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
