When our children were small, I stayed at home as the primary caregiver. This was unusual at the time. My wife’s career in industry was just beginning to blossom. I had by then been a teacher at a small prep school in Pennsylvania, a lecturer in American literature at a Spanish University, and a freelance writer with one book to my name (from a small press that immediately after went out of business). I also had sold the independent bookstore I had founded and operated for seven years. I worked at night teaching business communications and American literature at the adult education extension of the local community college. I wrote poems while the children napped, and I created paintings on weekends.
I learned quickly not to say I was a homemaker. People would wince as they tried to place a Betty Crocker template over me and my firm handshake. Nor would I say I was a poet or an artist. Despite national poetic figures as wildly different as Robert Frost and Allen Ginsberg, the stereotype of the Oscar Wilde aesthete tiptoeing through the tulips was what I felt came to mind for many of the people I would meet. I’d say I was a writer and taught at MVCC. That was okay. It had a ring to it. But it wasn’t who I was.
Even after fourteen years working in rare books and manuscripts at a research library, with an MLS and professional publications, I do not call myself a librarian. After doing consulting work for UNESCO in Germany, I find I could also call myself a documentalist, but I don’t. For six years I’ve worn the shaved head of an ordained Rinzai Zen monk, but unless people ask me about my head (and some do!), I rarely mention it, despite my deep involvement as a clergyman in our community. It is because of who I am that I am a monk, not the other way around.
Perhaps it is the way you live or what has happened to you? Are you handicapped? A widow? A Catholic? A Jew? A victim (of what)? And me? I’m a drunk, an alcoholic. Twelve years ago I went into rehab and have been working recovery ever since. For six of those years I taught meditation to other alcoholics and addicts at a local rehabilitation unit. My twelfth-step work. When I finally went for help, I was a tenth of an inch from losing everything—job, family, life. I have absolutely no doubt that if I had continued as I was I’d be dead now. This is the real thing. I am not afraid to talk about it but neither do I advertise it. I was told that if I wanted to get better I had to completely change my life. Yeah, right, I thought. I was 41. I was me. I could be a good boy and not drink anymore, but I could not change who I was. I was wrong. I am not the same person I was twelve years ago. I could not have predicted who I became, nor how substantively different. Clearly, being an alcoholic is not a defining characteristic.
Vanity is such a subtle thing. Twice a year I am supposed to attend intensive “retreats” called sesshin at a traditionally-run Buddhist monastery in the mountains as part of my training as a monk. It is the kind of training one comes to realize has no end point. It is a life-long way of keeping in shape spiritually. One of the two sesshin is always supposed to be Rohatsu Sesshin. This is an eight-day affair that takes place in the first week in December, ending on December 8, the day that traditionally marks the Buddha’s enlightenment. It is the most demanding and the most rewarding sesshin, with up to fourteen hours of meditation a day. The mountains can be beautiful in December. One year a heavy snowfall wiped out power in a three-county area and temperatures in the zendo dropped to thirty-three degrees. But we just put on long johns under our robes and sat in a silence so deep (no heat pipes, no water running, no lights humming, no white noise), we could hear the snowflakes settle outside. We were transported back three hundred years to a monastic experience impossible almost anywhere today.
In December of 1997, I was sitting through my eighth Rohatsu and my fifteenth or sixteenth sesshin at the monastery. Compared to some participants, I was still in my sesshin adolescence, but I was not a newcomer. I knew from experience that the first two or three days are the most difficult, rather like a wilderness canoe trip, and then one toughens up and truly enters into the rhythms of the extraordinary silent dance sesshin becomes. But this time I did not toughen up. Pain in my legs and back increased each day. The little sleep we got was erratic at best for me. By the sixth day I was nearly passing out from pain. But I refused to say anything to anyone. We do learn how to deal with pain and I was convinced I was failing to do so in some way, weakening in my resolve. Certainly Rohatsu in a Rinzai monastery breeds a kind of samurai attitude, a sense of toughness—we are the Dharma Marines! This may be helpful in some circumstances, though I am not so sure what they might be. It nearly killed me, at any rate. I would not let myself see something was indeed wrong with me—not a failure of will (ironic in this ego-eradicating environment) but of body. I would not listen to the warning signals. I was very sick.
It took some time for the doctors to get it right because the symptoms are easily disguised as something else. Besides, men who grew up as athletes, as I did, tend to hold on to the notion that they are immortal and don’t need doctors anyway, so I didn’t even mention at first some of the things bugging me. I thought they’d go away by themselves. But I was finally diagnosed with Graves’ disease, a hyperthyroid condition rare in men. The pain I experienced at Rohatsu came from loss of muscle tone in my body as my overactive thyroid consumed my proteins. I was so convinced I was beyond egotistic concerns for myself I couldn’t see my arrogance of denial. Subtle indeed. Does this make me an invalid (curious word in this context, if you shift the accent a little . . .)? No, I am getting better. It’s serious, permanent, but manageable, like a low-grade diabetes. This humbling lesson has not, however, changed who I am. Something else has, and I am still discovering what that something is.
The American Soto Zen teacher, Dennis Genpo Merzel, writes in The Eye Never Sleeps: “We think life and death [or sickness and health] are separate phenomena. We never think of life and death as the same; that would be illogical. Only one problem . . . reality is not logical. Truth is not rational; only our minds are. We are so egotistical, so arrogant, that we want to make reality into a concept, reduce life to a logical idea. We spend all our time looking for some concept of Truth, but Truth is what is left when we drop all concepts. . . .” Who is not dying or ill in some way? Death is the one thing at which we cannot fail.
Vimalakirti says: “All sentient beings are ill, therefore I am ill. My sickness will last as long as there is ignorance and self-clinging. As long as beings are sick, I myself will remain sick.”
It is a way of saying I will remain human. Merzel comments on this: “When we are trying to be strong, defending ourselves, we can’t let ourselves get sick. We force ourselves to stay well because we don’t feel strong enough to be vulnerable Delusion is a concept; enlightenment is a concept. Health is a concept; sick is another concept. We seek after health and try to avoid sickness, seek after enlightenment and try to avoid delusion. All are just concepts! Without concepts we find ourselves unbounded, undefined; and our greatest fear is to live without boundaries, without definitions Everyone and everything can come in . . . .” When my own health broke, something hard and bitter in me broke as well. There stood Nobody.
A Sweetness Appears and Prevails
The reason we bother
to get up in the morning
is because of everything;
is because there is another arithmetic
without internal sense
and we ache at the borders;
is because the grey music
of the first chickadee before dawn
in the hemlocks
is the grinding engines of the humpyard
carried on morning air;
is because we are afraid