Dishes rattle in the sink.
Cupboards slam and the smell of food
rises from floor to floor.
So, say, then, from the heart
that you are the perfect day
and in you dwells
the little ruined light
that does not fail.
In a direct, linear way we see desperation approaching, wordless, enveloping, inevitable. But it is not inevitable. We have a choice how to respond, unless we have given over our choice to addiction. The wisdom by which we are able to realize in ourselves the truth of a thing must not be only intellectual. It needs an element of attentive affection. One of the names for the Buddha—any Buddha—is Tathagata. It is usually translated as “thus come.” It also means, at the same time, “thus gone.” It makes no difference. At the turn of this paradox, just as we suspect that birth was the death of us, in the midst of total uncertainty, we can love.
Loathe to Leave You to Your Death
When you are no good,
when you are fodder,
when your ground is soiled,
when the precious child leaves you
without looking back,
when your truth is falsified
by terror and death,
when all doors are ashes
and all walls are deaf,
when your breath tastes like iron,
when you will never know a day
without some sort of aching,
you are beautiful
o my loves
as tears are,
comely as the first holy snow.
Part Two
The Orphaned
Dark
Dissolving the Fictions
On a Thursday evening in late spring you can hear children at play in the street through the open window. And birds yattering away, clamoring for territory, for mates, for the pure joy of it—who knows? The zendo is silent. Sixteen or seventeen people sit in two rows, one of which bends around the ell in the attic room. This is the old zendo of our early days on the third floor of a century-old Victorian pile, our spiritual director’s home.
Many of those sitting in the silent room first came to the zendo as I did. I was in crisis. I was scared. For the first time I could actually see the bottom of the barrel, and it was the abyss. My drinking had taken control of my life. No single moment went by without planning for it in relation to drinking. My marriage was tearing badly at the seams. I had found I could not write without drinking to give me that creative buzz, but by this time, I had to drink so much just to get the buzz I couldn’t hold a pen. My job was just a matter of time. The inner life, my spiritual being where my writing lived, was dying almost as assuredly as my body was. For seventeen years I had practiced Transcendental Meditation with fair regularity but without a guide. I had been on a plateau for years and had now come to the cliff at its end. I gave up meditation. This was not for me a small thing. It was connection. I was not sure to what, but it was real. Now it was gone.
Most people who knew me then assumed my first real step toward recovery was when I agreed to go to counseling, but that was more than a year after I first made an appointment at the Zen Center of Syracuse. I knew I needed help and I thought I knew where to begin. I suppose I also thought, quite wrongly as it turns out, that if I got my spiritual act together, the drinking and all of the other problems would take care of themselves.
I was in the local New-Age bookstore and saw a poster for the Zen Center. I asked the manager about it and was told it was “the real thing,” not just a hangout for aging hippies (as his store was). I called the number. The woman’s soft voice on the phone assured me she was the director. She asked me some questions in a hesitant tone and we made an appointment. I later understood her hesitation. Many odd people would call the Zen Center, and she needed to make sure their interest in Zen was real.
I arrived at the appointed time, standing nervously on the front porch, noticing the toys there. Young children lived here too. A small, pleasant-looking woman, with cropped grey hair, answered the door. She asked me to remove my shoes, something that has since become a habit in my own home, and took me through a bathroom and up a back staircase off the kitchen to the attic. The house was a happy clutter of books (piles and groaning cases), art (every available surface had a picture), artifacts, toys. Off the attic landing was a door. She opened it to a long room, radical in its uncluttered purity. The zendo. We sat facing one another, and I have no recollection of what we discussed. I was overwhelmed with a sense of homecoming. I knew I had found my teacher, someone who, should I ever be able to have some sort of insight, would be able to see and affirm that I did.
By the time of this pleasant spring evening I had been through rehab and had been sitting for a few years. It is evening but there is still light enough to see by. We are all enjoying the natural waning light of day. The room is silent. There are a few more women than men. Ages vary: a few students, a few adults with families, adults going back to school, adults with jobs of various kinds, a professor, a researcher, a macramé artist, a painter or writer, a couple of individuals from industry—the usual mix in a lay practice near a university.
Whatever each individual’s inner struggle, there is a palpable sense of enjoyment in the room. After a long day of work it is good to sit with these good people, share silence and peace. Each of them had once felt that sense of coming home I experienced on my first visit. It is renewed as we sit together in the gloaming.
Mothers begin to call the children in. The birds’ roosting songs draw to a dose. A dog barks in another neighborhood. Darkness deepens in the room. You can touch the stillness. Out of nowhere her voice booms: “Are you waiting for your life to happen? Or are you tasting it now?”
He Whose Face Gives No Light Shall Never Become a Star
Deep frost. Sun and moon
at once in the dawn.
Our utter impermanence.
Sudden bitterness
springing all unbidden
at a word
that we will fail again
to be human.
Birds
sleep in the throat.
Behind the ribs
it is a bare open country.
This empty vessel overflowing.
Lullaby of the Dreamcatcher
Hush. Be still.
The road is gone.
Speech and truth sleep
and only your dream
stands against darkness close at hand.
It is the place of night
and of time,
darkness without shore.
Your dreams
caught at the window
hang like stars.
In Samuel Beckett’s Endgame, Clove asks Hamm, “Do you believe in the life to come?” Hamm replies, “Mine was always that.”
I once loved a woman who was always angry with me. She said I lived my life vicariously, trying to fulfill someone else’s expectations of what my life should be, that I was waiting to finally get it right for everyone, and only then could I live my own life. She said she wasn’t going to wait for the real me forever. She didn’t