by Evan Dara
We fretted, we prayed, we checked that we hadn’t thrown out our T-squares, Bud said. But then, several weeks further into the process, a light. A note on a flute. Business, bless it, began to pick up …
Did it ever!, Theodore said. Fifteen percent one week, twenty the next, then twelve – a little disappointing by that point, but still a lift – in the week after that. And, you know, it continued, direction only existed as up. We became the largest sellers of chard on the West Side, according to our chard-man. Sold them steam-table trays down to the shine!
—Suddenly, we were realizing our blessings, Bud said. And we were grateful. But we also practiced right mindfulness. Why this reversing shower? We hadn’t changed our course of action. We hadn’t changed anything. Chef Harry’s newly-learned Thai salting techniques could not account for this delivered abundance. We scratched our heads …
But our new gifts brought new responsibilities, Bud said. Which in this case meant substantially more work. Longer hours; more lifting not from the waist; that kind of thing. We were pleased by this heightened discipline. And it, in turn, paid secondary benefits: I lost a little weight. That scale was my ally in many ways …
So we continued with our food-works down the weeks of this golden age, a time of happy customers and happy creditors. One afternoon, I gave myself a supplemental reward by visiting my Tuina practitioner over in Bridgeport, to perform due diligence on my meridians. My practitioner, Antje the wise, is not afraid to make use of the best of Western medicine, and in the course of the session we found out that, since my last visit, six months before, I had actually gained two pounds. This surprised me, of course, because the scale at the restaurant was consistently indicating the opposite, to the tune, by then, of four pounds down. I climbed into my car scratching my chin, grappling with this riddle when—
When boom!, said Theodore, leaning across the table. Clarity came upon us. And we checked it out, and, you know, there it was. Our scale in the store was reading light – about six pounds light, if you need it precise. And that, you know, explained the whole sitch – our bounty was riding on the back of mechanical failure. People were coming into the restaurant and being told they’d shed a few libs, so they’d reward themselves by piling on a few more cherry tomatoes and a tap of extra tempeh, and the whole experience was so reinforcing that they’d come back for it again and again, and before you know it we were up for an article in Foodservice Today …
But you know, Theodore continued, we didn’t want the article to appear in their Ethics column …
Precisely, Bud said. It was a dilemma, and it was ours. Although it wasn’t the dilemma you might expect. Of course we corrected the scale. Right intention requires it. The dilemma was what to do when our business collapsed, which it did in seven weeks flat. Seven weeks, I might add, in which no amount of price-reductions, or free soy-shake refills, could reverse our customers’ great girthly disillusionment. The dilemma was, of course, what the hell do we do next …
It was a challengeful period, Bud said. We closed the shop, and sold the fixtures to a liquidator who knew how to bargain, and it took a while for me to get the feel of frisée from my fingers. Meanwhile, while processing these lumps, I spent a chunk of my liberated time thinking about how so small a change – six pounds of miscalculation, maybe four-, five percent of a customer’s body-weight – could so shift behavior. It seemed out of proportion, even bizarre: weirdly mechanical or automatic …
Exactly, Theodore said. Opportunity has been known to knock, but do you have to answer? And, like, to take its coat? …
Precisely, Bud said. And so I found myself revisiting how much, in relative reality, happiness is dependant on expectation – on inner benchmarks. It’s pretty much everywhere: save twenty cents on a jar of apple/ strawberry sauce and you’re overjoyed; you’ll drive across town to do so. But if you were offered the same discount on a cruise package you’d look at your travel agent funny; you’d find it insulting. Six people killed in a bus accident is a tragedy; in a plane crash it’s a miracle. That kind of thing …
But this can also make contentment permanently elusive, Bud continued. Some study somewhere once found that a big majority of people, including our rich friends, define their financial goal as having twenty-five percent more than what they have at the moment of inquiry; thereupon, the vision goes, release, bliss. From ketchup-stealer to private-heliport owner, we set our set point an additional quarter up. At which new elevation, of course, the whole thing repeats …
Epicycles of the karmic wheel, Theodore said. Affective level, that is …
Such is the price of non non-attachment, Bud said. So if happiness is the product of an attainment-to-expectation ratio, but expectations always inflate, then no amount of attainment can pull the needle from the red. Again, this is in moha, in the relative sphere. Surely, then, the exit strategy for the Prometheus within must involve modifying levels of expectation …
And that, said Theodore, is one tricky expectation-type problem right there …
Yeah, Bud said, and smiled. But you gotta start somewhere. And I started – we started – at Kailash …
Keye … ?, Auran asked …
The great sacred mountain in Tibet, Bud said. Way far west on the massive mid-country plateau. It’s a holy place for Buddhists, and Hindus, and Jains and for Bon-pö – good animists, them – all of whom call it, a quaver coming to their voices, the center of the world. As well they should: Kailash is the source of four majorly important rivers, the Indus, the Ganges, the Brahamaputra, and, uh, the Sutlej. People of the four faiths dream their whole life of making a pilgrimage; it’s their Hadj. And I tell you: one view of the mountain itself and you can understand why: it’s this vast, ensnowed pyramid, thundering in the eye, graceful and super-majestic and—
—He fell into silence …
The proof of so many things, Bud continued. For us, for years, it had been a vision to go, and at that point, just about fourteen months ago, it became necessity. We knew it would have much to tell us. So we put together our last pfennigs and joined a group, led by a tour-operator out of Denver. The day we left was mystically warm, and all was magic: the flight to Katmandu connecting to the gasp-generator known as the trans-Himalayan flight to Tibet. Meeting the sixteen other members of our group, and hanging in Lhasa for four days to get acclimated to the altitude. The seven-day trundle west, in a caravan of trucks and cars and bashed-up jeeps, past endless flatlands whose misty distances Leonardo’d in the thinning air. Making do with home-brought food – nuts and dried fruits and energy bars – combined with cuts of yak-buttered bread, and tsampa, and tea, also sweetened with yak butter. Shivering on an interface of anticipation and doubt. And then seeing Kailash, 21,000 feet of resolution, rising from the obliviating plains …
We got to the mountain’s eastern access point in a place called Darchen, this amazing desolate maybe six-building village of mud bricks and water barrels and nothing much else. There, the great shedding, as we stripped our supplies down to a frightening, but portable, minimum. The back-up parkas, the second-string lip balms, the redundant undies, the stowaway thermoses, all gone-gaté! And gone, too, were the trucks: everything now would be hauled by sherpas – our personal Atlases – yaks, and a few of these incredibly cute little brownish ponies they have there. But word got out that everyone among us – everyone – had tucked away a pen, and a small notebook …
Our starting altitude was over 15,000 feet, fshew!, and we walked the 53-kilometer kora around Kailash in a little over four days, moving, as always, clockwise. Mostly we followed river valleys. Just an amazing thing, transformative: rock-hopping through freezing streams, holding silence as we walked by standing monks super-intently reciting mantras, boulders coated with Tibetan prayer flags by earlier pilgrims, sky-burial sites way up on crags drowned in vultures, permanent peril matched by permanent exhilaration. And, of course, the impossible horizons: making small, making infinite. At the highest of the mountain passes, Drolma-la, which is l
ike 19,000 feet, we all had to stop every few steps, just to catch breath. But even though the air was glisteny thin, each intake was as a flood …
There was some rain, but not much; the same could be said for talk. Yes, it was cold; then you moved on to more interesting thoughts. And at night, that high up: a quilt-dazzle of stars. Proudly, both of us, Theodore and I, went the whole way without a single trip to the Gamov bag—
Hyperbaric tent, Theodore said. We brought our own hot air …
Yeah, Bud said. Just amazing. Of course, we knew a little melancholy when we got back to Lhasa for the flight home – so much had happened, so much that couldn’t be understood by anyone who hadn’t been there – so the group got even closer our last night in the hotel, sipping white tea in the one-table lobby. And that’s when our pilgrim from Oregon let go of his last layers. His name was, is, Darren Paulie, and he’d said he was a physical therapist. But then it came out that he’s also an herbalist, and had met with some of his local suppliers before joining the group. A nice guy, brown-haired and quiet, super-fit, maybe fifty. In fact, he described himself as a liberation herbalist, so I took his card and told myself I’d stay in touch.
—And so I did, Bud said. When I got back to Chicago I shot him a quick e-mail to keep the wire live, and we corresponded fairly regularly, mostly regarding downloads of pictures he had taken along the trip. And then, when I happened to mention my experience with the salad bar, and my thoughts about it, he asked for my snail-mail address, and four days later there was a package at my door …
As it turns out, Darren was also interested in the ramifications of expectation, and had read around in it. He pasted phrases into an e-mail: From Carlyle: Disappointment is a derivative of preconception. From Wilbur: Expectation is the rate of mind’s metabolism. From Murray Gell-Mann: Happiness is a dependent variable, and expectation the parameter. From Garchen Rinpoche: Compassion comes from managing expectation; emptiness from its defeat. That sort of thing. It was wonderful: Darren wrote that expectatory therapy had become a sub-specialty of his, and that he was there to serve …
So I opened the package he sent, and giggled to find some two dozen sachets of an herbal tea Darren had prepared, and a good-sized burlap sack of round brown seeds. Darren wrote that the tea and the seeds came from an herb, restevia, that’s a cousin to kava kava in that they share an unusual group of lactones. He also noted that wild restevia traces its origins to a certain kind of shadeless enclave in the teak forests of Myanmar—
It’s the real brown gold, Theodore said …
Could be, Bud said, and smiled. Apparently, the herb has been known for thousands of years, but has never really been widely used – for reasons you probably can guess. You see, restevia’s active compound seems to militate against expectation, and so, as Darren wrote, It releases the guy-wire pretty definitively. Finally, the tight rope is taken down. Unquote …
Mm, Theodore said. No seatbelts needed for this soft landing …
Yeah, Bud said. And Darren gave us directions for growing and preparing the tea, along with his blessing. So one Thursday night we boiled up a pot of distilled water, and sat down at my kitchen table, and, you know, you have a few sips of this thing and Boom … ! A Actually, unboom … Don’t need that boom stuff no more. It’s kind of amazing. Actually, not kind of. It’s entirely amazing. The great unclutching …
Wo, yeah, Theodore said. Say goodbye. Then say hello. The bummer force behind the West, insufficial inertia – the shit that keeps shoving you forward – well, that deal just defaults. Finally, you know, remission. For the first time you can just step off the sticky escalator. Everything just is, rather than should be. This is a brew to breed bodhisattvas …
Exactly, Bud said. It lets you participate in the miracle rebirth of enough as enough. As more than enough. Fabulously, munificently, less becomes more …
And so, you know, what to do about this here benefaction?, Theodore said. We’ve got sippable Good News, and we definitely want to share it.
So we started cultivating hundreds of seeds in both of our basements, using metal halide lamps and humidifiers to bring them back to cradle Myanmar, and while they’re cooking we set in to cogitation. And the thought popped that maybe we have a business here – you know, get behind the stuff, let right view meld with right effort and let the merger bring the elixir to the greatest numbers …
We even came up with names for our nectar, Theodore said. Bud suggested Lovitol, which does have a ring. I preferred Lhasatude. You know, take the ring’s pitch up a step …
So we’re significantly jazzed, no surprise there, but the problem is los apostles are penniless, Theodore continued. We got skinned by the salad bar, and our debt rose pretty directly with our altitude at Kailash. So we decided Well, you know, maybe we should scout for partners. OK, for investors. Call it right accounting. So we asked a couple of friends – friends with standing reservations at fortune’s trough – to come by Bud’s one Tuesday afternoon, and didn’t spill why. We sat in the kitchen, and gabbed a few, then told them about the tea, then weathered the ten minutes of their disbelief. Then we started to pour …
Conversion, revelation, call it what you will, but it was complete, it was total, Theodore said. One of the blokes, Marty of the eighteen rooms, he said it was like sipping Miró. The other, Randall, the MBA who retired at 45, just went outside and smiled at a busted lawn chair – for a long time. Well, they both were totally ready to sign on, so we sent them off with sachets of tea and heard all sorts of smiley words about money-people, and being-in-touchedness.
—But oh, how silent the telephone, Bud said, with a grin. In fact, our two friends loved the stuff. The problem was, as Patsy Cline so ably put it, they may have loved too much. Alone, separately, Randy and Marty started drinking so much tea that, well, the miracle worked a bit too well. Both of them so lowered their expectatory levels that they lost all interest in investing. Both, individually, in separate calls late of a Friday afternoon, came back and said they were far too blessed to be concerned with base businessifying. Life offered other options for their time. But both of them, individually, wished us well, and, after both asked for assurances that we would continue to supply them with magic sachets, they went off far better men …
Though we then had something to file under q, for quasi-setback, Theodore said …
Yeah, Bud said. We had proof of our product, if not our method. So for our next play, Mr. Theodore here – and if he would stand and take a bow – had an idea. We spoke with two friends who had partnered on an air-ride baby carriage venture that had done well, and told them about restevia. But this time we asked that only one of them sample it. Sometimes, let it be said, objectivity still holds usefulness – OK, T, you can sit back down. So we brought both of these new potential investors to the kitchen of destiny, and shared a restevia pot with one of them. And, as we sat, the non-drinking one just kept looking at his partner and saying So, so …
And the other just kept giggling and saying back So what?, Theodore said. And the first guy had never seen his bud act like this, so they ask for a few samples, and go off, and congratulate us, and the first one says they’ll soon call to talk terms, and then we hear that the first bloke had run a chemical analysis of the tea, and found out what restevia was, and was starting his own business importing and distributing the stuff …
And then, like, he’s not returning our calls, and no one will tell us where he is, and in maybe five or so months we begin to see his brand, like, all over the shelves of Chicago’s alternative markets. An amazingly swift swooping down and cutting in. And, I mean, every time we go out we’re confronted by this tea, stacks and ranks all around the registers, in small brown boxes decorated with a rising sun—
Some say setting, Bud said—
Whatev, Theodore said. And he’s, like, marketing this whole line of tea products under the trade name Svaha. And, like, you know, we’re thinking Hats off … !
Exactly, Bud said. Well done. Really, the g
uy did one helluva job …
I mean, happily, we still have our own supplies, Bud continued, so we don’t have to pay the prices he’s getting. But the bloke must be doing very well for himself …
Oh yeah, Theodore said. I mean, I heard he’s got plans to go national, maybe start his own sippeterias …
Wondrous what he’s done, Bud said. Quite an accomplishment …
You know how it goes, Theodore said. The guys with the big eyes think it up, then the guys with the little eyes take it over …
Fabulous how that happens, Bud said …
Bud stretched his arms. So, not to put too fine a point on it, he said, we’re not exactly sure, just at the moment, what kind of business opportunity we might represent for you …
Yeah, Theodore said. Until we get back on our financial feet, that is. It’ll happen. I mean, unfortunately I had to let go of my house, but luckily I’ve been able to crash with Bud since his fiancée moved out …
Yeah, Bud said. That worked out …
Still, Theodore said, we’re confident something good’ll come along soon …
Meanwhile we’ve got reasonable money coming in, Bud said. The guy with the tea company – really big-hearted – he asked us to come work for him, for his marketing division. You know, talking with distributors, devising slogans …
Damn good positions, Theodore said …
Indeed so, Bud said. Especially for something part-time …