Archives for January 2009

Not One More Sparrow

Originally Published on Beliefnet.com

On a silent retreat, the author cleared his mind enough to open his heart–and help out some small, winged beings.

By James Kullander

Halfway through a two-week retreat at a remote Buddhist monastery in Nova Scotia, I was startled awake by a thud on my tiny cabin’s picture window, and then a softer dunk on the deck below. It had been a quiet week. I’d not talked to anyone and no one had talked to me.

To reach the cabin I had to walk down a long path through a dark gauntlet of hemlocks, their roots pushing up from the earth like bones in a shallow grave. The cabin, aptly called Cliffhanger, is perched high over the Gulf of St. Lawrence. I stood at the door, uneasily gazing through a window in the opposite wall, a postcard of deep blue open water and the vast curve of the earth. The veteran nun in burgundy cotton robes and green rubber muck boots who’d escorted me here assured me in a low voice punctuated with a mischievous chuckle that the place would not blow away, even though, in a gale, the walls might shake. Then she left me.

Now, as I twisted around in the hard, narrow bed and squinted into the dawn, I knew, sadly, those two sounds like the words to a bad song stuck in my head. It was the second time since I’d arrived that a bird had crashed into the window. The first time, the bird stood on the deck, stunned and shaken, but alive; I watched it pull itself together and fly away. I was relieved. But this time the bird, a sparrow, remained on its side, motionless. Suddenly, I was filled with a great sadness.

My longing for solitude and silence baffles most people I know, but I’d been on retreats like this many times before at Buddhist and Christian monasteries. I don’t wear a crucifix around my neck or beads on my wrist. I’ve taken no vows. It’s just that there are times when I want to be silent and in a spiritual community that aspires to more than what Shakespeare called “this mortal coil.” The point of it for me is to stop running and dodging the stuff I am made of; to sit still and take in the fullness of who I really am. I remember in seminary learning how the search for self and the search for God, the 4th-century Christian St. Augustine believed, are one and the same because your truest, most complete self is written in God’s memory. That has always made sense to me.

The search is a meaningful one because the only way any of us is going to be really happy and of any genuine help is, as founder of this abbey, Chögyam Trungpa says, if we “discover what inherently we have to offer the world.” To find out who I am and what I can offer the world I sometimes need to get away from the world, and I like what I find: I am not so quick to anger, easily annoyed, or frequently critical. In Buddhism, it is believed this sense of clarity comes from stilling the mind; it is compared to clear water after the sediment settles.

It was late summer in the Canadian Maritimes—warm days and chilly, sometimes stormy nights. Scents of sodden leaves and stubbled fields filled the air and the sun went down a little earlier each day as summer slipped into fall. After a few days and nights at the abbey as the familiar drone of my daily grind diminished, I began to notice the wildlife all around me. Suddenly, in fact, I was seeing more wildlife than I ever had. I was delighted.

I stood in awe as schools of a dozen or more pilot whales churned by in the changeable waters of the gulf just a few hundred yards away. A bald eagle soared over the cabin’s tin roof. I almost ducked; if I’d been outside I’m sure I could have heard its wings slice the sky. Flocks of ravens traced the lines of an invisible rollercoaster as they rode the thermals above the cliff.

One morning while I was meditating on the deck, four hummingbirds, one after the next, came to draw nectar from the wildflowers nearby. One hovered a couple feet from my face for a few seconds as if to say hello. A small red squirrel scampered on the cabin roof to toss a big, stale dinner roll (scrounged from the abbey’s composting pile) onto the deck in a barely successful attempt to break it into smaller pieces to stash in a small hole in the ground nearby. I had to laugh. Animals, not people, became my companions. I began to befriend them in ways I never imagined.

Back at my home in upstate New York several months before, I was getting ready to leave for another hectic day at the office when a bird crashed into my big kitchen window, and it seemed like just another upsetting event among many. What’s the death of a bird compared to the thousands of people slaughtered in Darfur or blown to bits in Iraq? Or even, I’m sad to say, everything on my to-do list? The bird flew away and I thought nothing of the fact that it could have died. I felt much the same when the first bird hit the abbey’s cabin window. I’d just arrived and I was thinking about the many things I always think about. My thoughts seemed like, as I read on a bulletin board in the monastery a few days later to describe our frequent state of mind, bees trapped in a jar.

But days later when a second bird crashed and died, it was not just another event I could so easily ignore. My mind was clear and open enough to see that it was a big deal. I shuffled outside and mourned its passing. I gazed at the tiny dead bird, my head down in an attitude of prayer, as the wind ruffled its feathers. The Gospels remind us that not one sparrow is forgotten in God’s sight. This one had not gone unnoticed by me either. I found a shovel leaning against the cabin, scooped up the sparrow, and gave it a proper sea burial: I flung it over the cliff, and down it went in a wingless arc into the white swells detonating on the boulders of the Canadian Shield below.

But that was not the end of it for me. I began to see again how removing myself from human contact like this, ironically, attunes me to the shared plight of humanity—and all of existence, for that matter. There’s no other way to explain it other than that I feel a certain connection to the world that reminds me that I am not really alone in the ways all of us suffer in our lives.

And as I sit cross-legged on my cushion in relative comfort, I find myself haunted by waves of recrimination. Innumerable noble causes and people to whom I can give my attention arise phantom-like in my mind. The pathology of a frequently divisive and violent world hollering at me, now seen at distance, strikes deep into the heart of me. At the same time I feel helpless as I think about all the people—and our planet itself—in such dire straits. There were times when I could almost hear at night a collective groaning of grief gusting in the treetops. How can I possibly stop the wind?

In Buddhism, however, you learn to deal with what’s in front of you. And what I could do in that place and at that time was to try to prevent any more birds from the fate of that sparrow. On the inside of the big pane I put up a half dozen pink Post-It notes like small warning flags: Stay away. It worked; no more birds flew into the window for the remainder of my time there. I was relieved.

When my retreat was over, I told the abbey’s director what had happened. He said there were semi-transparent decals that look like spider webs in a large window of another cabin on the grounds that deter birds from flying into the glass. He made a note to add them to Cliffhanger. We thanked each other. And the birds, I noted to myself, thanked us both. When I returned home I was shocked to learn from the Cornell University Ornithology Lab website that an estimated 100 million birds die every year by colliding with windows. “These collisions usually involve small songbirds, such as finches, that may fall unnoticed to the ground,” read the site. I put two spiderweb decals on the big kitchen window of my house, too.

It was a small thing, putting up those Post-It notes and spider web decals, at least compared to what else needs saving in the world. But one of my favorite Buddhist teachers, Pema Chödrön, suggests that to make the world a more humane place, you start where you are. That’s what I did, and to the birds whose lives may now be spared, that’s huge. I’ll admit that I am often still quick to anger, easily annoyed, and frequently critical—no matter how many retreats I go on. But I do try to remember now that it often takes so little to help so much.

Here & There Intro

By admin

In my dream I was being drawn with great force through the sea; there were terrifying abysses, with here and there a rock to which it was possible to hold.

–Ignaz Jezower, Das Buch der Traume, quoted in Joseph Campbell’s The Hero With a Thousand Faces

Here & There is a column that appeared monthly in the e-newsletter of Omega Institute in Rhinebeck, New York, where I worked for 20 years as an editor and program developer. I will be posting new columns on my blogs, writingandmeditation.com and theleapintothevoid.wordpress.com.

The personal essays in Here & There explored the realities and ideals of living and working in two places, both as geographical locations and as places in the mind and heart.

For a long time it has seemed to me that our lives are a balancing act between the two—being here (in the moment) and there (daydreaming, spacing out—basically anywhere but here). And also between being content with where we are (the physical space in which we live and work) and who we are (self-acceptance), and wanting to be somewhere else and be someone else.

Beginning early in 2008, I spent a lot of time on the road. I had a relationship in Nova Scotia that was just beginning and a father in Florida who was dying. I usually like to drive, and in 2008 I drove the entire eastern seaboard of the North American continent several times. This column was born amidst all this coming and going as I reached for “a rock to which it was possible to hold.”

Though my father has since died and the relationship ended, the search for that place in my life—and in my mind and heart—where I feel completely at home continues to be the grist that, in its own special way, feeds my soul.

Through this column, I took readers on a journey through the warp and the woof of my life—the good, the bad, and everything in between—all within the context of my attempt to be more mindful of the things I do and the way I am.

Here & There January 2009

By admin

Here & There January 2009
By James Kullander

I know someone whose marriage is falling apart. He’s been calling me a lot to talk. He doesn’t want the marriage to end. His sentences seem to have no end, as if that’s going to keep it all together. There’s no break between one word and the next. His life one long run-on sentence that’s unraveling. So I listen.

It’s not been easy. Sometimes I get a call in the middle of the day at the office when I’m really busy. Other times, I get a call at home while I am eating dinner. Recently, I’ve been thinking that it might be best if I called him on my cell phone during my half-hour commute. That way I’d be accomplishing two things at once. While I’m driving to my house I could be listening to him go through his hell. Multitasking.

The other night when I was at home, he called. I was nearly cross-eyed after a hectic day at work. I had not called him from my car because I just wanted to listen to some music. Now, I wanted to get off the phone but I didn’t have the heart to cut him off. After about 10 minutes he said, “You’ve been divorced. How did you get through it?” No sooner had I taken the breath to answer when his phone went dead. A part of me felt relieved. But I wondered what happened. I clicked off and dialed his number. A rope thrown to a man who’s gone overboard. He didn’t pick up. I left a voicemail asking him to call back.

How did I get through it? I could feel the words of my answer coming from a place in my mind that seems like a distant country that I might never have visited, an experience I might never have had. A bad dream. My divorce began with a separation agreement in 1993 and was final the year after. I can’t say that the years have exactly flown by. I can say that a lot has happened in my life since then. Maybe it’s not so much the years that have made the distance between then and now seem like eons; it could be that the person I was then is not the person I am now.

Later that night, I began to wonder what it means to “get through” something like a divorce. Or anything else for that matter. Does it mean we emerge on the other side unchanged by what has happened? Or “un” something or other? Unrepentant? Unforgiven? And is any quality like that such a good thing? If we want to “get through” something, might that imply that we want to remain the person we were before the beginning of the event or situation we’re trying to get through? Or if we want to change, can we even dictate how we are going change? Can we determine who we want to become as simply as we key in a destination on a GPS system? Can we expect to get there without getting lost?

If I’d had the opportunity to respond, I probably would have suggested that he just take things day by day. Don’t project into the future and imagine what might be, or what might not be. Don’t look back and wonder what might have been, or could have been—or really was. Accept the loss you are experiencing now as an opportunity for something else that you cannot even imagine. The family you feel slipping from you now might be better, stronger at the end of this current struggle. You don’t know, I would have said. You just don’t know. Life goes on.

These simple things are easy for me to say now. Yet they are informed by the kind of wisdom that comes from personal experience and the experiences of others I know who have divorced or almost divorced and got back together. I know part of what’s frightening and dreadful about a divorce is that it is kind of like a death. The death of a relationship you’d once held dear. The death of the person you thought you married. The death of the person you thought you were. The death of a way of life that you’d grown accustomed to and want to hang on to, even if it’s nothing more—or nothing less—than a bad habit to which you are enslaved. The death of a great lie that obscures an even greater truth. And that truth may be something you don’t want to see.

I got a call back the following evening. The cell phone he’d been talking on had died and his cell phone is the only phone he has these days. The question he’d asked me the night before had been forgotten. In the 24 hours we’d not spoken, many things had happened in his life that he wanted to tell me about. I listened. That’s what I figured he wanted, so I didn’t even bring up his question. He didn’t want advice. Not even the story of my divorce. Just an open ear and a little of my time. Ok, a lot of my time. But if that’s all that I can give right now, then I will give it as best I can.

After all, there is really no answer to the question he put to me that would have had anything to do with his own life. I know something of what he’s going through—how it helps to talk about it—and maybe if someone calls him someday about what he’s calling me about now, then he’ll do for that person what I am doing for him now. To me there is no better lesson than that.

Here & There December 2008

By admin

Here & There December 2008
By James Kullander

When the French writer Andre Gide traveled to the Belgian Congo in the 1920s, he wrote of an experience he had there involving what he called “our native bearers,” who during an expedition in the jungle carried the group’s food and equipment. One morning these bearers were found “sitting about without any preparations made for the start of the day,” Gide writes. He continues:

Upon being questioned, they said, quite simply, that they had been traveling so fast in these last days that they had gotten ahead of their souls and were going to stay quietly in camp for the day in order for their souls to catch up with them.

So they came to a complete stop.

And so did I.

During the last week of October I took a two-day drive to Gampo Abbey, a remote Buddhist monastery at the northern tip of Nova Scotia. I had been there several times before over the past few years. I knew I could come to a stop there and let my soul catch up to me. I felt that was what I needed more than anything I could possibly do with myself, the place where I wanted to be more than anywhere else on the map of the world.

This past September I joined the ranks of the 76 million baby boomers who are losing nearly 5,000 of their parents every day. In the weeks after my father died, I was so besieged by the things I had to do that I felt I had no time to even think about anything other than making sure all the people who needed to know that my father had died were contacted. I was calling banks, insurance companies, government agencies, friends and other family members—all while, back at the office, a pile of work was waiting for me. A part of me felt like I was watching a wall of televisions, each with a different program, and trying to figure out which one to focus on. Another part of me felt I had to be completely on task with things that had nothing to do with the televisions. At the same time I was trying to feel something about my father’s passing. I felt next to nothing. I knew something was wrong. Knew, too, that I could not keep going without one day falling asleep at the wheel during my drive home from the office.

At the abbey, I stay alone in small retreat cabin high on a cliff overlooking the Gulf of Saint Lawrence. The cabin has electricity for lights, a two-burner stove, a small refrigerator, and heat. There’s a tiny sink with (very) cold running water. And not much else. No phone (and no cell phone connection for miles around), no radio, no television, no Internet. And that, for me, is the beauty of it. I usually spend so much of my time so connected I hardly know what to do without a phone to talk on, a computer to check my e-mail on, a radio to listen to, a television to watch movies on. But not knowing what to do is precisely the antidote I seek there; for me it’s often in the long stretches of silence and solitude when not knowing what to do helps me get in touch with really knowing what I want to do, with who I am, and with what I want out of life. By disconnecting from the world I connect with myself.

Having nothing to do is not easy. Even the mind wants to be doing something. Thoughts and feelings are restless, like bees in a jar, I’d once read on the abbey’s bulletin board. But during this time in my life, it was a welcomed respite. Yes, there are people to be saved, the Earth to protect, projects to be completed, money to be made, bills to be paid. “But, oh that magic feeling,” The Beatles once sang. “Nowhere to go. Nowhere to go….”

I arrived on a Saturday afternoon, got settled, and limped into bed at eight o’clock that evening. I slept till 10 o’clock the next morning. Throughout that first day I read a little, wrote some, meditated, took a walk along the long dirt road that passes by the abbey, and napped. I took so many naps my first two days there I lost count. Horizontal was the only position that seemed right, and motionless the right sort of activity. As I lay there, a ragged bundle, listening to the ocean waves washing up on the Canadian Shield 200 feet below me, there were moments when I felt absolute contentment. Felt that I, too, had washed up there, a castaway from a shipwreck. Then, I’d drift off to sleep.

While in Florida to help my father die, I was reading J.D. Salinger’s Franny and Zooey. I’d never read the 1961 novel in high school or college, and one day last summer at the local Barnes and Noble, I saw it on the shelf, picked it up, and thought, well, it might be time to give it a try. While in Florida, before falling asleep each night, I’d read a few pages. Franny and Zooey are siblings who once starred as child geniuses in a famous radio quiz show. Their mother, Bessie, is doing what she can to comfort Franny, who has come home from college to the family’s New York City apartment having what she thinks is a “nervous breakdown.” She’s tired all the time. And lost. Franny and Zooey had grown into self-conscious, slightly embittered adults. Zooey is Franny’s older brother and throughout much of the book he teases and belittles her. But in the end he calls Franny on the phone (while in the same apartment and pretending to be another brother, Buddy) and has a long conversation with Franny, revealing his brotherly love for her buried beneath his cynicism and sarcasm.

I’ll tell you one thing, Franny. One thing I know. And don’t get upset. It isn’t anything bad. But if it’s the religious life you want, you ought to know right now that you’re missing out on every single goddam religious action that’s going on around this house. You don’t even have the sense enough to drink when somebody brings you a cup of consecrated chicken soup—which is the only kind of chicken soup Bessie ever brings anybody around this madhouse. So just tell me, just tell me, buddy. Even if you went out and searched the whole world for a master—some guru, some holy man—to tell you how to say your Jesus Prayer properly, what good would it do you? How in hell are you going to recognize a legitimate holy man when you see one if you don’t even know a cup of consecrated chicken soup when it’s right in front of your nose? Can you tell me that?

As I lay in the narrow bed in that cabin listening to the waves, I thought about Zooey’s words. I thought about them when I sat outside at night wrapped in a blanket and gazed up at the stars for hours as if emptying the psychic junk in my mind, and allowing something else in that felt clean and pure. I thought about them as I watched the tiny flashing lights of transatlantic jets bound for Paris, London, Madrid—and thought about how I’d almost decided to go to Venice, where I imagined I would find solace in beautiful art, wonderful food, and delicious wine like Franny looking for a holy man. But I knew I’d come to the right place. The waves, the dark night sky, the wind in the trees. All of it Bessie’s consecrated chicken soup.

Some critics consider Franny and Zooey to be an account of a sort of spiritual journey, a Zen tale with Franny progressing from ignorance to the deep wisdom of enlightenment. I felt my trek to the abbey was a little like that. I’m learning that enlightenment is not so much a destination but the way we live our lives every day; it’s about making good choices, being kind to others and yourself, existing comfortably in your own skin (your precious human birth), letting the world touch you, and paying forward your awakened heart as best you can.

I reflected on my dad’s passing, felt him gone. But not entirely. Not yet. I think it’s going to take a while for it to catch up to me, like it took some time for the souls of Gide’s bearers to catch up to them. I’ve a feeling it’s going to come in waves, like those consecrated waves I heard outside the cabin window. The bottom of my life probably won’t drop out from under me at this point; the scaffolding of my inner self seems to have born the full brunt of his death, and survived. The sadness is going to come when I want to call him on the phone to say hi but can’t. It will come when I want to ask him a question about something I’d read in the Wall Street Journal, but can’t. It will come when I go visit my mother in Colorado, and he’s not there.

***
For further exploration:

Andre Gide Journals, Vol. 2: 1914-1927

Andre Gide Journals, Vol. 3: 1928-1939

J.D. Salinger Franny and Zooey

Here & There November 2008

By admin

Here & There November 2008
By James Kullander

Scrawled in blunt-pointed pencil in my At-a-Glance weekly appointment book, my list of things to do on Friday, September 26, includes items like get coffee, pay my American Express bill, and call my home post office to let the people there know I’ll be gone longer than I had expected when I’d dropped off a hold-mail notice as I’d left for Jacksonville, Florida two weeks before. Squeezed in at the very bottom of the long list is a small notation: Dad died. 11:05 p.m.

On Wednesday, October 8, I have items listed that include pay day, sell tickets to the k.d. lang concert I can’t get to, call a friend of mine in Queens, and in the middle of all this: Dad cremated.

Is this what the death of someone I love has come down to? A couple of items in an appointment book?

Since September 26, I have spent unaccountable hours on the phone with lawyers, bankers, insurance companies, and every other official body that needs to know my father is no longer among the living. One morning in my parents’ apartment, three days after my father died, I was on hold with the subscription department of the Wall Street Journal while talking to a hospice nurse on another line. I felt like a stock broker, frantically selling on one phone and buying on the other.

While this was going on, I was maneuvering around boxes from a moving company, which had sent three men in jeans and T-shirts to pack up the apartment and move it Colorado so my mother, whose grief and confusion in the sudden whirlwind needed tending, could be near the only one of my three siblings who is married with children, and where we figured she would feel most at home now that her husband of 60 years had passed. My life at the office, although a welcome respite from my other life, has been no less demanding. Things all around me—and in me—have been happening so quickly and my memory feels so compromised and stupid with unprocessed grief, that I felt I had to write my father’s death and cremation dates into my appointment book so I wouldn’t forget a week or two later.

Events are passing me by like rows of billboards I am whizzing past in the fast lane of the business of death and survival. In the blur I can barely read what’s on them, see the images enough to make sense of them. Maybe one of them is advertising what I’m really looking for: Time to do nothing. But in the car I’m driving—or in the car that’s driving me—I can’t find the brakes and I’m running every red light I see. Normally, I like long road trips for their soothing, highway monotony. But the drive home from Florida in my father’s car was far from soothing or monotonous. The traffic between Washington, D.C. and Baltimore was epic. While I listened to NPR about all the frightening news about the crashing economy, it looked like everyone was evacuating and heading to the hills. The highway choked with Joads, only this time each one driving alone in a gleaming BMW, Mercedes, or Lexus, the American dream suddenly one huge, incomprehensible nightmare. Sort of like my own life, I thought.

I am not one to run from difficult emotions and I want to stop and let the sadness catch up to me. Instead, it feels like a low-grade fever I am trying to shake because I have to keep moving. Yet, on these increasingly chilly and dark autumnal mornings, the simple task of getting myself out of bed feels like I’m lifting a sack of potatoes. In A Grief Observed, C.S. Lewis mourns the death of his wife: “And no one ever told me about the laziness of death. Except at my job—where the machine seems to run on much as usual—I loathe the slightest effort. Not only writing but even reading a letter is too much. Even shaving. What does it matter if my cheek is rough or smooth? They say an unhappy man wants distractions—something to take him out of himself. Only as a dog-tired man wants an extra blanket on a cold night; he’d rather lie there shivering than get up and find one.”

From today’s standpoint, mourning seems quaint and old-fashioned, like a widow wearing black for a year after the death of her husband. Even our inherent responses to the death of someone we love—not only sadness, but also lethargy and confusion—seem like an indulgence we can no longer afford. When I e-mailed one my favorite Buddhist teachers, Sylvia Boorstein, to tell her about my father’s death, I was comforted to know she felt much the same. “I wish we had a society in which people could take a long break from work and other pressures just to be quiet and reflect for a while about a family death,” she e-mailed back. “The world is different after someone leaves it.”

If death has been with us forever and if the affects of death lay us low as much as they always have, then why should we allow ourselves to be so quickly pulled back into the tumultuous current of our lives like, well, nothing happened? Something did happen. Something big. These days I feel like a shell-shocked refugee from a country at war, where death is fast, brutal, and must be fled to survive. And I’ve found myself in a country where I feel out of place and lost, my normal points of reference back in the land I’ve left behind, which no longer exists as a sovereign state and which I would not be able to recognize if I could return, or even find my way back to, the path filling in with the undergrowth of endless tasks that threaten to overtake me.

One of the lessons I’ve learned in my years of study and practice of Buddhism is that we are the cause of our own suffering if what we desire is different from what we have, if we wish something or someone to be other than what they are. I’ve found these teachings to be a great solace sometimes. I am doing what I can to apply them to the events now going on my life; I am trying not to resist what I need to do to take care of the business of my father’s death and to do what I need to do to pay my bills, keep my house, feed myself—to get up out of bed in the morning and make my way to the office.

Yet, I can’t help but wonder sometimes to what degree does this approach snub my father’s passing and take a toll on my own well-being on account of that disregard?

What to do? At the moment, I don’t know but to keep on doing what I’m doing, like I’ve tripped over something and have to stumble along to keep myself from falling. In the weeks before my father died, he mumbled from his hospital bed that “the mountain is insurmountable.” I knew what he meant. He was ready to fall.

For me right now, I’m looking for something to break my fall, a place where I can stop, catch my breath, and for a moment look over my shoulder to take in the vast landscape of a life that is gone forever.

***

For further exploration:

C.S. Lewis A Grief Observed

Here & There October 2008

By admin

Here & There October 2008
By James Kullander

I am standing by my father’s hospital bed, slowly spooning applesauce into his mouth. His body is laid out in a position of quarter to two; the head is high enough to eat without sending waves of toe-curling pain throughout the rest of body. I am thinking of nothing else besides making sure that the dollop of applesauce I put on the white plastic spoon is not too large or too small, and that I get each spoonful into his mouth without making a mess of it. Between spoonfuls my father compliments my technique, his sense of humor still alive and well. “Even though you never had children you’re pretty good at this,” he said, a bit mumbled with his dentures removed.

Several years ago the Vietnamese Zen Buddhist Thich Nhat Hanh would regularly fill the Omega campus for a week each October with almost 1,000 people. During the retreat, everyone was asked to remain silent. Even those of us on Omega’s staff were asked to reduce our speaking to about things that were absolutely necessary for our work. No gossiping at the water cooler. Not even a friendly good morning. It was a sort of mediation in motion, a way of becoming conscious of the banter that knocks about in our minds like engine tappets at full throttle, and of reflecting on the ways we make plans, act out, criticize ourselves, size up people just by looking at them.

During meals one of the half dozen or so monks or nuns who’d come to help lead the retreat would ring one of those little brass bowls on a cushion, summoning all of us to stop whatever we were doing—spooning rice into our mouth, bussing our dishes, pouring coffee, chewing—sort like a game of Red Light, Green Light. And we all remained motionless till the sound of the bell faded, after which we’d continue whatever we were doing. The object of this was to bring instant awareness to the moment, to look into the mind to see where it might have gone. Who were you silently talking to? A woman at the next table? Your brother in San Francisco? What sort of fight were you having and with whom? What lost opportunity to forgive someone—or to apologize to someone—were you regretting?

The mind, I’ve found out over the years, spins like this all the time, but we hardly notice. A few years ago I once compared sitting meditation to being the only person in a shopping mall at the peak of the business day. When the mall is full of people, you can’t really hear the piped-in music very well. That piped-in music is the constant flow of thoughts passing in and out of the mind. Clear the mall of people and suddenly that music is really loud. And annoying. That’s what sitting in meditation is like. All your thoughts stand out in bold relief because you’re doing nothing else.

I remember at the start of my first long 9-day retreat a the Insight Meditation Society in Massachusetts back in the mid-1990s, I was looking forward to having some sort of spontaneous moment of enlightenment, whatever that was. I didn’t. Or maybe I did, if seeing the daft pattern on my thoughts was such a moment. For nine days, I thought of little but food, sex, and work.

But during that same week there too were moments when something quite different and extraordinary happened. I became more adept at focusing more on the inhaling and exhaling of my breath, and thereby quieting my mind which, in turn, calmed my emotions and opened my heart, if only a crack. At the end of the retreat I drove home in a sort of spell of tranquility, driving well below the speed limit, which is something my lead foot had never let me do before (and rarely has since).

Today, I am remembering those early days in my blossoming (and still often faltering) Buddhist meditation practice with Thich Nhat Hanh and the handful of other teachers I sought out. They come to mind at moments when I am unselfconsciously focused, like when feeding my father his applesauce. Buddhists call this sort of intense concentration samadhi, a state in which the mind sees into the ultimate nature of reality. Those few moments of spooning applesauce to my father was a little like that. He needed to be fed, I could feed him, and all was well with the world just as it was. I was nowhere else and thinking of nothing else, and perhaps he was enjoying the moment so much he was right there with me, temporarily freed from his chronic pain and worries about his and his family’s fate.

A few days after I returned home I was rearranging my small library and found a book I’d read years ago and loved, Sacred Journey: A Memoir of Early Days by Frederick Buechner. I leafed through the pages, glimpsing at all the passages I’d underlined. I came upon one passage that reminded me of those samadhi moments when ultimately reality is plain as the day. Just before the passage, Buechner writes of a busy time in his life when everyone he knew was “caught up with you in the swift and tumbling torrent of it.” For him, though, there were also moments of stillness. “But no matter how swiftly the torrent tumbles, there come moments when, rounding a bend of where the streambed deepens, it flattens out suddenly to a surface so slow and smooth that you can almost see down to the bottom of it.”

At 85, my father is the critical care unit for a variety if ailments; a fracture hip, pneumonia, a staph infection, fluid in the lungs, and such severe chronic pain that make it seem sometimes that his own body has become a medieval torture chamber. During the eight days I visited him there was a lot of activity and angst. Doctors and nurses came and went, checking his vital signs and administering antibiotics, pain killers, and, the times when he could not eat because of stomach cramps, an IV drip. He was hooked up to so many things the wires looked like the back of an old radio. Above his head a video monitor revealed a strong and steady heart, but sometimes I sensed it was breaking. One of my brothers was there and we spelled each other; one would stay with my father while the other would be with my mother at home. There was a lot of running back and forth, a tumbling torrent of going hither and yon.

But in those few moments when I was feeding my father, I saw down to the bottom of the river of life, the simple act of giving and receiving that constitutes the fundamental condition for human existence. And below that, the fact that we all die. And in my shimmering reflection I saw that the best we can do for people closer to death than we are is to treat them how we all would have liked to be treated throughout our lives: With undivided attention and unconditional love.

***

For further exploration:

Frederick Buechner The Sacred Journey: A Memoir of Early Days