Caravan of No Despair

by Mirabai Starr

  “Hi,” I said.

  Jeff looked around in an exaggerated manner, pretending that he could not believe I was actually condescending to address him. He pointed to his own chest, lifted his eyebrows, and mouthed the words, “Who, me?”

  I giggled like a girl, then blushed, then condemned myself for my flirty reaction. “Yes, you.”

  “Hi.” Jeff’s smile was the smile of someone who had long ago learned not to take the world or himself too seriously. “Can I get you something?” His eyes were seawater green, his lashes dark and long, his eyebrows crazy, like Einstein’s. I had never noticed how voluptuous his lips were, how perfect his teeth. His shoulders were broad, his torso long, his hips narrow. “Cerveza?”

  I must have wrinkled my nose. “Of course not,” Jeff said. “Beer. Yuck. How about a bottle of water?”

  I nodded, and he opened the cooler. He handed me my drink, grabbed a Negro Modelo for himself, and sat down on the ice chest, gesturing for me to sit beside him.

  “So I built your house,” Jeff said.

  “What?”

  “You know the plans Tomas drew up for you?”

  Tomas was our mutual friend, a fellow Maharaj-ji devotee who happened to be a contractor. When my father died, I had inherited fifteen thousand dollars—all that remained from the once robust estate left to him by his mother following her death less than a year earlier. Most of my grandparents’ money had been atomized by a combination of health care costs and what Dad called “the Jewish Mafia.” I used my share to buy a piece of land on the Hondo Mesa, overlooking the valley where I grew up. I could just make out the roofline of my father’s old adobe from the edge of my property. I wanted to build something, and in order to get a construction loan, I needed blueprints. Tomas helped me design a simple three-bedroom, one-bath, passive solar house. The bank rejected me three times. I was a single mother cobbling together a handful of part-time jobs—not a great prospect for managing a mortgage.

  When Jeff approached Tomas about building a house on a piece of property he had recently purchased in town, he described what he wanted: a modest structure, a couple of small downstairs bedrooms and a larger one upstairs, one bathroom, big south-facing windows.

  “That sounds just like what Mirabai designed,” Tomas had said. “You know Mirabai?”

  And so it came to pass that my secret admirer stole my blueprints and built my house.

  Jeff finished his confession and said, “Would you like to come see it?”

  A couple of days later, I drove up to Jeff’s (my) house on a quiet street on the outskirts of town. When I knocked on the door, he answered with a dustpan in his hand. He was sweeping the floor. Something about this simple, homey act made me feel as if I had found shelter under a tall tree in a snowstorm. He invited me in.

  “Sorry,” he said. “I didn’t realize what time it was. I’m glad you’re here. Can I make you a tea?”

  “Please.”

  It was the most delicious cup of tea I had ever tasted. What was so special? A Bigelow English Breakfast tea bag, dunked in a mug of hot water, mixed with a spoonful of raw sugar and a splash of milk. I had brewed a hundred cups just like it. But Jeff’s tea infused every cell in my body, warming what was cold in me, moistening what had run dry.

  Oh, Mirabai, I admonished myself, get a grip.

  “So you’re a stonemason?”

  “Something like that.” Jeff laughed. “Except much less glamorous. I install electronic locking systems in hotels.”

  “Those card thingies?”

  “Yup. Those card thingies. So I’m on the road a lot. Like fifty percent of the time. When I’m home, my kids are with me.” I watched him watching for my reaction to this revelation that his children are at the center of his life. I liked it, and I nodded. “How about you? You’re a poet.”

  “Much less glamorous,” I said, and he laughed. “I teach philosophy and world religions classes at UNM-Taos, and I run an office in my house making reservations for my family’s eco-resort in Mexico.”

  “Resort?”

  “It’s just a small place—twelve cottages on a lake in the jungle. People bring groups—workshops, yoga retreats, family reunions. I make all the arrangements. I’m terrible at it. I can’t even balance my own checkbook.”

  Having established how uninteresting and inept we both were, Jeff and I settled into a comfortable conversation. It turned out that Jeff had been with Joya in New York during the same time that I was there with Randy Sanders, only I (not surprisingly) didn’t remember having seen him there. He had gone on to live for several years at Joya’s ashram in Florida, where his first daughter was born. Jeff was a Vietnam vet. When he returned from the war, he made a pilgrimage to India and had lived in spiritual communities on and off ever since.

  He told me how the night before he was deployed at nineteen, he’d had a dream in which he was shown that he would spend his tour of duty on the beach. Having grown up in Southern California, Jeff had been obsessed with surfing all his life and was more at home in the water than on land. He ended up being positioned as a lifeguard at a beach in Chu Lai where soldiers came to recover from the horrors of the front.

  He told me about living with his teacher, Swami Rudrananda, “Rudy,” in an ashram in New York City in the early seventies, and how Rudy would throw bolts of shakti across the room, sending people into orbits of ecstasy. Unlike Randy Sanders, Jeff did not seem to be inclined to romanticize the spiritual path. He tempered his dramatic accounts with just the right amount of irony and without a trace of arrogance. Plus his syntax was idiosyncratic and unexpected (it turned out that Jeff was dyslexic), and his voice was warm and rich, like his tea.

  “You want to go hiking with me up in the ski valley tomorrow?” Jeff asked. “I’m leaving on a job the next day. I’ll be gone for a couple of weeks.”

  “Tomorrow’s Jenny’s birthday.”

  “Won’t she be at school?”

  “Well, yeah, but . . .”

  “So you can drop her off, take a walk with me, and get back in time to pick her up.”

  Work could wait. No one would perish if I couldn’t confirm their reservation for another twenty-four hours. Besides, I worked for my mom. She would understand. Mom always understood. I had concluded that she basically just gave me money and pretended it was a job. I struggled not to take advantage of this arrangement, but there were always a thousand distractions. Kids to schlep, car breaking down. Friends in crisis, crises of my own. Dentist appointments and grocery shopping. At least this was something special. It always made my mother happy when I did something special for myself.

  Jenny turned ten the next day. I dropped her off at school, covering her face with kisses before the other kids could see, and promised to come back with cupcakes at the end of the day. Then I drove over to Jeff’s.

  We never made it up to the mountains.

  We ended up on his couch, listening to Tom Petty, Jimmy Cliff, and East Indian ragas.

  “Can I kiss you?”

  No one had ever asked me this before. It seemed so old fashioned, so cordial, so startling, I could not resist. I yielded to those squishy lips—like twin loaves of bread dough rising on a warm windowsill. I yielded to Jeff’s ordinariness, which turned out not to be ordinary at all. Jeff was the kindest, most sensual, most interesting creature I had ever met. It was torture to peel my body from his when it was time to go pick up my birthday girl.

  I did not particularly like the way Jeff’s house turned out, but I liked him. A year later, it became our house, and I have lived there ever since.

  “If you build it, she will come,” Jeff would say, after telling our love story to dinner guests.

  Which made me feel like a treasure, yes, but also exquisitely ordinary myself. A common woman, like billions of others, making a life with a real man, in an imperfect house, with two interesting children—my youngest daughter, Jenny, and Jeff’s youngest daughter, Kali—curled up together in one or the other of their beds downstairs. O
ur kids liked to believe that they had woven a web of magic so that their parents would fall in love and they could become sisters. And for a long time we all felt as if we were living in a fairy tale. Happily. Forever after.

  13

  RADICAL UNKNOWINGNESS

  From the moment I first encountered San Juan de la Cruz (Saint John of the Cross) in Sevilla (Seville) during a semester abroad my junior year in college, I was infatuated. With his voluptuous love of language, dripping with images of gardens and fires, secret wine cellars and hopeless intoxication, John struck me as the Rumi of Spain. Long before translators like Robert Bly and Coleman Barks had gotten their hands on the medieval Persian mystic and rendered him so accessible that he had become the most popular poet in America, I had been reading Rumi as a Sufi master, rather than a literary figure. Now I had discovered his Spanish brother, and I followed them both into the wilderness of longing and took refuge with them beside the hearth of the Beloved.

  Twenty years later, I was teaching John’s mystical masterpiece, Dark Night of the Soul, in my college humanities classes, and my students were unimpressed.

  “How could they not love this book?” I complained to my friend Sean.

  “Maybe because it’s exceedingly stuffy and pious?” Sean suggested.

  “That’s just the translation,” I said. “In the original it’s so juicy it’s almost erotic.”

  “Then why don’t you translate it yourself?”

  “Me?”

  “You could marry your three loves,” Sean said. “That particular text, your fluency in Spanish, and your taste for beautiful language.” Sean had watched me write two incomplete novels and a series of personal essays, casting about to find my own voice.

  “I’ll think about it,” I said.

  What happened to him? What lit the lining of Saint John of the Cross’s heart on fire and sent the sparks flying across the centuries to ignite countless other hearts (like mine)?

  Nothing special, as it turns out. Just another version of the human condition. The ordinary suffering of what the Buddhists call samsara: life on the wheel of births and deaths, rolling toward liberation.

  Here’s what we know: He wasn’t born Saint John of the Cross; his birth name was Juan de Yepes y Alvarez. He was born in 1542, only fifty years after the Great Expulsion, when the Catholic Church banished Jews and Muslims from their homeland, where they had not only managed to live in relative harmony under Islamic rule for almost eight centuries, but also collaborated on some of the greatest and most enduring works of art, architecture, mathematics, science, and esoteric mystical teachings in human history. The atmosphere of sixteenth-century Spain was still permeated with the fragrance of this convivencia—the intermingling of Abrahamic faiths that characterized the so-called Golden Age of Andalusia. (We might rightfully suspect that things weren’t always golden between the children of Abraham, but it was a notable step in the direction of reconciliation and mutual respect.)

  As one of many children to a single mom, John almost starved to death in his early life, and severe malnutrition stunted his growth. He barely reached five feet (just like me!), and his luminous black eyes dominated his face. His father—probably an aristocratic Catholic with secret Jewish roots—died when John was a baby, and his mother—probably a beautiful and marginalized dark-skinned Moor—wandered from village to village with her children—half of whom perished—selling the yarn she spun by hand. When he was a teenager, John found work in a hospital where, with the tenderness of a mother soothing an infant with a cold, he tended outcasts who were dying of syphilis. His empathy and intelligence caught the attention of the hospital administrator, who sent him to Salamanca and paid for his education there. The University of Salamanca was the center of learning throughout Europe and the Middle East at the time, and it was there that the young mystic was probably exposed to the teachings of the Sufis. Hence the not-so-coincidental-after-all resemblance between his poetry and Rumi’s.

  John was intense. He hunted for God like a wolf in winter. He pounced on monastic life in the hope that it would transport him to the heights he longed for, but discovered instead that the Church was mired in rules and regulations that had nothing much to do with the power of the Gospel teachings he loved and evoked little more than a mediocre piety that depressed him. Shortly after his ordination as a Carmelite friar at age twenty-five, John decided to bail on the whole ecclesiastical enterprise and head up to the mountains to live as a holy hermit like the desert fathers and mothers of third-century Palestine.

  Teresa of Avila—radical reformer, institutional troublemaker, and passionate mystic—heard about this fiery little monk who had lost all patience with organized religion and wanted only to sit quietly with God. She summoned John to meet with her at her newly established convent for “Discalced” (Barefoot) Carmelites, named for the hand-woven hemp sandals the sisters wore as a symbol of voluntary simplicity.

  “I understand,” the middle-aged nun said to the young priest after he had unburdened his heart. “And I agree with you. The Church has lost her way, and things are a mess. You can either wave goodbye and go off and tend your own soul, or you can join me and help change it.”

  He bored into her eyes with the dark fire of his eyes. She did not flinch.

  “All right,” he said at last. “As long as it happens soon. I don’t have any time to waste.”

  Teresa laughed and clapped her hands. “You are the true companion of my soul.”

  Once the two mystics joined their flames, the blaze galloped through the mainstream Carmelite order, sweeping some members into a joyful embrace and pissing off others. When John was twenty-nine, a band of Carmelite thugs snatched him from his bed in the middle of the night and imprisoned him in a monastery in Toledo. They locked him in an airless cell that had previously served as a latrine. The space was so small he could not stretch out his diminutive frame when he lay down to sleep. The monks let him out once a day and took turns flogging him while the others ate their midday meal and watched. John was fed on minimal scraps and, never robust to begin with, grew frail, his back and legs striped with oozing welts that would not heal. For nine months he had no covering but the single robe he was wearing when he was arrested. In the sweltering heat of summer this woolen garment rotted off his body, and in the winter he shivered with cold.

  Meanwhile, the brothers would congregate outside the door to his cell and gossip in stage whispers. John had been forgotten, they murmured; no one cared about him. Teresa’s movement had been crushed, and there was nothing left to defend. Still John refused to renounce the reform. But little by little his faith began to darken. His faith in Madre Teresa and her vision for a contemplative life. His faith in a God who seemed to be entirely disinterested, if he existed at all.

  Two things saved John’s sanity: poetry and the night sky. There was a single window high above him, and he tracked the constellations as they drifted across the tiny square of air. John was an amateur astronomer, famous for grabbing young monks from the chapel and taking them on spontaneous stargazing expeditions in the hills and fields around the monastery. “See this?” he would say, sweeping his hand across the firmament. “This is where you will remember who you are, and catch a glimpse of the One who made you.”

  In captivity, deprived of writing materials, John began to compose poems in his head and repeat them until he had memorized them. Then he would recite them back to himself, like lullabies, and find comfort there. One day a sympathetic guard overheard the sublime poetry flowing from John’s closet. The next morning, when the monks were at Lauds, the guard slipped a scroll of parchment and a quill into the prisoner’s cell with his bowl of rice.

  It seems likely that the same kindly man who helped the patron saint of poetry meet his destiny also helped him escape from prison. One night John managed to climb the high wall of his cell, crawl through the window and, using a rope made of knotted sheets, let himself down the steep façade of the monastery. Then he crept across the courty
ard, scaled the wall, and followed a black dog through the darkened city streets to one of Teresa’s reformed convents, where the nuns enfolded him and nursed him back to health.

  One day, as John sat recovering in the convent garden, his most famous poem poured from him like an overflowing bucket of rain: On a dark night / inflamed by love longing / O, exquisite risk! / Undetected, I slipped away / my house, at last, grown still . . . That sweet night: a secret / Nobody saw me / I did not see a thing / No other light, no other guide / than the one burning in my heart . . .

  It was eight stanzas of distilled sensuality, in which the narrator (an apparently feminine figure) speaks of climbing “a secret ladder in disguise” and making her way through impenetrable darkness to a lush and radiant sanctuary where her Beloved waits. She lies down on his “blossoming breast,” and he (inexplicably) reaches up “with his gentle hand” to wound her neck. Suddenly all her “senses are suspended.” She flies up out of herself and is gone.

  Shyly, John read his masterpiece to the nuns before Vespers that evening. “So what do you think?”

  They must have blinked at him in astonishment. Had their esteemed priest lost his balance in prison and turned to composing erotic literature? If it hadn’t been for the precedent set by Solomon’s juicy love poem, “The Song of Songs,” John’s piece would have been a scandal. As it was, the nuns were anxious to protect their mentor from further persecution.

  “Father?” The abbess knelt at his feet. “Maybe you could write an exposition, explaining each stanza and showing us how this poem is a guide for our own . . . spiritual journeys.”

  “Good idea, Sister.”

  And so Dark Night of the Soul—one of the most incandescent jewels of the religious canon in any language—was born.

  People walk around all the time claiming that they’re having a “dark night of the soul.” His lover loves someone else. Her cat was diagnosed with leukemia. He blew out his ACL in a skiing accident. Her best friend from childhood overdosed on heroin. Maybe all these things happened to a single person within a short time period—a year, say—which makes the sufferer feel entitled to call his cluster of troubles by such a grandiose name. Sometimes we watch other people navigating life’s unanticipated (yet not uncommon) obstacles and we sympathize: “Poor thing,” we say. “She’s been going through such a dark night of the soul.”