great (or anyway modest) failure
Friday 4 May 2007 | 2 cookies in the jar
A few days ago, I heard from the fourth of my female friends, all in my Zen “peer group,” that she’s requested and been approved for ordination. And it’s funny—in the wedding-like excitement of an upcoming ordination, not one of the four, all normally excruciatingly sensitive women, has offered what the Group Therapist calls level-three validation—reading the unexpressed, which might sound something like: “This must be kind of hard for you to hear, since you once had an aspiration for the priesthood yourself and then felt you had to leave Zen training.” Or: “It must hurt, sometimes, that all of us will be priests and you won’t.” Or: “If I were you, I’d feel sad to think that my friends are still Zen practitioners and in a lineage and part of a tradition when I’m not anymore.” Or: “Maybe you’re afraid the rest of us don’t regard your spiritual path as legitimate now that you’re not a Zen student.” Or: “It must be painful sometimes to hear all about oryoki and ango and robe-sewing. Do you miss the Zen community?” —Just one, short, quiet, perceptive comment or question. That’s what my heart craves. Just some shred of acknowledgement that I’m still doing some kind of legitimate spiritual work and am not lost to the world; just the insight that maybe it’s not so easy to hear all about the priesthood and how noble and how upright and and and and and.
For whatever reason I crave that recognition, suddenly; suddenly I ache and brood over my failed Zen career—a word I use advisedly: my careering careening bumpy jerky course through four practice periods, myself so often so mentally interesting and so temperamentally and constitutionally ill-suited for Zen training that it was miraculous I persevered at all.
When I hear my friends’ wonderful news and exciting developments (they want me to teach! they want me to be dharma heir! look at my beautiful new robes!) somehow my mouth manages to say the right things; to smile, to pour the tea, to offer congratulations and expressions of sympathetic joy; but my heart is small and burning and seems to contain no mudita whatsoever. Maybe my I-hate-Zen act has been so convincing that it doesn’t occur to anyone that it might be painful for me and possibly difficult to celebrate alongside them? But how could anyone who really knows me fall for that?
The worst part by far is how infuriated and disgusted with myself I am for feeling any needs. In my seething hurt, I can’t believe I’m the same hypocritical person who wrote all the good sweet strong vital encouraging bracing Buddhist stuff of the Dying Book—like I know anything about being truthful, compassionate or equanimous. I want to throw things, scream, rip the heads off all their Barbies. PMSing, I felt black as the insides of a goat and twisted with unqualified rage, envy, loss. Sick of carrying the shadow, the sin, the fear and greed, the relative, the earthly, the discursive, the ignorant, the big stupid, the great failure for everyone else’s glorious yogic ascendancy.
And the old phrase came to me from The Color Purple, as a devastated Celie wrote on the back of an envelope to Shug, unable to speak for emotion: Spare me. I felt like carving it into the door of my house. Please! Everyone! Just…fucking…SPARE…ME.
All that gone now, drained out with the bleeding and the not-sleeping, the energy of anger siphoned off and replaced with a tired accepting calm. Of course, seeking validation outside oneself is ultimately a recipe for insanity; of course, when I do so it invariably means I haven’t been able to validate myself. No consolation, as the Zen phrase says. And also, as both group therapists said unhesitatingly, I had every right to want it, need it, and expect it. The DBT counter-myth reads: “Just because I didn’t get what I asked for does not mean I shouldn’t have requested it in the first place.”
It’s not like I want to return to Zen training, not for a long time, anyway—I burned through my own priestly aspirations over the course of those practice periods, despite some pretty serious enticements flung in my pathway. I decided that when Dogen Zenji said, There is not one way or two ways but ten thousand ways, he meant there were more paths up the mountain than either priest or lay. Unfortunately, pain and envy seldom work that way, all rational-like. Instead of being cool and peaceful, they’re fiery, the kind of unbridled body-feelings that start in my liver and cause me to snap in Mandarin’s comments area, “I’d rather be human than a Buddha.”
I’ve only been back to the temple twice since that disastrous Rohatsu, the one where Anzan stayed up half the night with me, the one where I skulked around with a knife in my robe sleeve. The first time was Persephone’s ordination; the second, a few weeks ago, to hear Natalie Goldberg’s dharma talk (in Herself’s absence). She seemed plainer than she used to be; less varnished and fancy, more her Brooklyn Jewish self. My favorite part of the talk was that at the end, she read poems by Jack Gilbert and Tess Gallagher.
Natalie wrote a book, a song to Katagiri-roshi and American Zen practice, Long Quiet Highway; I’ve always thought it was her best book, and can’t read it without weeping. I asked her to sign it for me, a few years ago, and she did, drawing her special Katagiri heart on the title page. “This is a first edition,” she said, glancing at the overleaf; “You should take good care of this.” We looked at each other sharply. “I do.”
Once I went to Roshi when I lived in Minnesota and told him, “When I’m at Zen Center, I feel like a writer. When I’m with writers, I feel like a Zen student.”
“Someday you will have to choose. You’re not ready yet, but someday you will be. Writing and Zen are parallel paths, but not the same.”
We never spoke about it again. I continued to write; I continued to sit.
Three months after I finished [Writing Down the] Bones, I went camping alone one weekend in August by the Chama River. I wondered why I insisted on going alone, since I’d just met a man I really liked in Santa Fe. The whole weekend I anticipated some vision or epiphany I was supposed to have. I woke Sunday morning to the loud gallop of deer hooves inches from my head. I’d slept out in a sleeping bag on the ground, no tent, and the deer were heading for the river. There must have been fourteen of them. I’d never seen them from that angle before: black hooves, beige bodies. Mostly I was panicked. By the time I sat up, I saw the last of them crashing through the willows at the Chama’s edge.
I thought, this must be it, the epiphany: I was almost trampled to death. I can leave now. I made a breakfast of brown rice and roasted nuts over a fire and then packed up. I had to drive eleven miles on winding, rutted dirt roads before I hit the blacktop. Pink cliffs shot up from the dry desert to my left and the Chama River and its valley spread out to my right.
I’d gone about three miles when suddenly I burst out crying. At the same instant, my blue Rabbit, which had never done this before, overheated, and steam shot up with great force from the hood of the car. I cried; it steamed. I repeated over and over: “I chose being a writer. I chose being a writer,” and sobbed and sobbed. Before that moment I had no idea that that question had been working in me so deeply. Though I had written a book and talked about writing practice, I still never consciously considered myself a writer rather than a Zen student.
That talk with Roshi had occurred maybe six years earlier. I had forgotten it, but being seen and unseen and our wild minds continue to work while we are busy apparently only shaking salt on our french fries. I felt a great relief after that morning by the Chama. I drove back to Santa Fe, stopping for a wonderful meal all by myself in Tesuque at El Nido’s [next door to the Unnarrator’s tiny old casita].
Why did I have to choose? I don’t know if we really do have to choose. Eventually, I think, somthing chooses us and we shut up, surrender and go with it. And the difference between Zen and writing? In writing you bring everything you know into writing. In Zen you bring everything you know into nothing, into the present moment where you can’t hold on to anything.
That night I asked Natalie to sign her book for me, she had been sitting cross-legged in her teaching robes before a temple full of ardent dharma listeners, as our resident Nepali lama used to call them. She was wearing Katagiri’s rakusu and talking about her koan training. I raised my hand to ask a question: Now that you’re also a Zen teacher, do you still feel you chose writing? She didn’t understand the question and wouldn’t answer it. When I brought my book to her, I asked it again. This time she saw me clearly and understood the question. But she still didn’t answer it.
In my sleeplessness I lie in bed and think about Kyojo, Seisen, Anzan, Togen—my old friends, once my teachers. Kyojo’s narrow feet beneath her black robes, swift and slender; our frost breath in the morning, me her jisha, holding the door, sliding her shoes toward her; or her as jisha, clearing her throat urgently yet unobtrusively, tugging at Herself’s robe sleeve to get her to offer the incense, dangerously glowing and dropping ashes everywhere, Herself oblivious, eyes closed, deep into the chant. Togen coming up behind me and bowing, my whole body stiffening, waiting for the correction, only to hear his hoarse British whisper: Mushin! Try to smile. You look bloody miserable. Swinging with Anzan on the swingset in the park in the moonlight, us in full Zen party dress, and him shaking his head and saying to me, If you can’t do it for yourself, do it for me. Love yourself for me. Or dear hippie Seisen keeping me in dokusan for an hour, telling horror stories of zendo disasters (tripping on the temple entrance, the thousand-year-old hako ashes flying across the floor) until we both laughed so hard Herself came to tell us to be quieter; Seisen suggesting I be less perfect, mess up more. Even Kyojo advising: Don’t give a hundred percent. Try to give maybe eighty. I’d say fifty or thirty, but you probably can’t pull that off. The whole of the spiritual life, the Buddha once told Ananda, is spiritual friends.
What does it mean, that this was my life and now is not. I grieve, but for what I am not sure. My teachers and friends, the robes hanging ironed and lifeless in my closet, the empty oryoki bowls? And yet during practice period, I continually mourned writing. Sleepless, I sketch my sacreligious self-portrait as the Virgin Mary, in Guad we trust, Guadalupe as guera; color her hair brown with blonde streaks, her robe dark blue with stars. And I bead rosaries, chain together aquamarines and amethysts with gold wire. Run the cool stones through my fingers, trying to think what to pray, what people say to God, how devotion works, my mind an almost perfect blank.
2 cookies in the jar
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No. Not failure. Intellectual self-defense. Certainly it is painful, but you are still in the fight. Which is where you are most needed.
And how did Toni Morrison suddenly morph into Simone Weil?