me.
Solitude was the only place where I did not feel lonely. I began to escape even more often than usual. I would grab my wool poncho, a jar of mint tea, and my sketch pad and clamber down the path to the Hondo River with my dog, Sunshine, where I would set up a nest among the red willows and draw and sing the songs I was making up, over and over, until they were etched in me.
The bells are tolling softly in the tower
The snow is falling softly on his grave
Now he’s got a universe of power
But we don’t seem to see, not me, not even me
He used to tell me that he wished that he could fly
Told me that there was an endless sky
Told me that he wished he was a bird
And now he’s taken off without a word, without a word
Into the shattered cup of me a small light was beginning to seep, outlining the cracks, rising up to dampen the shards. I could only feel this delicate thing when I became very still, when I stopped singing and noticed the silence, when I set down my black felt-tip pen and looked up and out at the stream, when, exhausted by crying, I smelled the coming of spring and noticed the minute green shoots of riparian grasses sprinkling the loamy bank.
The earth was slowly coming back to life. Actually, I hated that. I hated that the world went on without Phillip. That I too was expected to rise up and bloom.
In late May, after the Mirabai play, I moved up to the Lama Foundation and joined the summer staff. I was only fourteen, but I was determined to function as a full member of the team. My friend Margaret and her brothers and cousins grew up at Lama, but because their parents were the founders and they had already met every major spiritual teacher on the planet, they had cultivated the casual disregard of the elite and had no inclination to get up at sunrise and meditate with the self-important seekers who flocked up Lama Mountain as if it were Mecca.
I, on the other hand, sprang awake the moment the first bells—recycled warheads from the nearby Los Alamos labs—rang across the landscape and penetrated the dawn. I pulled on my cold clothes and headed to morning prayers. I signed up on the seva (“selfless service”) wheel to feed the chickens and stock the outhouses with toilet paper, to cook gallons of black bean soup and fry dozens of tortillas, and to wipe the smudged globes of the kerosene lamps we used to illumine the dome at night when we chanted the ninety-nine names of Allah or conducted weekly business meetings. I wanted to be in the place where Mirabai had sung through me. I was showing up in case it might happen again.
That first summer I gathered the appropriate garments for my spiritual persona: drawstring muslin pants, fiesta skirts, hand-blocked Indian blouses and scarves. I fastened bangles on my ankles and wrapped a string of 108 sandalwood beads around my wrist. I draped my shoulders in a prayer shawl from Nepal, and I did not wear shoes. I read the collected works of Hazrat Inayat Khan and Carlos Castaneda. I memorized the Heart Sutra, and I observed three days of silence. There was not a spiritual practice I encountered that did not cause my heart to fly open and burst into flame. There was only one practice that filled me with fear: silent meditation.
The minute I settled onto my round black zafu and closed my eyes—in the company of others or alone—the edges of my world swiftly lost their shape and began to melt. Soon I would not remember who I was. I could no longer feel the boundaries of my body. I’d lost all sense of orientation in time and space. My breath grew shallow and almost ceased. I could not have opened my eyes if I tried. I was being sucked up and out and into the realm beyond this realm, about to hurtle off a cliff into the void. It wasn’t worth it.
No one else seemed to consider meditation to be a dangerous thing. No one ever mentioned the perils of slipping into the abyss. They blithely sat down, closed their eyes, and endured it for the requisite thirty minutes, and when their time was up, they got on with their day, washing dishes and thinning the lettuces, as if meditation were just another task on the to-do list, rather than a brush with death. I carried my secret like a glowing coal. Smoke came out of my ears. But the adults around me—people in their twenties, mostly—had fires of their own to hide. Like trying (and failing) to be celibate. Like not really believing in God in a place where God was all anyone talked about.
A couple of years later I confessed my meditation issue to Stephen Levine. He had come up to Lama to lead a workshop on death and dying, geared both to the terminally ill and to those who wanted to go into hospice work. As a staff person, I was allowed to attend one summer retreat for free. I chose this one since I had so much experience with dead people (my brother, my boyfriend) and I figured I could be of some service if I were properly trained to help people die. I wanted to specialize in children.
&n
bsp; Stephen was a Buddhist and taught mindfulness meditation as an essential practice for those who planned to sit with the dying. I tried to participate. I sat in the dome, knee to knee with the others, and out I went. Gritting my teeth, I yanked myself back into my body, and when Stephen asked if there were any questions following the session, my hand poked into the air. He nodded in my direction.
“Um. . . is it normal to. . . go away during meditation?”
“Normal?” People chuckled and I blushed. “What’s normal?”
A stupid question—I knew it. Why did I say it out loud?
“Where do you go?” Stephen asked gently.
I tried to explain. Failed.
“Meditation isn’t about getting high—with all due respect to my friend Ram Dass,” Stephen said. “It’s about being fully present. If you have a tendency toward altered states, try keeping your eyes open. Or chop vegetables.” More chuckling from the throngs. Stephen moved on.
Later that season, Ram Dass himself showed up at Lama, and I gave up trying to keep myself grounded. Safe in his psychic embrace, I had full license to blast off and away from the present moment. I finally felt free to let the margins of my individuated consciousness dissolve into the sky. Not only was I permitted to chant myself into a drunken stupor, but that also seemed to be the point. This was the path of Bhakti Yoga: lover disappearing into Beloved.
That was the first of several summers I served as Ram Dass’s Lama liaison. Every morning I appeared at his RV bearing sliced grapefruit and a cup of black tea with milk, sugar, and ground cardamom. If Ram Dass had wanted a newspaper and slippers, I would have gladly delivered them in my mouth. I was smitten. I only wanted to make him happy.
Ram Dass always asked how I was and inquired about my sadhana (spiritual practice), but I kept quiet, trying to be unobtrusive, finding out what he needed and then slipping away. I was proud of this, determined not to be needy, disdainful of the adults around me who were always clambering for Ram Dass’s attention.
Before Ram Dass came into the dome for his teachings each day, I would light the incense, wave it in front of Maharaj-ji’s picture as I had seen others do, plump up Ram Dass’s cushion, and straighten the Persian rug where he would be sitting. Then I would press my back against the adobe wall, close enough to respond if he needed anything, but far enough away to remain unnoticed.
Throughout those early years, I cultivated my invisibility, determined to eradicate my ego. The fact that I was too young to have had a chance to develop an ego escaped me, as did the fact that what little sense of self I might have managed to pull together was annihilated with Phillip’s death when I was barely fourteen.
I began to assemble my spirit squad. I set up a puja table in my tent: an aspen round that I covered with a mirrored cloth from India, on which I placed a small painted statue of Hanuman, the monkey god, incarnation of devotion; a wooden Buddha in seated meditation; and a brass Tara, Bodhisattva of compassion. Against this I leaned pictures of my team: Meher Baba, with his finger to his lips, admonishing silence; Maharaj-ji in his plaid blanket slipping into samadhi; and Murshid Samuel Lewis leading Sufi dancing.
But the most prominent deity on my altar was Krishna, Lord of Love, who had captured my heart, yes, and also absconded with it, leaving me ruptured and hemorrhaging. Krishna and Phillip took turns torturing me, and the truth was, I could no longer really tell them apart.
7
THE GURU AND THE GIRL
That first year at Lama was not all about ecstatic states of consciousness and bonding with famous spiritual teachers. In between chanting the names of God and learning to bake bread, I was grieving. I staggered under the load of heartbreak: the death of my first love, the lack of empathy I was receiving over the death of my first love, the now long-ago death of my big brother, my parents’ divorce and the reconfiguration of my family, my father’s alcoholism and my new stepfather’s alcoholism. Plus my propensity for spontaneous and debilitating hallucinogenic experiences that made me feel like an extraterrestrial that did not belong on this planet. No one understood me.
Until Randy Sanders. Randy Sanders had moved from Southern California to Lama that spring with his wife and two children. His wife had a voice like Minnie Mouse and a tendency to see the world as a benign and uncomplicated place. His son was my age and his daughter a couple of years younger. Like most newcomers to the mountain, Family Sanders threw themselves into life at Lama. The wife became the “kitchen master,” in charge of ordering bulk foods, stocking the underground root cellar, and planning menus for large groups. The son learned how to mix adobe plaster in a wheelbarrow and mud the cracks on the outside walls of the dome. The daughter convinced her elders to purchase white flour, sugar, and food coloring on town runs, and she baked and lavishly decorated cakes in the Lama’s practically macrobiotic kitchen with recipes she found in The Joy of Cooking.
Randy Sanders strutted around dispensing spiritual teachings and making suggestions about community development. A middle-aged amateur scientist, he had greasy hair and a potbelly. He bragged about everything, from the award-winning film he had supposedly produced on mitosis and meiosis to his scuba-diving instructor’s certification to his association with Ram Dass to his gifts of clairvoyance. There was not a single lovely thing about Randy Sanders, except that he seemed to love me, and I was longing to be loved.
After ten years of running Da Nahazli, the alternative school they built in Taos, Tot’s parents had given it up, and Lama had taken over. Asha, one of Lama’s founders, was the new headmistress. Asha was a close disciple of Murshid Sam, the Holy Fool Sufi master who invented the Dances of Universal Peace and proclaimed what I was beginning to suspect: all paths lead to the One. Up till now, Da Nahazli School only went through eighth grade, but there was a crop of us hippie kids between the ages of thirteen and fifteen who were dreading the prospect of public high school. That’s where the “straight kids” went. We would never fit in. When newcomer Lama Bean Randy Sanders heard about this educational gap, he volunteered to start up a high school program at Da Nahazli for the coming school year. Asha was thrilled. Since I was one of the prime candidates for the new program, she made sure to introduce me to Randy Sanders as soon as it was decided.
“I see you,” he said. We were sitting on a bench under the Russian olive tree to become acquainted. He winked meaningfully. “You have hidden long enough. It’s time to be who you are.”
I tried to hold eye contact.
“I was there, you know. When she entered you. When you became her.”
My head began to spin, and I thought I might shoot out of my body again.
Randy Sanders took my hand. “It’s all right,” he said. “We can take it slowly. You’re not ready yet, but your time is coming.”
Lama’s summer program came to an end and it was time to head back down the mountain and home to my family, which had transformed into a circle of dangerous strangers. Mom and Ramón had bought a half-finished, half-underground, half-passive-solar house in Arroyo Hondo the year before, and they had been fixing it up ever since. They had brought back a pile of Zapotec rugs from a spontaneous road trip to a weaving village near Oaxaca in the spring, sold them all, and gone back for more. They convinced the owner of the ice cream parlor on the Taos Plaza to let them open a kiosk at the back of the shop, where they operated a thriving little import business. Now they had a home, a shop, and three children. But Ramón had not miraculously mutated into a family man. He still disliked kids. And Dad, who had moved into the one-room adobe hut on the hill above my mom’s new house, did not seem to remember that we belonged to him.
Dad drank. And smoked—cigarettes and pot. Ramón smoked and drank too. Mom just smoked pot. No one talked about God. Or about feelings. The prevailing language of our extended family was sarcasm, and everyone seemed to have concluded that I was linguistically impaired. Whenever my feelings were hurt (every few minutes, it seemed) that was because I had no sense of humor. I was overly sensitive, too emoti
onal, so dramatic. Always had been. Only I was worse now. Plus I had turned into a religious fanatic.
A Da Nahazli parent had contributed the building materials and blueprints for a one-room hogan—the octagonal structures common in Navajo country—so that our new high school program could have a room of its own. Randy Sanders was in charge of the construction project. He tried to recruit parent-volunteers, but no one seemed interested in helping, so he spent the last few weeks of the summer banging it together by himself. When he invited students to spend a day organizing our new library from book donations, I signed up. Books were my thing.
My mother dropped me off at Da Nahazli on a Saturday in late August, promising to pick me up after she had finished the shopping and laundry. I expected a roomful of kids sorting novels and textbooks, but there was no one in the hogan except Randy Sanders. Inwardly groaning, I smiled politely and sat down cross-legged on the remnant of a beige shag rug covering the sand floor and began to pick through the pile of books: Findhorn Garden, Dune, Thirty Days to a More Powerful Vocabulary, The Tao Te Ching, Diet for a Small Planet, The Old Man and the Sea. Not bad. I could just read my way through the school year, read through my grief, read through the drunkenness of my two reluctant fathers.
“So,” Randy Sanders said.
The next thing I knew, we were talking. About everything—about Phillip dying, about my mom running off with Ramón, about Krishna. One thing led to another and suddenly I found myself confessing my deepest secret: I told him about my altered states. I had not even been able to explain this syndrome to myself, and Randy Sanders got it right away! Not only did he grasp what I was saying, but he seemed to be familiar with the landscape I had been getting lost in. He knew the landmarks. He had navigational recommendations.
Caravan of No Despair Page 5