Real Capital

For every outer challenge in the world there is an internal place to stand that enables us to meet that challenge with courage, conviction and generosity. The present difficulties of the world - economic, existential, or ecological - call for a radical shift in our wants and needs and therefore our very identities. - David Whyte

I have seven friends and colleagues who are losing their jobs or who are unemployed: seven highly educated, experienced, professional people. Three of them have been been unable to find work for more than six months, despite every effort. I know other people who have lost nearly all of their savings in the last few months. Amidst the news of "recovery", I'm seeing something unprecedented in my lifetime, and despite the positive headlines, almost everyone I know feels frightened. What had seemed like solid ground beneath our feet - a job, a house - now heaves and swells like a raft in mid-ocean.

And beneath the immediate questions of livelihood lurk deeper, even more unsettling questions about the world, and many people I know feel these questions at the edges of their consciousness too, a sense that perhaps something is coming to an end, whole ways of life falling into bankruptcy, the unsustainable now evident, cracking and shifting at the seams.

I've had conversations about buying gold, buying land, growing food - all the tricks of survival - and I think those conversations are helpful as we grope toward new, and perhaps more sustainable ways of living. But I sense that all strategies of survival depend ultimately on a kind of desperate individuality, a "gonna grab me a gun and dig a hole in the ground" mentality.

And I wonder: what are the true sources of security and prosperity? How can we - I - best take of ourselves as the world bends dangerously around us? I don't pretend to know the answers, but these are some of my thoughts, based partly on the life I've been living for much of the last three years - without a home or a job, radically contingent and dependent on circumstances and on kindness.

These are the words that come to mind when I think of real security:

Friendship

Gratitude

Path

All the rest - savings and gold buried in the ground, or a gun in your pocket - might buy a little safety, for a little while, but I don't know if I'd trust any of them in the long term. That's just me, I know, and maybe for someone else those things would be enough. But let me tell you why I think friendship and gratitude and path are the real capital in a human life.

Here's a story about friendship: I know a generous, warm-hearted man who, when an old college friend of his moved to his city, offered a room in his apartment until his friend got settled. He told his friend not to worry about rent until he had a job. Eventually his friend found a very good job, and then bought a house in Seattle, and invited my friend to rent a room from him. They've shared the house for years. Now my friend is unemployed, and his savings are running thin. But his friend has already told him that if he can't pay the rent for a while, that's all right. The man I know doesn't have to lie awake at night wondering where he will live if he doesn't find a job soon. Their friendship is true capital, for both of them, as is history of generosity between them.

In my own hard times, my friends have been my deepest resource. I remember when my marriage ended and I was utterly lost, I knew that without the love of friends I would have been swept under. And at other times I have held up my friends, knowing that some day we would change roles. I can barely imagine the narrowness and vulnerability I would feel without their imperfect yet steadfast love.

When we are planning for the future, wouldn't it make sense to consider how we can best nurture our friendships and relationships? Relationships pay dividends twice, to all who are part of them: in the present, through the joy and love we can feel in one another's presence, and in the future, through the support we can offer each another if times get hard - if illness strikes, or sadness, or a hundred other difficulties.

Recent studies have shown that friendships and relationships increase longevity and happiness. And yet some people I know treat friendships as a luxury or a burden, something extra around the edges of making a living or the many tasks that can fill our days, rather than central to a human life. What if we valued others' love, and took care of it, as much or more than we valued our retirement accounts?

There's a story from the life of the Buddha of a time when his attendant and cousin, Ananda, came to him with a revelation. "Honored one," he said, "half of the holy life is in our friendship with one another." The Buddha replied, "No, Ananda, that is not right. All of the holy life is our friendship with one another."

And then there's gratitude. I've thought a lot about gratitude in the last few years, and developed a practice of it, and I've decided that it's a kind of magic. Gratitude turns fear and disappointment into a broader, brighter road. If I wake up feeling sick and all I have is my misery, the morning is very small and difficult indeed. But if remember that I also feel gratitude for the sunlight through the window, or the cup of tea in my hand, the morning expands outward into happiness, even though the difficulty is still there. In hard and frightening times, the cultivation of gratitude in a daily way could show us the possibility of happiness even if our lives are not turning out as we would wish. Sometimes money can buy us out of difficulty, but when it can't.....what do we have? The morning sun through the window, still. The sweetness of a smile.

My favorite web resource on gratitude is a site developed by Brother David-Steindle-Rast, a joy-filled Benedictine monk in his 80's: www.gratefulness.org . He has dedicated the last part of his life to teaching gratitude.

And finally, path. I was going to write, "faith", but faith is a tricky word for a Buddhist. Still, I mean faith too. What I mean is the feeling that one's life is not bound entirely by conventional identities as a consumer, or a worker, or a wife, or a student, but is instead held within a larger container, as a "child of God", or a person dedicated to awakening and compassion, or whatever it is that is a meaning far beyond and far larger than our small identities.

Several of my colleagues whose jobs are disappearing are people of faith - Baha'i or Christian - and I can see that they hold what is a disastrous event (by any standard) within a certain deep and beautiful trust. When our identities are limited, and we lose that identity, we lose everything. When we are held within vastness, within love, within a purpose beyond our small selves, the loss is different - still significant, still painful, but not shattering in the same way.

So I see these three as true capital in hard times, or for hard times to come. If each of us truly nurtured mutually supportive friendships, gratitude, and whatever path sustains us, we would be rich beyond belief, protected and blessed. The winds could roar, our house could be swept away, and we could suffer, but we would also be held by priceless gifts. What more is there to wish for in this brief life?

Of Resurrection

These last few weeks I’ve been considering a kind of paradox, one that I’m reminded of every time I walk along the shoreline here where I’ve been staying: to what lengths must we go to undo the damage we’ve done? And if to undo the damage we must use a kind of poison, are we right to play with such fire?

I’m staying on the shores of Willapa Bay, a big bay on the southern Washington coast that opens out to the Pacific, the largest bay north of San Francisco. The first time I saw this place, it stole my heart: the light on the water and sandy shoals, the birds wheeling above in the gray skies. A few years later, a village on the north shore of Willapa Bay became my refuge and occasional home.

Shoalwater, Willapa …the words soft in the mouth, sibilant like rain on water. Shoalwater Bay was the old name for the bay, back when schooners tried to thread their way forty miles from the mouth of the bay through the sand shoals and squalls and big tides to the harbor at the mouth of the Willapa River.

Back then the low hills were rich in old-growth western red cedar and hemlock, the huge, shallow bay was rich with native Olympia oysters, and the eelgrass beds nurturedmillions of young salmon. Every year hundreds of thousands of shorebirds would settle on the shoals and mudflats on their journeys to and from their breeding grounds in the north, recovering and growing strong for the next leg of their flight.

The early settlers got rich gathering up the native oysters and sending them to Gold Rush San Francisco, and by 1894, the oysters were nearly gone. The old growth lasted longer, until the mid-20^th century. Then Willapa Bay became a backwater, a quiet, poor place, left mostly to the rain and tides.

One thing still thrived and grew in the bay, a slow cancer. Back in 1894, when oyster spat was brought from the East Coast to replace the native oysters that had been decimated by over-harvesting, something else came with them. The spat were kept alive in boxes packed with moist layers of another East Coast native, Spartina alterniflora.

The Atlantic oysters failed, but the spartina thrived, growing on the sand and mud below the high tide line where the shorebirds fed, seemingly barren places that supported great life and diversity just beneath the surface. The spartina formed dense patches that trapped more sediment, converting the intertidal zone to meadow. Eelgrass beds, juvenile salmon habitat, shorebird feeding areas…all gone.

For most of its first one hundred years in the bay, the spartina spread slowly. In 1984, there were just a few hundred acres of the grass in the bay. Then it exploded, and by 2003, there were 20,000 acres of the tidelands completely dominated by the grass, and it was increasing by 20% a year. It was like a wildfire, killing everything in sight.

The cabin where I stay is close to a tidal channel that drains a large salt marsh and sand flats. Across the channel is a deserted sandy island. In the few years that I’ve been here, I watched the spartina fill in the tidelands and saltmarsh, until there was little else. I would try to dig the smaller clumps, but it was like flailing at the edges of a monstrous growth; the next year there would be even more.

I seldom saw shorebirds here, because the invertebrates they depended upon couldn’t survive amongst the spartina, and the dense growth provided cover for their predators. I knew that this was happening everywhere else in the bay, an inexorable loss, a helpless grief I felt every time I walked the shoreline.

I came back to the bay a few weeks ago. I’d been gone a long time, since late summer last year. I arrived back at Willapa in early twilight. I got out of the car, stretching cramped muscles from the long drive, and heard the thin high calls of godwits nearby. I hurried down through the beachgrass and then stood, stunned at what I saw.

The tide was low and shorebirds were everywhere, feeding, calling, flying. Plovers and sandpipers and dowitchers and dunlins, companionably chatting with one another as their bills probed the wet sand. The big shorebirds were there too: godwits and curlews and whimbrels and willets, their very names a kind of ancient poetry. I had arrived at a place I thought I knew and found it reborn, alive in a way I’d never known.

Over the next few days I visited the beach many times, each time near to tears, grateful beyond words. The water flowed smoothly between the open sand shoals, eelgrass exposed at the lowest tides. At night I heard flocks of shorebirds calling out of the dark sky as they flew, and wheeling down to land just a few hundred yards from where I lay. Brant- beautiful black geese – roosted on the island. A place that I thought I knew had been transformed, had come alive like a beautiful animal, breathing in the dark, life flowing richly in its veins.

The rebirth I saw wasn’t a fluke. It was born of hard work and controversy and a great determination to bring Willapa back to health, a valiant attempt to undo the damage that had begun nearly a century ago, and that threatened not just my little spot, but the very fabric of the bay, its rich and extraordinary ecological integrity.

It took a long time for anyone to realize that there was a problem in Willapa Bay, but when the bay began disappearing under the dark green grass, there was finally a rush to stop it. Millions of dollars of federal and state money were thrown at the problem. The biologists – some of them people I know - tried everything – digging, mowing, plowing, biocontrols…nothing worked. Finally they went to pesticides. The two that worked are called, quaintly, Rodeo and Habitat, two “less toxic”, non-bio-accumulating herbicides approved for aquatic environments. When they combined the herbicides with mowing, the spartina was killed.

In 2007 and 2008 the people with their sprays and special mowing machines came to my corner of the bay, and I watched acres of dense grass open up again. Above high tide, the native plants began to come back. And by this year, 2009, the shorebirds had their habitat back. This part of the bay teemed with life in a way I had never known. By this year, through great effort, they had reduced the spartina in the bay to less than 1000 acres.

But what about the herbicides? Even “less toxic” herbicides are still toxic to some extent. Some people fought tooth and nail to keep the spraying away from their beloved bay. Can I blame them? We’ve made so many mistakes in the past, overlooked effects we didn’t want to know or see. It’s hard even for me to write this; I feel that I’m somehow betraying my own ideals of working in harmony with the natural world.

But on the other hand, we made this terrible mess here, inadvertently. A whole system was dying – I saw it with my own eyes - a system that millions of non-human beings depended upon. I know people with cancer who did everything they could to avoid chemotherapy, as I’m sure I would. But would you withhold chemotherapy from someone if it meant a good chance of recovery? Could we have said, “Ah, too bad about Willapa Bay and its beautiful shorebirds, its salmon, its ancient harmony. Let it go.”?

There’s something beautiful about what was done here – a great effort to save a place, beyond human needs. I think that’s what moves me. Maybe we’ll find out it was a mistake. But meanwhile, I listen to the shorebirds happily feeding, and I bow to those who worked so hard to bring them back, mistaken or not: the politicians, the biologists, the humble people who walked the mud with backpack sprayers, day after day in the rain and wind. Thank you, thank you.

Naming, Seeing, Knowing

Nobody sees a flower, really, it is so small. We haven't time - and to see takes time like to have a friend takes time. - Georgia O'Keefe

Three weeks ago I led a wildflower walk in the coastal hills just north of San Francisco, on a blue-skied, blue-oceaned, emerald-green-hilled California early April afternoon. A poet and Zen practitioner named Genine Lentine had asked me to lead the walk as part of a series she’d organized (Space Walks). I had said I’d be happy to lead a wildflower walk, but I wanted to do more than point out the flowers and give them names: I wanted to explore the relationships between botanical language, deeply seeing the natural world, and the flowers themselves, blooming so extravagantly in the spring wind. So that’s what we did together, a little group of people gathered on a weekday afternoon, admiring spring wildflowers and thinking together about naming, seeing, knowing.

I carried a shoulder bag full of heavy books out into the hills with us: my huge Jepson Manual of the Plants of California, my slightly smaller Flora of Marin County, a little paperback book on spring wildflowers of the San Francisco Bay area, and finally, a folded brochure of the wildflowers of the Marin Headlands. Botanizing and heavy books go together. As a child I never went anywhere without a book; as an adult I carry books into the wilderness, my keys to knowing what I see, my keys to the door of intimacy with the wild plants around me, my keys to conserving and protecting the rare plants hiding in the deserts and forests. It fits somehow with who I am, my twin passions of language and the natural world, married in the books I so willingly carry on my aching shoulders.

It was language that brought me to plants in the first place. Specifically, a little poem by Gary Snyder, read first when I was eighteen or so ("For The Children"):

To climb these coming crests, one word to you, to you and your children:

stay together learn the flowers go light

He’s speaking of knowing where we live, what we live amongst, as native people know the living world around them in deep and sensuous and essential detail. Living not on the land, but within it. I read that little stanza and knew that I wanted to “know the flowers”. I had no idea that knowing the flowers would lead to a lifelong commitment and love for the green, unspeaking world. I could never have imagined that my “knowing the flowers” would support me, literally, for much of my life.

Botanical jargon is a language of deep observation. The Inuit may have many words for different kinds of snow, but botanists have just as many elegant and exact words for the shape of a leaf or the kinds of tiny hairs on the stem of a flower. Leaves can be simple, compound, pinnate, palmate, bipinnate, tripinnate, lanceolate, oblanceolate, caudate, spathulate, acute, dentate, lobed, ovate, crenate, spinulate….these are just the words that come to mind at the moment – there are dozens more, each with a very specific meaning, a shape in the world. Hairs can be stellate, dendritic, hispid, sericeous, tomentose, glandular, postulate, puberulent…again, just a few of the words that come to mind, among many others.

This is a language of seeing, seeing made manifest on the page. When a plant is first described, formally, a description of the whole plant, from roots to stems and leaves and flowers and fruits, is written and published in Latin. Anywhere in the world, someone who knows this botanical language could make a painting from the Latin description which would strongly resemble the plant itself, enough that someone could probably match the illustration to the plant. This language, and the scientific names that go with it, is a language of seeing and knowing.

With this language, I can go anywhere in the world, look carefully at a plant, and begin to know it, begin the knowing of it. It’s just the first step, and not the only one, but it’s a great step forward into relationship.

It’s not uncommon for me to come across people who feel that classification and naming are actually a problem, a separation from the world rather than a meeting of it. What I say to them is, “When you first meet a person, you don’t know their name or anything about them. How close are you to them at that point? Then, over time, you learn not only their name but their family, the way they look when they’re sad or tired, where they went to college, the names of their children. Does this lead to great intimacy or less?”

It’s the same with plants. All that language is a bridge to intimacy, not a wall. I remember that before I began learning the names of trees, the forest was a “wall of green”. Then it became “beech, maple, oak”, and I began to see that some forests were mostly beech, others mostly oak, and that this was the land and soil itself speaking in trees. Some places say “beech”, some places say “oak”, but before I can hear that speaking, I have to know the difference between a beech and an oak.

I think there’s a notion that naming is new, a product of our scientific mania for classification, but I remember learning, years ago, that the people of the Yakama Nation in eastern Washington, whose culture is strongly tied to the root plants of the arid shrub-steppe, distinguish MORE species of biscuit-root (Lomatium) than we do, not less. It matters more – they are deeply intimate with biscuit-root, and have been for thousands of years. Names matter.

At one point on our wildflower walk, on a spectacular bluff overlooking the Pacific, I invited everyone to sit down next to a plant and look at it closely for five minutes. When we gathered again, everyone’s eyes were sparkling. Each person described something wondrous: one woman had looked closely at a poppy, and had seen the individual pollen grains dusting the base of the petals, had seen the light through the orange petals as like the light of a flickering fire; another person had looked at the long fruit of stork’s-bill, and had noticed that as it dried it curled into a fantastic parasol. Each person was amazed at the beauty and intricacy of what they had seen.

This is what I do every day that I’m out in the field, using the language that I have painstakingly learned over the decades to look closely at plants - how they grow, their leaves, their flowers, their fruits,. And from that knowledge comes the ability to name – and protect – some of the rarest plants in North America.

And joy. The joy that each person felt on the bluff that day is a joy I still feel after all these years, a joy that arises naturally in, as Georgia O’Keefe said, “seeing a flower”. I don't know what it is exactly, but try looking closely at a flower, even a humble weed in your backyard, and see what happens.

I Am Not There, I Do Not Sleep

I offer this old poem in honor of a beautiful lady, Hisako Kimura, who was born June 23rd, 1918, and who died gracefully at home this last Sunday evening, April 5, 2009. Everyone who met her loved her. Now her generous spirit has gone back into the world as a blessing.

Do not stand at my grave and weep,

I am not there, I do not sleep.

I am in a thousand winds that blow,

I am the softly falling snow.

I am the gentle showers of rain,

I am the fields of ripening grain.

I am in the morning hush,

I am in the graceful rush

Of beautiful birds in circling flight,

I am the starshine of the night.

I am in the flowers that bloom,

I am in a quiet room.

I am in the birds that sing,

I am in each lovely thing.

Do not stand at my grave and cry,

I am not there. I do not die.

Mary Elizabeth Fry

Desert Prayer

“It seems to me that the strangeness and wonder of existence are emphasized here by the comparative sparsity of the flora and fauna: life not crowded upon life as in other places but scattered abroad in spareness and simplicity, with a generous gift of space for each herb and bush and tree, each stem of grass, so that the living organism stands out bold and brave and vivid against the lifeless sand and barren rock. The extreme clarity of the desert light is equaled by the extreme individuation of desert life-forms. Love flowers best in openness and freedom.”

Edward Abby, Desert Solitaire


I’m working in the California desert this spring. Every day I walk across the vast landscape, through sandy washes, over rocky low hills, amongst the creosote bush and wildflowers.

The sun is bright, the wind cold, and all day long I hear the crunching of the small stones beneath my boots. Lizards scurry under shrubs when they hear me, antelope ground squirrels flick their tails, and if I’m very lucky I might see a desert tortoise, infinitely dignified and every-so-slightly comical, blinking its ancient eyes. Some days there's a river of painted lady butterflies, streaming past me from the south, alighting now and again on the tiny bright desert flowers for a sip of nectar before flying on.

I drove through the desert last December in a blinding rain, and the glorious wildflowers all around me are the fruit of those winter storms. Sometimes I walk through a sea of golden desert dandelion, splashed with the blue and purple of phacelia. The beavertail cactus is just coming into bloom, a brilliant unlikely fuchsia. Tiny white “desert stars” dot the gravels, and evening primroses of every shape and color are splashed across the landscape. It’s a paradise for these few weeks of spring.

I’m working with a team of botanists, looking for rare plants on a huge swathe of public land. We’re here because this land may end up bulldozed to make way for one of many, many solar energy projects slated for the southwestern deserts. Everything we see and document may be gone in a few years.

The work is glorious, we all agree. We work long hours but we have the joy of seeing the desert in bloom and of working in a place that feels like wilderness, miles from the nearest paved road. Most of us are tremendously concerned about global warming and climate change, and cheered by the new emphasis on alternative energy. But to see this beautiful landscape and imagine it utterly changed is painful. We walk and wonder…is it worth it? Is this the only way?

Millions of acres of public land in the southwestern deserts, much in pristine condition, are currently being identified by energy companies as potential sites for solar and wind power projects, in a kind of 21^st century gold rush. I was told that if all these permits were actually granted, more public land would be destroyed than in all the mining since the passage of the mining act in the 1800’s.

Wind power leaves some natural habitat beneath the turbines, but most solar projects need to completely flatten the landscape to provide a stable surface for mirrors or solar panels. Nothing is left except the stones and gravel. And these projects can cover many square miles of land, enough solar power to be equivalent to a nuclear power plant.

Is this good? Is this bad? Some environmentalists – and the current administration in Washington - argue that these few million acres of our deserts are expendable, given the scope and scale of global warming, looming over us like a bad dream. They may be right. But how do you say that to these tortoises, to the whiptail lizards, to the painted ladies streaming across the land? What about the value of wilderness, of great open spaces of light and heat and emptiness?

Deserts have always gotten the short end of the stick. They’ve been the places we put our prisons, our bombing ranges, our landfills, our toxic waste dumps. They’re too dry for cattle, too stony to farm, too far from cities for suburbs. Most of the desert is public land, but there’s no money for the government to make on creosote bush and sunlight. Until now. And it’s a great deal for the energy companies, perhaps even what makes these huge projects feasible: rather than spend millions for private land, they can lease – and utterly alter – public land for a fraction of the cost.

“Public land” means “our land”. But no one seems to be considering yet where these projects will do the least harm, or how to plan for them on a regional scale. We do our surveys, but it’s not clear that they will have the slightest effect on the final decision. The government wants clean energy, NOW, and the desert is a long way from Washington.

So far not one major national environmental group has been willing to raise concerns about the effect of “clean energy” on desert lands. Only the tiny California Native Plant Society has stepped forward: Deserts Need Care in Rush to Clean Energy.

Last week, Senator Feinstein became the first senator to take a stand and ask for greater protection for desert lands that were specifically purchased by the public for wildlife conservation and are now being considered for solar projects: Feinstein Seeks Block Power from Public Land. I wonder whether any other legislators will be willing to join her, and whether the Department of Interior will be willing to listen.

Meanwhile, I walk through the desert, bending down to identify the small flowers, feeling the clean wind in my face, loving this place while it’s still here, knowing it may one day go to feed our great hunger for energy, like so many other places – our coal mines, our uranium mines, our oil fields, our pipelines…Even though part of my spiritual practice is to know that "all things that have a beginning have an end", still I can hope that this place, and others like it, will go on as they have for thousands of years, free of our insatiability.

Every day that I walk here I love it more, and wish for others to see it and love it as I do. Surely there’s a way to move toward more solar and wind power with less harm. Surely people can and will wake up and ask our government to care for the land that belongs to all of us, and to the plants and animals that live here, no matter how barren and empty it may seem at first glance.

That’s my prayer.

True Nature

"The capacity of the mind is so great, it’s like space…In this world of ours, space has room for the sun and the moon and the stars, the earth and its mountains and rivers, every plant and tree, bad people and good people, bad teachings and good teachings, heavens and hells. All this exists in space. The emptiness of our nature is also like this….Our nature contains the ten thousand dharmas (things). That’s how great it is. "

The Platform Sutra of the Sixth Ancestor, trans: Red Pine



Right now I’m sitting in a motel room in Barstow, California, deep in the Mohave desert. I just made myself a cup of tea, and as I sip it I’m remembering Spirit Rock, and the many times during my month of silence this February that I sat on the bench in front of the dining hall with a cup of tea warming my hands, looking over the hills to the sky beyond. How much I appreciated each sip, how much I appreciated the sky and clouds as they changed, the echoes with other retreats when I had sat on that same bench, the breeze against my face.

In some ways, that’s all that happened for that month of silence. I sipped cups of tea, I sat in my room with my breath, I walked the beautiful open hills, I listened to birds. Sometimes I walked in rain, sometimes in sunlight. Sometimes my mind was clear and light and easy, sometimes cloudy. I could just leave it at that, and it would be accurate. At the end of a retreat, the teachers advise that if someone asks you about your retreat, just smile and say, “It was great.” That’s all people want to know anyway. But I want to say more, at the risk of saying less, because the gifts that come from retreat feel beyond the personal. They’re glimpses into what it means to be human, what we really are, what our minds can know and hold, what is possible.

The quote above is from a teaching given in 8th century China by a great Zen teacher, Hui-Neng. The teaching was so inspiring and encouraging and powerful that it has been read and memorized and quoted for the last twelve hundred years or so, in China, Vietnam, Korea, Japan, and now the West. It sounds lofty and abstract, but I think he’s just talking about something as close as this mind, right now. Space is nothing special, but it can hold everything. The human mind seems confused, but it can hold everything too: heavens and hells, happiness and sadness, birdsong and the sky and the gritty feel of sand in the palm. That’s what I saw, in this month of silence – not “saw” in the sense of “intellectually understood”, but “saw” in the sense of “directly experienced”. And it came through an unlikely teacher: pain.

Those who know me know that I’ve wrestled with a chronic illness for a long time. One of the symptoms, when the illness is active, is severe body pain, like the pain of a high fever. I was in pain when the retreat started, and for about half the time I was there. Strong pain while in silence can be quite overwhelming, because there’s no distraction, no buffer between the mind and the pain – no book to read, no movie to watch, no telephone to pick up to call a friend. I’ve left retreats because the pain was too strong and my misery was too great. But developing a relationship with the illness and with pain is important, because it’s part of my life, not anything I can push away or pretend isn’t there, and I wanted to see if something other than misery was possible.

In the first few days, I wondered whether I would have to leave. I wasn’t sure I could be in silence and hurt that much. My mind felt like a white-water river, tumultuous and frightened. But as the days passed and my mind settled, I could feel myself getting calmer and wider and happier, like that same river when it comes out of the mountains and on to the plains.

I remembered a teaching by Darlene Cohen, the author of Turning Suffering Inside Out. Darlene has had rheumatoid arthritis for thirty years, and is also a Zen teacher. One of her teachings is, “Find what doesn’t hurt, what is pleasant. That’s there too.” When we’re in pain we tend to lock on to the pain, to close down around it, but at the same time that there’s pain, there’s also sweetness – the warmth of a cup of tea, the softness of fabric against the skin – and if we’re not careful we’ll miss the sweetness altogether, lost in our bad dream. When we open up a little, there’s room for pain and pleasure, sweetness and suffering, and that changes our relationship to both.

At the same time, one of the teachers at the retreat gave a talk on a traditional Buddhist teaching about how we relate to sense experiences. Basically, every time we have a sense experience – seeing, smelling, tasting, touching, hearing, thinking – right away there’s one of three possible visceral responses to it: we like it, we don’t like it, or we’re not sure whether we like it or don’t like it. That response is almost hard-wired, although we can grow to like things we once disliked, and grow to dislike things we once liked.

What usually happens is that we miss the moment of that visceral response, and go immediately to trying to get more of it (ice cream, for instance), or less of it (physical pain, for instance). This activity actually takes up a lot of our waking energy. Traditionally it’s taught that if you can just see that initial response in a neutral way (“Oh, this is unpleasant”), without going into the cascade of “Oh, make this go away”, there’s the possibility of freedom, right in that moment.

So I applied both those teachings to the physical pain I was experiencing: I opened up my senses to the things that were happening that weren’t painful, and I just noticed when something was pleasant or unpleasant. And, miracle of miracles, I found freedom, right in the midst of the pain. I found that I could know that pain was happening without contracting around it and desperately wanting it to go away, and that the experience of not contracting was actually joyful. I could be in pain, notice the light through the leaves of the tree, feel happiness in my heart, and sip a cup of tea. Room for everything, just as Hui-Neng said. The mind vast like the sky. What a discovery.

And the strange thing was that the pain itself responded, and instead of staying steady day in and day out, it would come and go, as if it was also more free, now that I wasn’t clenched around it. And whatever it was doing, I was OK. More than OK. Really happy.

I had a dream, while I was there, that I was in a high wind, and the wind was buffeting me and pelting me with stones and silt, but my mind was peaceful and steady, even in the middle of the chaos and roar of the wind. To know that it’s possible to be peaceful in the high winds of life, and not just when things are easy ….that’s freedom.

And it’s not just possible for people who spend months in meditation. People who spend months in meditation are like astronauts going to the moon or oceanographers diving deep in the ocean – they do it for the rest of us. We may never do those things, but what they learn about the nature of the universe opens us up to new possibilities. I learned a little about my own nature, which is the same as yours – and now I offer it to you.



“In your dark house of afflictions
keep the sun of wisdom shining”

The Platform Sutra

Pause

I'll be disappearing from the blogosphere for the next month; on February 1st I'll enter a thirty day silent retreat at Spirit Rock Meditation Center. I thought, as my last blog for a while, that I might share some writing on the practice of silence. These are excerpts from an essay in a book manuscript that I'm hoping will find a publisher in the next year: Not Dwelling Anywhere: Essays From a Time of Pilgrimage.

"We’ve always been around – the people who go apart to some high hill or cave, the people who go on walk-about alone, the people who choose to marry Christ and listen for his whisper. Maybe others would do this if they could, but not all lives have room for such a luxury. And maybe, for some, there’s fear in the thought of silence.

I remember the first time I heard of the possibility of a silent retreat. It was the winter of 1983, I was eighteen, and I was in Washington D.C, living and working with a radical homeless advocacy group. My mother had an old friend in D.C., Tilford Dudley, a socialist lawyer who had come from Illinois during the Roosevelt. His wife, Martha, befriended me. She was a poet and birdwatcher, and I was living in the heart of poverty and concrete, faced with suffering on a scale I’d never seen before. She would scoop me up and take me on long walks along the creeks and forests outside the city, taking care of me in her quiet way. One day we were walking in the hills, our feet shuffling through dry leaves, and she began to tell me about another young friend of hers who had just returned from ten days of silence. We were both baffled by what that might be like, both intrigued. I can remember that we were walking beneath a bridge. I can remember something in me lighting up like a new star.

Six years later I finally made my way to my first retreat. It was a women’s vipassana meditation retreat, held in a Catholic convent outside Santa Rosa, California. It was late March, and the grassy hills were green as the finest brocade and covered in wildflowers. I remember two things from that retreat: realizing with relief that I actually didn’t have to believe all the ridiculous, self-centered thoughts in my mind, and moments of walking in the hills when pure joy flooded into me, so intense that I wondered whether my heart could bear it. The salmon had found its home stream.

Living in silence is not what it looks like from the outside. I think from the outside it seems like a form of asceticism, a relinquishment of community and relationship for some higher good, a voluntary descent into darkness. It doesn’t look like much fun: people in silence tend to look serious, if not downright dour. The inside of a person on retreat is a whole different story. Suzuki Roshi said, “I just try to teach my students how to hear the birds sing..” When I shut my mouth, I can start to hear, and it turns out that what I can hear is beautiful. Ditto with what I can see, what I can taste, what I can smell, what I can touch. Suzuki Roshi could have just as easily said that he tried to teach his students to look at a tree, to eat an orange, to meet another human being.

Ordinary life is, I think, like being wrapped in layers and layers of cotton wool, protected and defended from our direct experience. Silence unwraps some of those layers. I remember coming out of a retreat and reading a newspaper in the airport. There had been a disaster, as there are always disasters, but this one went right to my heart. I sat on the plastic chair with the newspaper in my hands and I wept. And I was glad to be weeping: it seemed like the sanest, most deeply human response to such news.

I never know what will happen on a retreat. I’ve learned over the years not to assume anything, and certainly not to plan for anything. With stunning accuracy, what needs to be healed appears, spontaneously and often in direct opposition to what I would like to have happen.

In the second year of pilgrimage, I spent a month in silence. Within the first day, a huge pain and sorrow appeared in the center of my heart. I had no idea why it was there, or what had triggered it. I’d spent my previous long retreat in a state of happiness and bliss, far beyond what I had ever known, and I half-expected to continue that bliss. Something had other ideas. For thirty long days I learned about courage. I sat with the pain, opening wider and wider to it like a woman in labor, learning to hold it with compassion, learning not to run away. When the retreat ended, so did the pain, as mysteriously as it appeared. What I do know is that those thirty days changed my relationship to great emotional difficulty, my own and that of others.

I think it can seem like a retreat is a retreat from the world, a retreat into solipsistic naval-gazing Paradoxically, to spend time with others in silence is intensely intimate. I spent a winter at Tassajara Zen Mountain Monastery, more than ten years ago. Every morning we would wake well before dawn and walk down to the meditation hall beneath the bare-limbed trees in the cold mountain air, the way lit by kerosene lanterns. We all wore black Zen robes, so in some ways we looked alike, but by the end of the first month I could recognize every person in the dark by the way they walked, the tilt of a head, the gesture of a hand. Even from the back I knew my fellow-travelers. There were no locks or keys at Tassajara: it was inconceivable that we would steal from one another or hurt one another after sitting hour after hour together in the hall, the roar of the creek filling all our ears, the same gruel filling all our bellies. I learned to trust at Tassajara – to trust the inherent goodness and kindness that arises when those layers of cotton wool begin to come apart.

Tomorrow I’ll enter that silence again, as I have so many times before. I’ll sit with my own mind and heart, not knowing what will happen, trusting the silence. I do know that a few days into the retreat my heart will begin to open on its rusty hinges, and I’ll be filled with gratitude – for the courage of the people who sit around me, for the depth of this tradition, for the beauty of the world. Whatever else happens in a retreat, gratitude is always there, like the delicate scent of a single stick of incense, as natural as the blue of the sky."