Still Amazed

A Simple Monk

I certainly feel unqualified to report on this in any depth, but yesterday I went to a lecture by His Holiness the XIV Dalai Lama, and what blogger worth her salt could fail to at least mention it?  It was curiosity more than reverence that motivated me. After all, who could resist an opportunity to see one of the great spiritual leaders of our time, a beloved icon recognized throughout the world? Tickets for his two lectures at UCSB went on sale in early December and  sold out within two hours. I was out of town at the time, but my dear friend Kelley bought me one as a birthday present. The lecture she chose was titled The Nature of Mind, which sounded pretty interesting.

It was a chilly gray morning but the campus was crowded and festive as we inched our way towards the security checkpoint at the entrance to the event center. We climbed up the bleachers and found our seats in the distant shadows, and then I went down again for a preemptive rest room stop. The queue for the ladies’ room was absurdly long, but it was hilarious to see how many "women-of-a-certain-age" had had the same thought, and we were all of a type: a bit disheveled and vaguely hippie-esque, our post-prime plainness countered by colorful scarves or an ethnic-looking necklace, all in practical shoes and intrepid spirits. A woman in a purple fleece jacket was telling her friend about the condors she had glimpsed during a recent foray into the backcountry. Someone else was talking about her recent trip to Bhutan. After seeing me greet two old friends, the woman standing behind me tapped my shoulder and asked, “Oh, how do you know Dan and Linda?” The line crawled along and we joked about our bladders and finally, mission accomplished, I returned to my seat just in time.

Everyone rose when His Holiness appeared on the distant stage along with Chancellor Henry Yang and a dean and professor or two. Dressed in a red robe with a saffron undergarment, he turned away from the audience to pray and bow to a Buddha image, lowering his body and touching the ground with his arms and forehead three times. The vast auditorium was hushed as he positioned himself cross-legged on the yellow cushion of a carved wooden sofa at the center of the stage and began to speak: “My dear brothers and sisters…usually my voice a little better…” He clearly had a terrible cold.

And never having heard him speak, I had not known how difficult it was to understand him. This was partly because this lecture was exactly that: a lecture, and at times I felt as though I was sitting in the advanced graduate course without having taken the basic 101. Among other things, he talked about the various states of consciousness, including the brain activity that exists after death. After speaking in heavily accented English for a short time, he switched to his native Tibetan, pausing intermittently for translation.

His interpreter was a professorial gentleman in a dark suit who sat with rod-straight posture on a small chair on the stage. And he was brilliant, I must say, for he translated with a quickness and elegance that was simply stunning, and some of the passages were long and complex and required more than just a literal translation but explanation and pedagogy. The lecture was quite technical, including passages from Buddhist texts and discussion of various states of the mind. Perhaps it was directed toward university scholars or the rows of monks who sat in the front row chairs just below the stage. High up in the bleachers, I could sense the audience growing bored and fidgety. It seemed unimaginable to walk out on the Dalai Llama, but I noticed a few who did.  

I thought he was a trooper. I imagined that  he might have preferred to stay in bed on this particular morning, but he diligently forged ahead. He paused now and then to sniff and cough and blow his nose, but meticulously covered his topic. I wondered what it would be like to have been chosen as a child to lead such a rare and astonishing life, but I could not begin to picture it. Yet he seemed a gentle and good-natured man with a sense of humor and humility. He has described himself as a simple monk.

Here are a few points I was able to glean from the talk:

The only way to reduce destructive emotion is to increase constructive emotions.

Simply focusing on the sensory level of experience is not adequate.

If one observes the mind, one can perceive a sequence of thought processes with tiny intervals in between. The trick, through meditation, would be to try to “tease up” these transitional periods and hold onto them. These gaps between the arising of thought and the dissolution of thought represent true moments of consciousness.

To attain such consciousness, we must refrain from chasing retrospective or future-directed thought, remaining simply in the present. Through practice, one can learn to recognize the gap or absence of thought, and prolong it. The result is a clear-line state of mind, a sense of pure wonderment that allows for the natural quality of the mind to express itself.

H-m-m-m. 

No doubt a lifetime of discipline and practice is required to attain this, but another point His Holiness made is that motivation is the bottom line. “The mind creates the world,” he said (I think), “and the mind creates the action that leads to that creation.”

H-m-m-m.

His personality emerged more fully when questions were presented that had been posted via email. Is it harder in America, someone had asked, with its fast pace and constant stimulation, to achieve a tranquil state of mind? “I don’t think that much difference,” he replied. “Same human mind everywhere. External influence important, but nature of mind same.”



Another question: Can you explain what you meant when you said that Buddhism is not a religion but a science of mind?

His answer: “I didn’t say this. Western scholar said it. Ask him.”

When asked about the use of LSD and other drugs to achieve enlightenment, he said that although he had not tried them himself, it seemed to him that they produced a great profusion of illusion, and since we already have plenty of illusory experiences, what was the point? Serious practice should rely not on these external things but rather on internal work.

I very much wanted to hear him answer the question on how he maintains a peaceful, happy heart when life is such hard work, and how to stay true to one’s principles, but he smiled and said that question was for the afternoon lecture, which was titled Ethics for Our Time. Its focus would be on compassion, and I later heard it was a more accessible talk, but I’m grateful for the experience I had, and I feel that I have a lot to ponder.

In his travels throughout the world during all the years of his exile, His Holiness has been an emissary of peace and an advocate for compassion and nonviolence. “Our happiness,” he has said, “is inextricably bound up with the happiness of others. There is no denying that the more our hearts and minds are afflicted with ill will, the more miserable we become. Thus, we can reject everything else: religion, ideology, all received wisdom. But we cannot escape the necessity of love and compassion.”

“So are you enlightened?” wrote my mischievous friend Cornelia.

 Obviously not. But I am A Woman Who Has Seen the Dalai Lama.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Disappearance Again

In this odd silver sliver of day when the afternoon sunlight is filtered by coastal fog and a choir of bees is humming in the orchard and an open book lies beside me on the couch where I dozed off and just awakened, in this odd silver space I turn again to that theme of disappearance.

But I’ll be lazy today and simply print out the words of my favorite discourse on the subject, The Art of Disappearing, by Naomi Shihab Nye:

When they say Don't I know you?

say no. 


When they invite you to the party


remember what parties are like


before answering.


Someone telling you in a loud voice


they once wrote a poem. 


Greasy sausage balls on a paper plate. 


Then reply. 


 

If they say we should get together


say why?

  It's not that you don't love them anymore.


You're trying to remember something 


too important to forget. 


Trees. The monastery bell at twilight. 


Tell them you have a new project. 


It will never be finished.

 

When someone recognizes you in a grocery store


nod briefly and become a cabbage. 


When someone you haven't seen in ten years


appears at the door, 
don't start singing him 

all your new songs. 


You will never catch up. 


 

Walk around feeling like a leaf.

Know you could tumble any second.

Then decide what to do with your time.

And now, for a walk up the canyon. New topic tomorrow. 

On the Subject of Disappearance: The Tale of Everett Ruess

I spoke of disappearance in yesterday's post.  Today, I am thinking of it in regards to Everett Ruess, whose story has intrigued me ever since I first heard about it from John Kiewit, who, like Ruess, was fascinated by the epic beauty and grandeur of the West. It was John who gave me the book Everett Ruess: Vagabond for Beauty by W.L. Rusho.

Born in 1914 to educated and artistic parents, Everett Ruess enrolled only briefly in formal classes at UCLA before taking off on his own kind of learning adventure. Apparently a very confident and appealing young man, he managed to meet and study with quite a few impressive writers, painters, and photographers of the time, including Edward Weston, Maynard Dixon, and Dorothea Lange.  His own block prints, watercolors, journals, and letters reveal a promising artistic talent and exuberant appreciation of the beauty of the natural world. He seemed to possess a heightened sensitivity that comes across sometimes as youthfully melodramatic, but I picture him wide-eyed and filled with wonder as he tramps around the Sierra Nevada, the California coast, and the Southwestern wilderness during the 1930s.

His writings are filled with lavish descriptions of the skies, the weather, and the breathtaking scenery he witnessed. "Oh, but the desert is glorious now, with marching clouds in the blue sky, and cool winds blowing," he rhapsodized in a letter, "the smell of the sage is sweet in my nostrils, and the luring trail leads onward."  

Elsewhere he declared, "Beauty has always been my god; it has meant more than people to me."

But Everett was by no means a recluse. "I have been meeting all types of people," he wrote, "artists, writers, hobos, cooks, cowmen, miners, bootleggers..." An archaeologist whom he met in Arizona described him as a "strange kid" but a "free spirit" who simply "loved the Navajos and everybody, loved animals, burros, dogs, kids, and everything."  His warm and intimate letters to his family and friends clearly reveal his affection and devotion to others.

And then he vanished. He was last seen near Escalante, Utah in 1934.

A twenty-year-old who abruptly disappears in the vast, wild lands of the Southwest is by definition a haunting mystery, but Everett's own words, lifestyle, and preferences have given the story a somewhat mystical dimension and fueled speculation for decades that his disappearance was a fate he chose and orchestrated. It so happens that one of his favorite passages from Willa Cather's Death Comes For the Archbishop, which he marked in his family's copy, begins as follows:

 ...It was the Indian manner to vanish into the landscape, not to stand out against it...[The Indians] seem to have none of the European's desire to "master" nature, to arrange and recreate. They spent their ingenuity in the other direction; in accommodating themselves to the scene in which they found themselves...

One persistent theory was that Everett fell in love with a Native American girl and was absorbed into that culture. There is in fact a photograph in which he is standing beside a young Indian woman who is holding a papoose, and beneath which he wrote the caption, My Navajo Wife, a quip that would later contribute to the fantasy.

He had written to his parents that they would not hear from him for at least two months. He had carved the name NEMO, Latin for "no one", into a rock face. (Wallace Stegner called the latter information "both useless and tantalizing", a description which could apply to most of the snippets gathered about Everett over the years.)

But he does at times seem to be predicting something.

“My burro and I, and a little dog, are going on and on,” he wrote, “until sooner or later, we reach the end of the horizon.”

Perhaps more ominously, there were journal entries such as this: "I have been flirting pretty heavily with death, the old clown."

And most prophetically: "I don't think you will ever see me again, for I intend to disappear."

I have been thinking about Everett Ruess lately because a few days ago my friend Steve-in-Utah informed me that the mystery has now been solved, 75 years later. He sent me this link to a site that explains -- and it was a murder, ugly, tragic and entirely unromantic, after all.

And so, the tale of Everett Ruess draws at last to its conclusion. And I suppose that if there is some consolation here, it is that a young man lived the life he chose, and that there are still places of wildness and beauty that have not vanished.

“I thought that there were two rules in life,” he wrote in June of 1934, “Never count the cost, and never do anything unless you can do it wholeheartedly. Now is the time to live.”

Ah, yes. There is the now. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

You Will Disappear Some Day Like That

It is time to get back to my blogging, although it is possible that no one but me is aware of how erratic my posts have become, or indeed, how absent. I started neglecting the blog because I was unusually busy for a while, and then I just fell out of the habit. Now I am approaching it tentatively, as though it were a friend I haven’t called in a very long time. I’m feeling rusty and awkward and unsure what to say.

In fact, I have decided to shamelessly plunder my own journals to get myself back into it.  Here is something I wrote on a summer day several years ago:

Yesterday I made a birthday cake for R, the kind of cake for which you sift flour, melt baker’s chocolate, and fold in sour cream and sweet milk. He sat at the table, thin and white-haired, looking bemused.

“I never thought I’d get old,” he said. “I did everything right. I really took care of myself. I thought I’d never get old…and I’m old.”

He talked about the foundation he had started, his legacy, his son’s legacy; he seemed to feel that all the good things for him personally were behind him. He seemed to be looking toward the exit.

But do any of us believe in our own deaths? No matter how near to our ears the rumors of mortality whisper, no matter how deep and jagged a gash prior loss has left in the heart, it is still inconceivable that one day soon enough the world will be happening without us.

Not enough time. There is never enough time no matter how much time there is.

It seemed relevant enough to revisit that entry today, not because I think I am so very old, but because I do indeed feel myself aging. Also, we have entered a new phase of our lives, with Monte retired, and although his brand of retirement is a working and busy one, it has definitely ushered in new patterns for us. Everything is shifting.

And I understand the sense of surprise that my friend in his 80s expressed. I feel it too sometimes upon glimpsing my own face in the mirror, or watching my daughter from afar, a young woman on her own trajectory entirely separate from me. 

There are a thousand small reminders daily that erosion is occurring, even if I feel exactly the same inside.

Last week I took my mother to get her hearing tested. I think she has not heard a human voice clearly for a very long time, and she looked for a moment quite startled as she sat in a booth and the technician’s words came across to her via headphones. She had that same fleeting look of bemusement and surprise at lunch afterwards when she mentioned that her birthday was nearing and uttered her age with disbelief. She still has long hair and twists her white ponytail into a banana curl. She wears pink and frets about her wrinkles and wistfully speaks of her first dance with my father, who would be 99 if he were alive.

Variations on a theme: Just yesterday I was listening to a replay of an interview with Leonard Cohen on Fresh Air, and he said, “You just have to get very careful…it’s inappropriate for an elderly chap to register authentically his feelings… you have to get quite covert as you get older, or you have to find some avuncular way of being, but still you are wounded, you stagger, and you fall.” 

Wounded. Staggering. Falling. I suppose we all are.  But I like William Stafford’s hint of consolation: “The old have a secret./They can’t tell others, for to understand/you have to be old.”

I am saddened by the looking back and the aching sense of gone-ness. I'm just a barrel of quotes today, but here I think of Carlos Casteñada: "The trick is in what one emphasizes. We either make ourselves miserable, or make ourselves happy. The amount of work is the same."

So I am growing things, traveling, diminishing my aspirations, and trying to savor this last lovely season before old age really does kick in.

I just finished Muriel Barbery’s extraordinary book, The Elegance of the Hedgehog, and found many thoughts that seemed both poetic and wise. She speaks of finding the always within the never, and how a camellia can change fate. She says, for example:

Beauty consists of its own passing, just as we reach for it. It’s the ephemeral configuration of things in the moment, when you can see both their beauty and their death. Oh my gosh, I thought, does this mean that this is how we must live our lives? Constantly poised between beauty and death, between movement and its disappearance?

It makes a lot of sense to me these days.

Now morning is entering this room through an open window: the chittering of birds, the affirmation of some distant machinery, mild spring air with a surprising absence of wind. I am going outside to smell the orange blossoms as I age, and observe the light.

I close with William Stafford, as I so often do, but who can blame me?

You will walk toward the mirror,

closer and closer, then flow

into the glass. You will disappear

some day like that, being

more real, more true, at the last.

 

 

 

 

 

Through the Halls of Power Into Haiku

Last week I was in Washington, D.C. for the spring meeting of the National Writing Project, and it was spring indeed. The city was noisy with the din of traffic and sirens, and the broad streets bustled with throngs of tourists and school groups and locals in suits who strode by with cell phones at their ears, but the air was mild and fragrant with bloom. The branches of the blossomed trees were delicately etched against a luminous silver sky that now and then rained lightly upon us. In the uncommitted spaces between business, Jan and I paid homage to the monuments and landmarks, feeling patriotic, never cynical, but we’re teachers, after all. We even got passes to see the Senate in session, shedding our purses and electronics at security, briefly becoming unfettered nobodies (how odd it feels to be schlepping nothing) for balcony seats in a theater of power where Senators in living color were debating and voting on budget amendments.

The President was in Europe, but I had imagined I would feel a different kind of energy in the nation’s capital in this era of Obama. Indeed his image was on tee shirts, postcards, books, and posters everywhere, a ubiquitous new icon. I even glimpsed a panhandler on a street corner sporting an Obama shirt, and quite a few giggling tourists (including Jan and me) snapped pictures of each other standing next to a life-size cardboard Presidential facsimile. Why not? It is refreshing when leadership feels congruent with our values and our hopes, evoking pride instead of embarrassment. But there was very little residue of Inaugural ebullience here. In fact, I sensed a gritty sort of tension.

Once in the course of our wanderings I turned back and glimpsed a poster of Lincoln through the glass lobby door of a building I had entered. The juxtaposition of the poster and the marble edifice of the building struck me as arty, somehow, framed by the doorway, and I took a picture, inadvertently pointing my camera in the direction of the security checkpoint. A burly guard accosted me and demanded that I delete the image.

“Do not ever photograph security,” he said angrily. “I am very serious.”

“I know you’re serious, sir,” I replied, showing him the image and deleting it.

“We are very serious here,” he said again, as though to leave me with that lasting thought. 

I believe it. These are serious times and the evidence is everywhere.

But the purpose of our Washington gathering was to garner support and strengthen the writing project. It is not my intent to write about this here, but we are a network of teachers, teachers who value writing across the curriculum and beyond, who know that writing is the currency by which we manage our lives, and who understand that language and expression are at the core of who we are. Writing is the way to engagement, the way thought becomes words and words become action, a skill and an art we must transfer to our students if they are to become responsible citizens who think and communicate effectively. 

And when you put such teachers together, you do feel a sense of hope, even when the world seems strained and stressed and sometimes downright scary. Times are hard, but that's why we were there.

These words of Lincoln’s are carved in stone in some great hall we passed through: The way is plain, peaceful, generous, just – a way which if followed, the world will forever applaud, and God must forever bless.

I love the alliterative sounds, of course: plain and peaceful, generous and just. But above all, I love what the words imply, for they seem to belong in the answer to almost any question, sound tenets for solutions in the season we are in. 

Outside it was snowing pink petals beneath the silver sky and I was summoned by the fragrance of hyacinth to step into a haiku and inhale springtime.

 

 

 

Church

Ladies with powdered cheeks and lined lips smiled and greeted us as we entered, and a white-haired gent handed us a bulletin, and we took our seats in a bright airy sanctuary where all the proceedings at the front were projected on a large video screen above the altar. There were many welcomes and affirmative handshakes, and children in turquoise robes made a joyful noise as they entered singing and waving palm fronds. A pastor with the demeanor of a neighborly insurance salesman talked of God’s love in a broken world, and I hoped to hear one of the old traditional hymns but the choir sang contemporary Christian music. I would have never even been in here but I was visiting my friend and it was important to her.

“It was what they call a blended service,” she explained afterwards, somewhat apologetically.

For a moment I thought she said a “blander service”, which it certainly was. I would also say it was bleached and benign. And to give it the benefit of the doubt, maybe it was even blessed, and certainly a positive force for many, but I have felt  blessedness with greater certainty in the church of the outdoors. I was glad I went, though. It cured me of the misguided notion that I might really find some greater connection to God through the community of a church. For many years I drove to churches on Sunday mornings, and I would sit at the back and at the edges, trying to be inconspicuous, testing the waters, seeking a house of worship where I felt I belonged. Now I remembered why I stopped. 

I thought of a certain sandstone cave from which I can see the sea and the contours of the hills, upon whose walls are still visible the fading red spirals and sunbursts painted by those who came here long ago and where the windblown sand that covers the ground is as cool and soft as talcum powder. I thought of the time I stood with friends beneath the sycamores in the canyon when the sparkling percussive music of the universe encircled us, the sound of rain on leaves. Remember that? It was a sound like whispers and rustling rising to applause, a sound like tambourines and laughter, a sound that quenched a thirst we didn’t know we had. It was sudden and secret and it quickly passed, but we knew we had been blessed.

I have known churches.

But back to Florida, which is where I had gone to visit my friend who asked me to accompany her to this other kind of church with its affirmative handshakes and instructive readings and contemporary Christian music. Back to Florida, where the moment I stepped outside from the airport in the middle of the night, the humid air covered me with its sloppy kisses and the warm breeze brought back a rush of unwelcome memories. 

Back to Florida, where a group of black-skinned men stood at the curb by their taxicabs laughing and talking in musical island accents, and one of them of them drove me to my hotel and I slipped into the room where my friend was asleep and lay in the dark remembering other times when I was here.

My friend and I settle at a table by the pool the next day trying to establish a private corner in which to talk. Our view is dominated by a big-bellied man whose bathing trunks are sitting well below the crack of his ass, but it’s a benign form of visual pollution until he approaches what we have naively begun to think of as our table, sets down a bottle of cheap champagne, and begins to chat. He has a loud voice and a personality that is somehow both affable and aggressive. He tells us he has been living in Lynchburg but is looking to buy a place here in Palm Beach to retire in.

“I’m a New Yorker,” he tells us. “We go to Florida. It’s what we do. We retire in Florida.”

As though on cue, his real estate agent approaches, a woman with bleached blonde hair, skin suntanned to the texture of jerky, and a cigarette between her lips.  The guy pours her champagne and offers some to us. We decline.

“I refuse to die in Lynchburg,” he continues. “I’d rather die here in a storm than up there in nice weather.”

Another woman comes by, and another guy, and more champagne is poured, and cigarette smoke is curling around our faces, and the volume is escalating, and finally my friend and I retreat in defeat, unable to hold our claim to the corner that was ours.

It’s okay. Our best conversation happens unexpectedly, in the middle of the night, and I hate that it is precipitated by her waking up in pain, but that’s the truth of it. It’s the tumor at the base of her spine. She doesn’t like to take the medication unless she really needs it, but by the time she really needs it, the pain has gotten fully entrenched. I switch on the lamp on the nightstand between our beds and a small circle of light envelops us and we talk. 

Did I tell you that we have known each other for over forty years? It makes us sound like old ladies, but we were in junior high when we first met, and to be honest, we didn’t even like each other back then. We met again in college, and that’s when our friendship really began. I’ll tell you the whole story one day, with all its twists and turns, including the long stretches when we lost touch, always reconnecting, whether by chance or intent. Some friends walk together for a part of the journey, but some friends bear witness to the overall trajectories of one another’s lives.  With us, it’s been the latter.

And now we are in a hotel room in Florida in the hours before dawn remembering who we were and grateful for who we have become. But my friend is in pain and there is nothing I can do.

“I hate to see you suffering like this,” I tell her.

“Suffering? This isn’t suffering,” she says.

There are so many things I haven’t told you about this friend. She is a pastor, a calling she heard and followed during one of the long periods during which we were far apart and seldom in contact, and she used to work in a hospice center. She has seen people writhing in agony that drugs could not assuage, crawled next to them in bed and held them. Her own pain is manageable: the medication is kicking in, her face relaxes, and she begins to unfold like a blossom in the pool of warm light. She has borne this cancer for years beyond what doctors allotted her. She tells people it’s a God thing.

We eat almonds and cheese and slices of pear. We talk about our husbands, who are such good men. We talk about how much we love the thrift stores in this part of Florida where those fancy ladies who have moved here from New York deposit their designer castoffs, though maybe not so much now, with the economy as it is, and we talk about the things that need fixing and the values that were slipping and how hard our fathers worked.  We talk about what we believe and what life has taught us. Then she reads to me from a book the perfect thing to say when someone asks you how you are doing: Aqui en la lucha. Here in the fight.

It is and ever was an unfair struggle. And certainly it is up to each of us to alleviate some small share of the world’s collective misery. But at the same time is it not gracious to accept happiness when it is offered? And are we paying attention? Have we learned from our mistakes? Did we ever imagine it would all go by so fast? 

The thread of this conversation began to unspool forty years ago. We pick it up every now and then and continue it with the same fervor we always had. It's a wondrous thing, really, how we update, and question, and confirm. 

And we're still here. Here in the light.

By now we are sleepy, and a tropical breeze is ruffling the blinds and the decades of our lives and our beds are like little white boats in the Florida room lit with lamplight and blessings and my heart is filled with thanks like a prayer in a church.