james kullander

A couple of weeks ago, I walked by Harry’s garden. It’s a small garden, about 10 feet by 20 feet, off to the side of a narrow dirt road. I’d forgotten all about the garden till then, and what I saw was a mess. It wasn’t really Harry’s garden anymore. Harry had died the year before. I’d not been around when he died. I did not know him well. But when I saw his garden choked with weeds, I felt a deep sadness suddenly well up in me—for Harry, his garden, and everyone and everything else that dies, moves on, slips away.

Harry and his wife, Gabriella, lived in a house down the road from Gampo Abbey, a Tibetan Buddhist monastery on the northern tip of Nova Scotia I’ve been going to once a year since 2005. This year, I made it there twice, once in May and once last month. I stay in a small cabin on the grounds for a silent, solitary retreat for about two weeks each time. I’m not supposed to be talking to anyone. But sometimes when I go out for a walk down the long, remote dirt road and see someone, I’ll say hello. And hello often evolves into a bit of conversation.

I’d met Harry and Gabriella walking toward me one lovely August afternoon my first time at the abbey. They had been affiliated with the place for years before, and in their retirement years, had chosen to live nearby. I thought it brave of them to pick a place where the winters are cold and long, and told them so. I remember Gabriella waved away such petty concerns. “If it’s cold, you put on a coat.” I liked that simple logic. And agreed with it.

On another one of my walks during my retreat that summer, I saw Harry working in his garden, which was across the road from their house. The garden was lit by a small patch of sunlight surrounded by pines, and Harry’s thin, tall frame threw a shadow toward me and the road while he worked. He didn’t see me. I kept to my vow of silence and continued walking.

During my subsequent retreats, the couple’s health quickly declined. They were not young when I’d met them. Both were in their eighties. Turns out, I rarely saw them again. Maybe one or two more times. Gabriella’s mind started going, a victim of Alzheimer’s. Harry tried to take care of her till he died last year. Then the resident monks and nuns tended to Gabriella, offering a rotation of 24-hour care at her house. I saw Gabriella one more time. It was last year at the monastery’s main building, where she was going to have lunch. I said hello to her. She said hello to me. She had no idea who I was. That winter she was moved to be closer to family in Ontario.

On this retreat, I’d brought along I book I’d started reading on my last retreat, The Words of My Perfect Teacher, by Patrul Rinpoche. The book is a translation from a Tibetan teacher Patrul Rinpoche had studied with, so it’s an old classic. Patrul Rinpoche lived and died in the 19th century. A few days after I was struck with sadness when I saw what was left of Harry’s garden, I turned a page to a chapter called “The Impermanence of Life.” What follows are 20 pages on the Buddhist teachings on impermanence, focusing mostly on our death, from which nothing and no one escapes. One of my favorite passages:

No soldier’s army, no ruler’s decrees, no rich man’s wealth, no scholar’s brilliance, no beauty’s charm, no athlete’s swiftness—none is any use. We might seal ourselves inside an impenetrable, armoured metal chest, guarded by hundreds of thousands of strong men bristling with sharp spears and arrows; but even that would not afford so much as a hair’s breadth of protection or concealment. Once the Lord of Death secures his black noose around our neck, our face begins to pale, our eyes glaze over with tears, and our head and limbs go limp, and we are dragged willy-nilly down the highway to the next life.
There are pages on the impermanence of everything else—the seasons, towns and cities, great empires, friendships and other relationships, buildings, fortunes, sorrows, happiness, poverty. “Everything is subject to change,” Patrul Rinpoche writes, “everything waxes and wanes.”

The purpose of these teachings are to, quite simply, point us toward living good, virtuous lives. Patrul Rinpoche quotes one teacher, Geshe Potowa, thus: “Think about death and impermanence for a long time. Once you are certain that you will die, you will no longer find it hard to put aside harmful actions, not difficult to do what is right.” So the lesson here, which is not always easy for me—or for others, I suspect—is to simply be kind.

During my retreat, I took plenty more walks, sometimes on the monastery grounds. Harry had a small Bonsai tree garden on the grounds. The wooden tables are all still there, but the trees are gone. A cabin I used to stay in—called Cliffhanger because it sat on a cliff 200 feet above the Gulf of St. Lawrence—was closed last spring. A chunk of nearby cliff had washed away into the gulf and the cabin needs to be moved back before anyone can stay in it again. One evening when eating a simple dinner of rice and steamed vegetables I’d prepared and put into a bowl, I dropped the bowl, and it shattered into four pieces. That evening I watched the sun go down in a blaze of vast, oceanic beauty. When I walked back to my cabin, I saw more leaves turning.

The only thing we can really do with change is get used to it, as much as we often don’t like it or want it to happen. Death and impermanence are not things we normally think about, I know. But here in the deep north when your life slows down, you see it. If you stand still long enough you can see how the world is changing all around you all the time.

It feels like a sort of training, and that’s exactly what Buddhists call it. It’s a training because we can learn to dispel our illusions that life goes on forever, or that anything else lasts forever. Then when we experience a loss, it won’t seem like the end of the world. Which doesn’t mean we won’t be sad when people we love die and things we hold dear break or disappear. Sadness is not the same as despair.

And we can always keep ourselves attuned to what we might gain from our losses. Regarding this, one 17th and 18th century Japanese poet, Masahide, said it best:

Barn’s burnt down—
now
I can see the moon.

On of one my last days at the abbey, I took another walk past Harry’s garden. A part-time neighbor from Halifax hours away was working nearby. I stopped to say hello, of course. Turns out he was rescuing an old rhubarb plant Harry used to tend to, and he was going to transplant it near his own house in anticipation of getting fresh rhubarb come spring.

There are many wonderful places in the world to wake up in the morning. Recently, and unexpectedly, one of these places for me was at a KOA campground in Nebraska.

I was traveling East on Interstate 80 in a Westfalia, a Volkswagen camper, which I had just purchased in Colorado from my brother. He’d started a business refurbishing old Westfalias. This past spring he found a 1985 model on Ebay in El Paso, Texas, bought it, and had it shipped to Colorado. As he told me all about it in conversations over the phone—its excellent condition and what he had planned for it (including installing a new fuel-efficient Subaru engine)—I started to think I wanted it before he sold it to someone else.

I’ve always liked Westfalias. I’ve always liked any sort of small home. When I was young, my aunt and uncle sometimes visited from Bronxville, New York. On Sundays we all drove around the Connecticut countryside and pointed out “Jimmy houses.” A Jimmy house came to be any small house, the more remote the more true to form. My mother says a Jimmy house also had few windows, but I don’t recall including that feature in what I liked.

In winter, after a big snowstorm, I built igloos. In summer, I built a couple of tree houses. One summer years ago a neighborhood girl and I walked upstream from our family homes and made a little stick hut to sit in and talk and listen to the water. My mother once asked me if the girl and I were kissing out there—the girl and I were about 13 at the time and certainly of an age to experiment—and the question struck me as odd. For some reason, it never occurred to me to do that with my friend. There was something about the little hut we made that was for talking, communing with the woods and the stream that rushed by. In my first few years on the Omega staff I lived in a trailer, and loved it. Perhaps that whetted my appetite for getting a Westfalia, the manifestation of which was years away.

One Sunday afternoon this past June I woke up from a nap and knew immediately I wanted to get the Westfalia. Perhaps I’d been told in a dream, just like in the days of old when people had dreams and did what they instructed because the dream was held as a message from the heavens. A couple of weeks later, I was in Colorado and my brother and I were putting the finishing touches on the Westfalia—my Westfalia now. And the next thing I knew I was driving it East across the continent.

Western and Midwestern states are huge compared to the matchbox-sized states of New England, where I grew up and went to college, and you don’t appreciate their immensity until you drive through them. I’d spent my first semester of college at the University of Denver, driving there with a friend in his car. When I got there the landscape and sky were too vast for me. The only patterns I’d known from spending my life among hills and rivers and meadows all crowded together and connected by old, narrow, winding roads, made me feel alienated and lost out there. In four month’s time I came home to be where I felt at home.

Now, some 30 years later, I was back on Interstate 80 waking up at the edge of a cornfield in Nebraska. I’d pushed open the top of the camper—it has canvas sides, like a tent—climbed up on the mattress there, and slept soundly, having exhausted myself from the long drive the day before. It was a sunny morning, and cool; the muggy heat that can plague the Midwest had not yet arrived. I heard the distant whine of traffic on the highway and didn’t mind it; it was the sound of my people—my tribe—at the moment. Travelers. But what I remember most is the feeling of fresh air on my face. I’d slept outside, I suddenly realized.

It had been years since I’d slept outside and now found myself missing the thousands of nights I’d not done this. On summer nights when I was young, I used to have a friend over to sleep under the stars in the backyard of my parents’ house. As a teenager, I slept on the screened porch. Throughout my 20s and 30s, my wife at the time and I hiked all over the place—the Adirondacks, Maine, Utah, Washington State—and slept in a tent. Outside you wake up to whatever the weather is, and accept it. You’ve no choice in the matter. I’ve found that if you spend the night outdoors, then whatever the weather is, you’re not separate from it; you embody it in a way that does not happen inside.

What I began to realize was that I was happy and content not only in the moment but also in the memories of all the earlier times when I’d slept outside; the past and present merged into one wonderful sensation. There was something else to ponder. The French philosopher Gaston Bachelard writes in his book, The Poetics of Space: The Classic Look at How We Experience Intimate Places, of what he calls the “oneiric” house. The word “oneiric” has to do with that which belongs to dreams. The oneiric house, Bachelard writes, is “a house of dream-memory, that is lost in the shadow of a beyond of the real past.” The oneiric house, he says, is “the crypt of the house that we were born in.” It is where we are “in the unity of image and memory.”

I spent the first three months of my life sleeping in a baby carriage in a motel room in Buffalo, New York, where I was born. My hard-working father, then at the lowest one or two rungs of his climb up the corporate ladder, was shuttling between there and Connecticut, where he’d just landed a new job and was looking for a place for us to live while my mom stayed in Buffalo taking care of me and my older brother. The carriage was my little home on wheels.

Perhaps rooted in the core of my being, the Westfalia is like the baby carriage I spent my first few months of life in—it’s imbued with memories of home beyond my conscious reach, of a house that is gone but in which I used to dream my dreams and rest content with my own company.

I was reluctant to leave that campground. But after my second cup of coffee, the morning was well on its way toward noon, and I still had 1,500 miles and at least another three days to go before I reached my house—my so-called permanent residence, my mailing address—so I needed to be off.

I lowered the top, started the engine, backed out, and drove away. In the driver’s side mirror I saw the empty rectangle of grass where I’d spent the night, leaving no trace but two parallel rows of pressed grass where my tires rolled in and out.

It was a Friday evening after a long day at the office. For some reason, I had a little time on my hands. I was too tired to read. Too tired to write. I don’t have television except to watch DVDs but I had no DVDs. I didn’t feel like going out. I figured I’d go online for a while and call it an early night. And then it happened, almost before I knew what I was doing. I joined Facebook.

I’d been meaning to join for the past few months. I felt I was missing out on something. This normally doesn’t bother me. But this did. Launched at Harvard in 2004, Facebook now calls itself the most trafficked social media site in the world. It has more than 250 million active users. That’s just about 50 million shy of the entire population of the United States. I’m a social guy (for the most part) and I am easily impressed by big numbers. When 250 million people are doing one thing, I get curious. And, if it’s something good, I check it out. I checked it out.

Signing on was easier than I feared. Too easy. After I created my “wall”—that’s what your page is called, although there’s nothing solid about it—I did what everyone else does when they first join. I looked up the years I graduated high school and college to see who I might know who was also on Facebook. I saw a few vaguely familiar faces, older now. I even thought about asking them to be “my friend.” That’s how it works; Facebook will send friend requests for you to other members. It can also comb through everyone on your e-mail address book, and if they are Facebook members, you can click on them and Facebook sends them an invite. These people then need to accept your invitation on their Facebook page. Or not.

But I didn’t ask any of my old classmates to be my friend. I hardly really knew these particular people, hardly called them my friend back then. So why would I ask them to be my friend now? Truth is, I hated high school. Why do I want to relive that particular miserable episode in my life? Once was enough. College was better, but not much—what I can remember of it. In those days I drank way too much tequila and beer and, as if caught in a strange dream from which I could not wake up—one of those dreams in which you are running but can’t get anywhere—I was in love with the same girl for the entire four years even though I knew she had a boyfriend out of state and would never return my affection for her. I’m not going back there, even in cyberspace.

By the time I was done inviting all the people I knew and liked to be my Facebook friend, the sun had gone down and the moon had come up. I’d begun at about 7:00 p.m. and now it was after midnight. I was shocked by how the hours had fled by. I didn’t feel like I’d wasted time, though. I’d done something I’d wanted to do, and felt good about the accomplishment. I went to bed tired but content.

Come morning, something happened. What happened is that now I was a member of Facebook.

Normally, I stumble out of bed, get some water boiling for tea, shuffle to my desk, and, as I rub the sleep from my eyes, check my e-mail. I cannot recall when I began his routine. Probably a long time ago because I can’t remember. I open e-mails from family members or friends and then open the Writer’s Almanac newsletter to read its poem and short sketches about the birthdays of writers and other illustrious people and celebrated events down through the ages. While I sip on my tea I sometimes answer e-mails if I am thinking clearly enough. After that, and before I get ready for the day, I read a few pages in whatever book I was reading in bed the night before. Sometimes, if I am working on a specific project, I write.

Now, there was something else I felt I needed to squeeze in between checking and answering e-mails and the book I wanted to get back to reading: check my Facebook page. That morning, I joined all the others around the world whom, according to one statistic provided by Facebook, spend more than 5 billion minutes on Facebook each day. When I saw that figure I grabbed a calculator to figure how many years that is. If I did my math correctly—and I double checked it with some colleagues—it comes to 9,506 years.

For the next hour, I read posts from my Facebook friends from all over the place telling me what they are having for breakfast, where there are going, where they’ve been, what sort of shape they were in upon waking (numb, hungover, perky), random thoughts that shoot randomly through the mind, and the results of these strange tests you can do online to find out, say, which Harry Potter character you are most like or which Batman villain you are. Then there are comments from others on these posts. So, for example, if I say I am in Starbucks sipping on a grande coffee mocha with the morning sun streaming through the window and warming my face, someone else might say, “Sounds heavenly!” Or “Wish I was there. I’m just home from the dentist and can’t drink anything hot and I need some caffeine really bad!”

If I wanted to, I, too, could comment. But what would I say? Or more to the point, why say anything? Or even more to the point, why are people writing this and why am I reading it? I’ve suddenly traded in my morning dose of Kierkegaard for a coffee klatch. I used to have this sort of centering prayer of waking, reading, and writing. Now I’ve become a spectator of a very bizarre parade. I started wondering what else we could all be doing for those 9,506 years we spend on Facebook every day. Clean up the litter in our neighborhoods? Feed the poor? Help the homeless?

I have to admit, however, that I am enjoying Facebook. I’ve been using it to contact current friends I hardly see and to make new friends of people I know in my professional circle. I quickly gloss over the things people write about what they are doing or how they are feeling, but it does not mean I’m totally uninterested. As I was writing this column and in the midst of the rant above, a friend and colleague of mine, who happens to be a heavy user of Facebook, came into my office. I explained my rant to her. She defended what I was attacking. “It’s like a huge party,” she said. “Yeah, some of it is lame, just like at a party, but some of it is really fun. You just sort of hang out with people, and you can make some really cool connections.” I agreed. I’d actually been having the same experience she was describing.

My father used to tell me that the best way to get a job done well is to use the right tool. You don’t use a regular screwdriver on a Phillips-head screw. All technology is a tool. We need to be careful not to be used by the tool that is supposed to be used by us. We are all familiar with dystopian science fiction stories that point to the horrors of man being ruled by the machines we created. One of my favorite stories of this sort is 2001: A Space Odyssey from 1968. In that story—Arthur C. Clarke wrote the novel while Stanley Kubrick created the film—a mission to Jupiter is thwarted by the computer (nicknamed HAL) that’s operating the ship. HAL gets wind of the crew’s plan to disconnect it after they realize HAL might be malfunctioning. Unknown to the astronauts, HAL reads their lips and discovers their plot and then sets out to destroy the very men it is suppose to serve.

My guess is that most of us are not aware of how subtly and insidiously this kind of technology is actually taking over our lives. Key in the wrong password at your computer or an ATM and what happens? When this happens to me I always hear in the back of my mind the calming yet assertive voice of HAL when one of the scientists, Dave Bowman, after making some repairs on the hull of the spaceship, asks HAL to open the door to be let in. HAL does not want to let Dave in because Dave is in the process of disconnecting HAL. The exchange goes like this for several rounds.

DAVE: Open the pod bay doors, HAL.
HAL: I’m sorry, Dave. I can’t do that.

Eventually, Dave finds his way back into the spaceship, but the expedition is doomed after HAL is finally disabled and the ship speeds off faster than the speed of light into other, dreamlike dimensions in both time and space.

Another early memory I have about technology and the future is Alvin Toffler’s 1970 book, Future Shock. I read this book during college (it was one of the few things I liked about those days) one summer I was working for the county road crew where my family lived at the time. During lunch breaks, I’d pull the book from my brown bag and read. Leafing through its brittle, yellowing pages now, I can see that much of what Toffler wrote before the personal computer and e-mail and Facebook presages much of what is happening now, and it was not good news for us.

There’s one more recent and more optimistic prediction than Toffler’s about the effects of technology on our lives. Over lunch another friend recommended to me a 2006 book by Ray Kurzweil, called The Singularity is Near. Kurzweil describes his idea of the “singularity” thus: “It’s a future period during which the pace of technological change will be so rapid, its impact so deep, that human life will be irreversibly transformed. Although neither utopian nor dystopian, this epoch will transform the concepts that we rely on to give meaning to our lives, from our business models to the cycle of human life, including death itself.” Like Toffler nearly four decades ago, Kurzweil writes: “Exponential growth is deceptive. It starts out almost imperceptibly and then explodes with unexpected fury—unexpected, that is, if one does not take care to follow its trajectory.”

Facebook is one manifestation of this sort of change. It is neither good nor bad. It just is. And it is up to us to use it to our benefit—to not be taken over by it, become addicted to it, or somehow find ourselves unable to live without it in order to be engaged in the world, to develop our inner lives, and to be happy.

There’s an old and a somewhat shocking adage in the teachings of Buddhism that suggest if you see the Buddha on the road, kill him. The idea is that the Buddha you see is an idol, a projection of your own image of who or what the Buddha is, which is not the real Buddha. The real Buddha is behind that Buddha, and even behind the other Buddha behind that Buddha. And so on.

At the moment, I’m feeling much the same way about Facebook. It’s a projection of what we think it is. In some way, it is just a party, as my friend said. We can drop in anytime. And if we don’t like it, we can leave.

The past few weeks I’ve been thinking a lot about obsession. I guess you could say I’ve been obsessed with obsession.

The other night at home I read a magazine article about Leonard Cohen’s 1984 song “Hallelujah.” The article was a sort of a tribute to the song, offering a description of how the song came to be and about the many performers who have covered it over the years.

The first time I heard the song was 20 years after Cohen recorded it. This version was on NPR during a live performance k.d. lang was giving at Carnegie Hall during a tour promoting her 2004 CD, Hymns of the 49th Parallel. I was in my car and nearly had to pull over. I felt a soft explosion in my heart and my entire body seemed to get caught up in a vertiginous swirl of thought and emotion I couldn’t stop—and didn’t want to stop because that kind of surrender just felt so good. I bought the CD and listened to it—and “Hallelujah”—on and off (more on) for about two years. Then one day I took it out of my CD changer and gave it a rest. I’d had enough.

When I opened that magazine article the other night, I lost myself all over again. Maybe this is what an alcoholic feels like if he or she takes a drink after having been on the wagon for a while. There’s this gripping feeling of delight and dread, the cartoonish angel on one shoulder (Better not) and the devil on the other (Go ahead, do it). I did. After I read the article, I clicked on youtube.com to see if there were any videos of anyone singing the song.

Turns out were plenty of them. There’s not only lang’s version but there’s also one by Jeff Buckley, John Cale, Allison Crowe, Rufus Wainwright, Sheryl Crow, and even Cohen himself. Of course, I had to watch them all. Then I clicked through to some other sites to get the lyrics (they change slightly depending who is performing the song), which led me to sites that explored the meaning of the word “hallelujah” (it’s Hebrew for “praise the Lord”) and examined the song’s allusions to the Biblical stories of David and Samson. This started at about 9 p.m. When I next looked up from my computer at the clock, it was close to 1 a.m.

Where did those four hours go? People who study obsessions and addictions say when met with the object of our desire we go into a sort of trance. Is that what happened? And, if so, is it such a bad thing? What’s the difference between getting lost in a trance and simply paying attention? In Buddhism, what happened to me might be called samadhi, which is Sanskrit for the sort of mental concentration that leads to an awareness of ultimate reality and complete freedom from suffering. My mind was not wandering, scheming, wishing, dreaming. I was nowhere else but right on task with what I was doing.

I love good music. And I love to learn. I spent hours online that night because I wanted to hear a song I love played many times by many performers. And I wanted to know more about the song because that would deepen my love and appreciation for it. Is there a crime in that?

What about getting caught up in a good book? “I couldn’t put it down,” people say about reading a novel into the wee hours of the night. We commend people for that—both the writer for telling a good story and the reader for finding so much pleasure in an activity our culture holds up as one of humanity’s highest achievements. The other morning I found myself so engrossed—obsessed?—in reading a book on obsession and addiction that I forgot I had put the stove on to heat a skillet to scramble some eggs. I laughed. But if I had been online then chasing “Hallelujah” down a rabbit hole, I wonder if I would been so kind to myself.

Now, days later after giving it all some more thought, I am wondering if clicking through sites online is just another form of page turning, and I am wondering if my little adventure with “Hallelujah” was just as compelling an adventure as reading a good book. It was a sort of story I was wrapped up in—the song, its performance, creation, and hidden meanings.

The song has many others who can’t seem to get enough of it. When I last checked, one of lang’s performances had gotten 1,091,990 hits on youtube.com (I must have contributed to about a hundred of those); Buckely’s has 8,405,694 (which is more than the entire population of New York City); Cale’s (which appears on the soundtrack of Shrek) 1,763,840; Allison Crowe’s 2,973,259 views; Wainwright’s Irish performance 3,758,095 views; Sheryl Crow’s 994,143 views; Cohen’s own version (and not the best, by my lights), 6,359,846 views.

When I first heard lang sing “Hallelujah” on the radio back in 2004, I was in a relationship that wasn’t going well. It eventually ended—and it did not end well. I listened to the song a couple of years later while in the throes of another relationship that ended barely before it began. Amidst all that listening, the song gave me a profound insight into the nature of love. There’s a line in the lyrics that says “love is a cold and broken hallelujah.” I’d heard that line dozens of times before, but it struck me anew after my second break-up and has stayed with me through the years, like a tuning fork whose sound never changes—or goes away.

“If we hear a piece of radically new music enough times, some of that piece will eventually become encoded in our brains and we will develop landmarks,” writes Daniel J. Levitin in his book, This is Your Brain on Music. “If the composer is skillful, those parts of the piece that become our landmarks will be the very ones that the composer intended they should be; his knowledge of composition and human perception and memory will have allowed him to create certain ‘hooks’ in the music that will eventually stand out in our minds.”

I wonder if I listened to the song so much during those couple of years in an attempt to imagine a better outcome for either relationship, if only in my own mind. Change not the events but my perception of the events. Locate within me a level of acceptance that certain relationships—like certain roads—are not always smooth and do not necessarily lead you where you really want to go. Or maybe I listened to find solace in a world in which my broken heart felt like the only heart that was ever broken. One website I found examined the lyrics of “Hallelujah” and pointed out that the song speaks of the fact that “people are imperfect and wavering in their affections.” And those people include not just others, but also ourself.

The dictionary defines obsession as “a persistent disturbing preoccupation with an often unreasonable idea or feeling.” So I’m thinking that this is the line in the sand between a healthy enjoyment of something or a pathological compulsion. On one side there’s joy. On the other “a persistent disturbing preoccupation.”

Given that, I don’t think I’m obsessed with “Hallelujah.” I just like the song. A lot.

Amen.

***

Purchase k. d. lang’s Hymns of the 49th Parallel This CD has a lovely studio recording of “Hallelujah.” The entire CD, a collection of songs by Canadian musicians, including Neil Young, Leonard Cohen, and Jean Sibbery–all of them beautifully covered by lang–is unforgettable.

Puchase k.d. lang: Live with the BBC Concert Orchestra [Blu-ray] This DVD has an awesome live version of “Hallelujah” and many other k.d. lang favorites.