Is It Necessary to Have a Plow?
Endangered Species
Dominant Species
Desire
Into the Woods
Across the Face of a Clock
Dirty Stab Wound
Attachment
Feast of St. Francis
Fidelity to Objects
Ghost
Tundra Swans
Why I Am Plodding
Efficiency
From a Distance
PART TWO
Clearing Land for the Lotus Pool
Cold
Monkey Mind
Casual
Nothing Human
Kindness
Practice Everything
Homesick
Armor
Regular Practice
Why?
Rich Life
Moving Woods
Oceans
Failed Novice
Trancing a Rabbit
Empty
Full
Stop
Surrender Again
Dharma Rap Session
Community
Work
Lightning
Excess
PART THREE
I Saw a River Rise
Apprentice Shepherd
Home
Cleaning
When You Talk to Angels
Barn Ecology
The Best Way to Work with Lucy
Inside and Outside
Hallucinating
Freezing
What You Know
It’s Not Free
Nothing to Do
What Language Does God Speak?
Hard Metaphors and Soft Facts
Weather Shifts
Lazy Day
Haltering Up
Lake
Missing in Action
The Council of Nature
Grieving
Weights and Measures
Dark and Ebbing Energy
Elf Patterning
Heading Out
Sheep May Safely Graze
Maine
The Religion of Natural Process
Hot
July
Sin and Grace
Leaving
True and False Personae
Getting Dressed
Forgiveness
Healing
Pearl of Great Price
Pacem in Terris
Thirty Hours
Acknowledgments
I’D PARTICULARLY LIKE to thank the man identified here as Josef for giving me generous and free permission to write about my experience at Plum Village: “We’ll know it’s only your opinion,” he assured me. I’ve quoted extensively from my notes on Thich N’hat Hanh’s dharma talks, in hopes that they might be as valuable to others as they were, and are, to me: I’m grateful for the privilege of having been there, while others could not be, and feel a responsibility to pass on what I recorded. However, the best source of information on Thay’s teaching remains his own vast and accessible series of books, beginning with The Miracle of Mindfulness, most of them published by Parallax Press.
I’m grateful, also, to my sister Peg Plumbo, my friend Robin Fox, my children, Jude and Julian O’Reilley, and my colleague Bob Miller for reading early versions of the manuscript and offering helpful suggestions. Without Bob’s astute and sensitive emendations, in particular, I would be even more afraid than I am to let this book out of my sight. Thank you, dear friend, for so many years of patient, loving counsel.
I gratefully acknowledge the assistance of grants from the Bush Foundation, the Minnesota State Arts Board, and the University of St. Thomas, which helped me to live and record the story that’s told here.
I GREW UP at the intersection of narrative and silence, as most of us do; in any relatively normal family, there are those who tell stories—stories about themselves and the life of the family—and those who do not: some, too, who listen, and some who do not. At the kitchen table of our little cottage, long after my grandfather had gone off to his carpentry work, my grandmother’s stories would roll: The Day My Twin Died and His Spirit Came to Me, The Girl with Lice, Florence and the Ouija Board, My Vision of the Angel of Death, and so on. My mother, too, especially in the midst of canning or jelly making, was full of family narrative. But the silent members of the family exerted an influence as well, the aunts who sat wordlessly rocking, the ones who chose not to speak or were silenced, their stories controlled by others. I had a photograph, once, of a nineteenth-century male relative, a handsome, quite rakish face above a clerical collar.