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.
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For further exploration:
Frederick Buechner The Sacred Journey: A Memoir of Early Days
