The Great Spring, Page 4

  Maybe the third rule, which includes the first two, should read: Be creative and flexible at the same time that you continue your meditation relationship. Learn to meditate in a chair while sitting in the waiting room of the dentist’s office, or in the car as you wait for your daughter to finish soccer practice.

  Meditation is about having our large life smack in the center of our everyday life. How do we stay open and continue?

  I was at a retreat at Plum Village in southern France when the person next to me asked Thich Nhat Hanh, a Vietnamese Buddhist monk, who was then in his sixties, how he kept his practice alive.

  He smiled a wry, sweet smile. “So you want to know my secret?”

  She nodded eagerly.

  “I do whatever works and change it when it no longer works.”

  I thought of the small round labels that were handed out to us at the beginning of the retreat. We were instructed to put them in the inside of our shoes. I still have that note glued on the left insole of my turquoise moccasins. I walk for you. Every time I put on those shoes in early summer, a gap opens and I remember: I live connected to everyone.

  When Writing Down the Bones first came out in 1986, I was invited to teach in Selma, Alabama. I was delighted by the thick air and the abundant trees, so different from my dry New Mexico, and I was curious about an author who lived an hour away in the country. She’d just won the Hemingway Award for a first collection of her short stories. She was in her seventies. Unfortunately, my visit was too short for me to meet her, but I had the privilege of speaking to her on the phone.

  “Have you been writing all of your life?” I asked her, elated at the victory a writer could still have at seventy.

  “I wrote through my twenties and then got married and had a son. I didn’t start up again until my sixties, when my husband died.”

  I was a gung ho writer then, wouldn’t give it up for anything. “Well, was it hard? I mean, giving up writing. Did you resent it?”

  “Oh, no, I didn’t feel bad. All the years I didn’t write I never stopped seeing as a writer.” She paused. “Anyway, I could never have created anything as fine as my son, David.”

  I always remember that conversation. Even if you can’t write, you can see the way a writer does, notice, take in, digest the details and stories of what surrounds you.

  I think this is also true of a life of meditation. There might be periods—a year or even two—when we can’t get to the cushion, but that doesn’t mean we have to give up. This might be the fourth rule: We can still carry meditation inside, still see and feel as a meditator, but physically practice differently.

  This is when I made walking my meditation. In Santa Fe I lived near the downtown plaza and close to cafés. I’d do mindful walking to the places where I wrote. One foot after the other. I’d feel my toes bend, heel lift, hip shift, the weight of placing one foot down and the rise of the other. I’d notice how my feet carried me. Then when I was done with three or four hours of writing, I’d walk some more. I’d join the tourists strolling up Galisteo, left on San Francisco, cross over to Burro Alley. I’d transfer the power of my writing concentration down into my feet. I’d leave the mind of my imagination and land in the mind of the streets. My feet became my focus under the one sky, near parking meters, amid the rustle of cottonwoods, the smell of roasted chilies. Even though I consider writing an inner physical activity, where my whole body is engaged—my heart, lungs, liver, breath—walking grounded me to the physical world around me.

  Even now, ten years later, when I pass through Santa Fe I feel the birth of my walking life and have a gratitude toward that city. If you saw me in those years, you saw a woman knowing the present pleasure of a mind weighted down into the soles of her feet.

  4

  Blossom

  I am at a meditation retreat at Vallecitos Mountain Refuge in northern New Mexico with a Zen teacher from Boston I have been working with. I’m on the board of this remote enclave deep in the national forest. Tired of flying across the country, I’ve arranged for him to teach here. I’ve driven him in on the twelve-mile dirt road past aspen groves and an old, abandoned original settler’s log cabin, through green meadows, and along sheer cliffs. We’re in my sturdy 1978 Land Cruiser, an old hippopotamus of a truck with thick tires, rattling doors, and a fierce engine replete with a choke to get it going on cold mornings.

  I want to impress this teacher in the hope he’ll want to return. He’s smart and astute, and I’m taken with his teachings. I’ve already studied with a Japanese teacher for twelve years and then a Vietnamese teacher for six. He’s American, and we come from the same cultural context—for once, at the very least, I can clearly understand the language.

  The first day, he tells a story about seeing the hairs around a horse’s mouth when he spent a year in silence in the woods of Maine. I settle into deep, still sitting in this rural Southwest setting that I love so much.

  The next day he presents us with a koan, a short teaching story from eighth- or ninth-century China that is designed to cut through conditioned ways of thinking, enabling a person to experience one’s true nature. My usual response to hearing a koan is stunned silence. My mind stops dead center, full of hesitation. Some truth is sitting right there, but I can’t touch it. Like meeting a whale in a huge fish tank. We don’t know each other, but the whale is magnificent and is contained in too small a space—the limits I’ve put on my mind.

  But I am feeling frisky and alive—the morning is crisp—and I’m ready to tackle anything. I’m listening closely, but after the first line of the koan, I am lost—I’ve been tossed into a swamp and I can’t get out. I can’t even hear the rest of it. And no matter how many times he repeats it in the lecture, I can’t follow it. All I get is “flowers are falling” in the ending.

  Suddenly suspicious, I separate myself. These Zen people are nuts. My father’s voice comes to me: This is ridiculous. I’ve met a chunk of stone from Mars and there’s no communication.

  The rest of the week we work on this single koan. I count the days, the hours, till I can hop on my faithful hippopotamus and gear through rocky dirt roads out of here.

  I can hardly mouth and swallow my oatmeal in the morning.

  The teacher tries so hard to make us see. On Wednesday afternoon he has us marching around in circles in the noon sun, imagining we are falling blossoms. It has something to do with becoming the thing, with embodying . . . blooms? Buds? Floral designs? The repetitious bouquet print on my childhood wallpaper? Does it mean spring, youth, vigor, decoration, ornamentation? Should I become an interior decorator? I give up.

  In an hour I’m supposed to present the koan, demonstrate my understanding to him in a one-to-one interview.

  I am a long-practicing Zen student. Mostly in a nonkoan tradition, but I have my pride. I want to show something, but I’m dumbfounded—and he’s also half a friend. You don’t want to appear this stupid in front of a friend. And I’m going to. I don’t even have a clue. Maybe if I’m 100 percent stupid, that will do the trick. But I’m not 100 percent anything. I just want to go home.

  I remember a story Joseph Goldstein told in this very place at a retreat the year before. In Burma and Thailand he had practiced hard under difficult conditions in small rural huts. In 1972, when he returned, he was about to bring a whole fresh lineage of Buddhism to America.

  A year or two later he went to a weeklong sesshin with the Zen teacher Sasaki Roshi at Bodhi Mandala in Jemez Springs, in my very own New Mexico. Sasaki knew of Joseph’s experience and so gave him an advanced koan. In Sasaki’s lineage, each student presents the answer three or four times a day. The practice hall heats up as each practitioner strains to figure out the appropriate answer that Sasaki will give sanction to and then pass him or her on to the next koan.

  It is the middle of the week and Joseph has humiliated himself over and over in the small meeting room with Sasaki. He can’t answer the koan—not even close—and each time Sasaki quickly cuts him off and rings th
e bell, signaling Joseph to leave. Finally Sasaki takes pity on Joseph and changes the koan for him to one of the most obvious and elemental: “How do you manifest your true nature when chanting?”

  Joseph smiles. This one is easy. He knows the answer even before he leaves the room. You just chant. Nothing else. So in the few hours before he returns to Sasaki, he practices in his head four lines from the Heart Sutra.

  When it’s his time again, he settles himself on the zafu opposite this Zen teacher. He is about to chant his heart out when suddenly what flashes before him is his fourth-grade music teacher, Mrs. Snodgrass. “Goldstein, when the class sings, you mouth the words. You’re tone deaf.” And all at once Joseph’s voice cracks and he croaks out half a line of a chant and falls apart, naked, exposed.

  He looks up. Sasaki is smiling. “Pretty good. Pretty good,” the teacher says.

  Now I’m sitting opposite my teacher and I’m a squashed duck in my fourth-grade seat. “I don’t get it. I just don’t get it.”

  In a flash he jumps up on top of me and pushes me to the floor. I’m lying on my back and he’s staring into my eyes. I shrug like a dead horse and say, “I still don’t get it.”

  “No?”

  “No.” I shake my head.

  He clumsily crawls off.

  Finally, the week ends. After many good-byes I’m at the steering wheel. The old car has been sitting idle for seven days. I pull out the choke and the motor vrooms. We are on our way. Thank God.

  He is next to me. I’m driving him out to Taos. Teacher/ student roles have been suspended. We are chugging along when the engine stops dead right in the middle of the dirt road.

  I start it up immediately. It chugs along for another ten minutes and then dies. People who will leave later will be coming up behind us if we need a lift, but I want out. Besides, what would I do with the old Land Cruiser if I have to leave it in this remote place? I start it up again and it darts forward for another mile. Then another. Each time I have to start it again.

  We decide on a plan. Get it to the main road and bank it. Hitch a ride to Tres Piedras, which consists of a gas station on the corner, a diner next door, and a hot-pink adobe across the highway that always says GALLERY OPEN and never is. The gallery has some mean Dobermans behind a chain-link fence, so no one would think of shopping there anyway. The gas station has mostly empty shelves, but they usually sell Tootsie Pops in a cardboard box. I know because I stock up on cherry ones before I head for retreats at Vallecitos. I’m pretty sure there is a mechanic and a garage too, but it’s Sunday. Maybe I can ask them to tow the Land Cruiser on Monday. I have it all thought out.

  We finally get to the blacktop. I park the Toyota on the shoulder and we hitch a ride.

  The woman behind the counter at the gas station points next door. “They’re in there. Working on a car. Go ahead in.”

  What luck.

  I step over the threshold. Two burly men, shirts off, bellies hanging over their pants, grease to their elbows, are under the hood of a Chevy pickup. One skinny man missing three front teeth is to the left, mostly giving them advice and also looking under.

  “Excuse me,” I say gingerly. “My car died on the road. I’m wondering if you could tow it to Taos.”

  “Sure,” the big man on the right says, but none of them looks up. “Leave the keys over on the table.” He juts out his arm in the table’s direction but still does not look up.

  “But wait,” I say. “How will you know where to take it? I want it to go to Doc’s on Pueblo Sur. Do you know where that is?”

  The same big man slowly stands up and turns his greasy hands in a rag. “You mean, Doc is out of jail?”

  “Doc in jail?” I’ve been bringing my cars to him for twenty years. When I’m stuck he even comes up to the mesa to get me. He was brought up in Taos, married his high school sweetheart at sixteen, lives a few blocks from his shop, and now his son Wendell works with him. Last time he was sick, I bought him a subscription to an auto mechanics magazine. I consider him, with his gentle steady ways and soft smile, a guru of sorts.

  The big man sees the horror on my face. “Nah, I’m only kidding. Sure, we’ll bring it in to Doc’s in the morning.” Then he leans over under the hood again and reaches for some wires.

  “But wait, don’t you need to know who I am?”

  “We know who you are.”

  He must be kidding. “Who am I?” I ask.

  “You’re Natalie Goldberg. We’ve read your books.”

  “You’ve—read—my—books?” My mouth hangs open.

  “Yeah, whatya think? We were illiterate? New Mexico is one big family.”

  I place the keys on the table and back up, bumping right into the Zen teacher, who is standing in the doorway. He has seen the whole thing.

  “Now I’m impressed.” He nods, his forehead creased with two lines, and he laughs.

  The next time I see the teacher is two days later. He comes over for chicken soup. A large bottle of sake a friend gave as a gift is on the table. I don’t drink, so it is full. He drinks the whole thing. I think, It must be hard to be a Zen teacher.

  Six months later, I hear that he has slept with several of his female students, and his whole spiritual community has fallen apart. For a moment I flash on our interaction in the meeting room. “Do you get it?” he asked, lying prone on top of me. I wonder if he meant something other than the flower koan? But then I decide no. I’m naive, but I trust myself in this case. Sometimes you have to hedge your bets. I’m a teacher myself, and I know the true effort one can make. We all can fail miserably.

  . . .

  Now I’m left suspended between the koan, my broken car, and my cry to the mechanics: “Who am I?”

  That small troop of practitioners marching about in the high July sun, trying to imitate blossoms, the light off the ponderosa needles, and the two spring-fed ponds where beavers swim still haunt me. It’s a long time later and I still carry the whole situation, with no resolution.

  But maybe the tip of the pen on this spiral notebook, midsummer, sitting out on a chipped, red-painted Algonquin chair on this portal in Santa Fe, early Thursday morning, is enough. Maybe the clay birdbath ten feet across the way, where a fat robin bathes every morning, fluttering in the high-desert water like a beached skunk, its feathers drenched and close to its body, is enough. Maybe, just maybe, it’s enough to give this story over to you, not to hold on to it any longer. To know that spring is robust and fall is the beginning of the colored descent, and there is nothing you can do about either but receive it all and surrender to no perfect answer and allow no conclusion.

  What do you think?

  Wandering

  Black dog lies across my path

  So this is it—

  Yellow autumn of my fifty-fourth year

  red mailbox at the open gate

  and no answer anywhere

  5

  The Great Spring

  Katagiri Roshi had been dead for a long time and still I missed him. And I did not know how to complete the relationship that had begun more than twenty years earlier. I was frozen in the configuration we had when he died—he was always the teacher and I would ever be the student.

  More than a decade had passed. I wanted to move on, and in order to do that it seemed I had to move back to that northern state of long winter shadows, a place I left fifteen years earlier to plant my roots in Taos, New Mexico. I had to go back to that cold place in order to unfreeze. So in 2000 I moved back, this time to St. Paul, Minnesota, for a year and a half to practice Zen with one of Katagiri Roshi’s dharma heirs.

  A few months before the move, a muscle in my groin would not let me cross my legs in the traditional zazen position. I forced it and injured it. This did not please me. I’d been sitting cross-legged for twenty-five years, so that my reflex even at a fancy dinner party was to have my legs intertwined on the oak upholstered chair under the pink linen tablecloth.

  Structure in the zendo had been everything: straight bac
k, butt on black round cushion, eyes unfocused, cast down at a forty-degree angle. Bells rung on time. Clip, clip, clip. Everything had order. In a chaotic world, it was comforting. Sitting in a chair in the zendo with feet flat on the floor seemed silly. If I was going to sit in a chair, I might as well have a cup of tea, a croissant—hell, why not be in a café or on a bench under a tree?

  But I did go every single day—like a good Zen student—except in the wrong direction, not to the Zen center in downtown St. Paul but to Bread and Chocolate, a café on Grand Avenue. I walked there slowly, mindfully, and it was grand. I didn’t bring a notebook. I just brought myself and I had strict regulations: I could buy only one chocolate chip cookie. And I ate that one attentively, respectfully, bite after bite at a table next to big windows. I felt the butter of it on my fingers, the chips still warm and melted. In the past, seven good bites would have finished it off. But eating was practice now, the café a living zendo. Small bites. Several chews. Be honest—was this mindfulness or a lingering? This cookie would not last. Crisp and soft, brown and buttery. How I clung. The nearer it got to disappearing, the more appreciative I was.

  “Life is a cookie,” Alan Arkin declared in America’s Sweethearts. I fell over the popcorn in my lap with laughter. One of the deep, wise lines in American movies. No one else in the theater was as elated. No one else had eaten the same cookie for months running. I gleefully quoted Arkin, the guru, for weeks after. I could tell by people’s faces: This is the result of all of her sitting?

  But nothing lasts forever. My tongue finally grew tired of the taste day after day. Was this straw in my mouth, this once-great cookie? In the last weeks I asked only for a large hot water with lemon and wanted to pay the price for tea, but they wouldn’t let me. I had become a familiar figure. Instead I left tips in a paper cup—and I sat. Not for a half hour or until the cookie was done. I sat for two, often three hours. Just sat there, nothing fancy, among an occasional man chopping away at a laptop; a mother, her son, and his young friends, heads bent over brownies, eating after-school snacks; an elderly couple breathing long over steaming cups; a tall, retired businessman reading the Pioneer Press. I sat through the whole Bush/ Gore campaign and then the very long election; through the death of a young boy murdered on his bike by the Mississippi and the eventual capture of the three young men who did it for no reason but to come in from the suburbs for some kicks; through the sad agony of the boy’s parents, who owned a pizza parlor nearby.