Katagiri Roshi had been dead for a long time and still I missed him. And I did not know how to complete the relationship that had begun more than twenty years earlier. I was frozen in the configuration we had when he died—he was always the teacher and I would ever be the student.
More than a decade had passed. I wanted to move on, and in order to do that it seemed I had to move back to that northern state of long winter shadows, a place I left fifteen years earlier to plant my roots in Taos, New Mexico. I had to go back to that cold place in order to unfreeze. So in 2000 I moved back, this time to St. Paul, Minnesota, for a year and a half to practice Zen with one of Katagiri Roshi’s dharma heirs.
A few months before the move, a muscle in my groin would not let me cross my legs in the traditional zazen position. I forced it and injured it. This did not please me. I’d been sitting cross-legged for twenty-five years, so that my reflex even at a fancy dinner party was to have my legs intertwined on the oak upholstered chair under the pink linen tablecloth.
Structure in the zendo had been everything: straight back, butt on black round cushion, eyes unfocused, cast down at a forty-degree angle. Bells rung on time. Clip, clip, clip. Everything had order. In a chaotic world, it was comforting. Sitting in a chair in the zendo with feet flat on the floor seemed silly. If I was going to sit in a chair, I might as well have a cup of tea, a croissant—hell, why not be in a café or on a bench under a tree?
But I did go every single day—like a good Zen student—except in the wrong direction, not to the Zen center in downtown St. Paul but to Bread and Chocolate, a café on Grand Avenue. I walked there slowly, mindfully, and it was grand. I didn’t bring a notebook. I just brought myself and I had strict regulations: I could buy only one chocolate chip cookie. And I ate that one attentively, respectfully, bite after bite at a table next to big windows. I felt the butter of it on my fingers, the chips still warm and melted. In the past, seven good bites would have finished it off. But eating was practice now, the café a living zendo. Small bites. Several chews. Be honest—was this mindfulness or a lingering? This cookie would not last. Crisp and soft, brown and buttery. How I clung. The nearer it got to disappearing, the more appreciative I was.
“Life is a cookie,” Alan Arkin declared in America’s Sweethearts. I fell over the popcorn in my lap with laughter. One of the deep, wise lines in American movies. No one else in the theater was as elated. No one else had eaten the same cookie for months running. I gleefully quoted Arkin, the guru, for weeks after. I could tell by people’s faces: This is the result of all of her sitting?
But nothing lasts forever. My tongue finally grew tired of the taste day after day. Was this straw in my mouth, this once-great cookie? In the last weeks I asked only for a large hot water with lemon and wanted to pay the price for tea, but they wouldn’t let me. I had become a familiar figure. Instead I left tips in a paper cup—and I sat. Not for a half hour or until the cookie was done. I sat for two, often three hours. Just sat there, nothing fancy, among an occasional man chopping away at a laptop; a mother, her son, and his young friends, heads bent over brownies, eating after-school snacks; an elderly couple breathing long over steaming cups; a tall, retired businessman reading the Pioneer Press. I sat through the whole Bush/ Gore campaign and then the very long election; through the death of a young boy murdered on his bike by the Mississippi and the eventual capture of the three young men who did it for no reason but to come in from the suburbs for some kicks; through the sad agony of the boy’s parents, who owned a pizza parlor nearby.
St. Paul was a small city with a big heart. If I was still enough, I could feel it all—the empty lots, the Mississippi driving itself under bridges, the Schmidt brewery emitting a smell that I thought meant the town was toasting a lot of bread but found out later was the focal point of an irate neighborhood protest.
In early fall when the weather was warm, I sat on the wood and wrought-iron bench in front of the café under a black locust. I even sat out there in slow drizzles and fog, when the streets were slick and deserted. After fifteen years in New Mexico, the gray and mist were a great balm.
Sometimes, if I was across the river in Minneapolis, I sat at Dunn Brothers Coffee on Hennepin or the one in Linden Hills. Hadn’t this always been my writing life? To fill spiral notebooks, write whole manuscripts in local luncheonettes and restaurants? But now here was my Zen life too, happening in a café at the same square tables, only without a notebook. Hadn’t I already declared that Zen and writing were one? In and out I’d breathe. My belly would fill, my belly would contract. I lifted the hot paper cup to my lips, my eyes unfocused.
My world of meditation was getting large. By leaving the old structure, I was loosening my tight grip on my old Zen teacher. I was bringing my zazen out into the street. But who wants to let go of something they love?
In a city of large oaks, magnificent elms and maples, I managed to return to practice Zen at a zendo surrounded by concrete, where one spindly young line of a tree gallantly fought by a metal gate to survive. I’d renamed the practice center “The Lone Tree Zendo.” And, yes, I did actually go there early mornings and Saturdays and Sundays, for weekend and week-long retreats.
I was working on koans. I had to present my understanding to the residing teacher, and it never came from logic or the thinking brain. I had to step out of my normal existence and come face-to-face with a buffalo passing through a window, a dead snake or an oak tree in the courtyard. The northern cold penetrated me as deeply as these koans. No fly, no bare finger could survive—even sound cracked. I was gouged by impermanence.
By the last days of February, even the most fastidious homeowners—and believe me, St. Paul was full of them—had given up shoveling their walks. In early March I looked out my apartment window to the corner of Dale and Lincoln, near posh Crocus Hill, and watched the man across the street blaze out of his old many-floored, pale-blue clapboard house, jacket flying open and unzipped, with a long ax in his hand. Bellowing, he hacked away at the ice built up by the curb. Behind him stood a massive crabapple, its branches frozen and curled in a death cry.
I doubted that my scheduled mid-April, day-long public walking and writing retreat would take place. Where would we walk? In circles around the hallway? My plan had been to meet at the zendo, write for two rounds, then venture out on a slow stroll, feeling the clear placement of heel, the roll of toes, the lifting of foot, the bend of knee, the lowering of hip. We’d make our way through the dank, dark streets of industrial St. Paul, across railroad tracks and under a bridge, to be surprised by a long spiral stone tunnel opening into Swede Hollow along a winding creek and yellow grass, then climb up to an old-fashioned, pressed-tin, high-ceilinged café with good soup and delicious desserts, where we could write again at small tables. I would not tell the students where we were going. I would just lead them out the zendo door, past the Black Dog Café and the smokers hunched on the outside stoop, near the square for the Lowertown farmers’ market.
When the first miserable weekend in April came, I looked at the roster of twenty-four faithful souls who had registered for the writing retreat. Two women from Lincoln, Nebraska, were flying in. A woman from Milwaukee—a six-hour drive away—was leaving at 3:30 A.M. to make the 9:30 beginning. Such determination. Only in the Midwest, I thought. I noted with delight that Tall Suzy and her friend from Fargo were coming. She’d studied with me back in New Mexico. Mike, the Vietnam vet from Austin, Minnesota, was driving up too. I nervously fingered the page with the list of names.
The workshop date was the Saturday before Easter. The day came and, miraculously, the temperature was in the low sixties. I hustled over early to Bread and Chocolate to grab a cookie and touch the recent center of my universe. I arrived a few minutes later for class. Everyone was there and silently meditating in a circle. I swirled into my place.
“We are going out for most of the day. You’ll have to trust me. Remember: no good or bad. Just one step after another. We’ll see different things. This is a walk of faith.”
After brief writing sessions we bounded outside, eager to be in the weak yet warming sun. But the deserted weekend desolation of industrial St. Paul sobered us. One step after another. This was a silent walk, so no one could complain—not that a midwesterner would do such a thing. But I, an old New Yorker, had to shut up too. I couldn’t encourage, explain, apologize. We just walked bare-faced on this one early-April day, slow enough to feel this life.
Over the still-frozen ground to the tracks, crushing thin pools of ice with our boots. A left foot lifted and placed, then a right. The tunnel was ahead. Through the yellow limestone spiral, built in 1856, a miracle of construction that seemed to turn your mind. Eventually we all made it through to the other side, to sudden country, the hollow, and the sweetness of open land. Long pale grasses, just straightening up after the melting weight of snow, and thin, unleafed trees gathered along the lively winding stream.
We had walked an hour and a half at the pace of a spider. I’d forgotten what this kind of walking does to you. You enter the raw edge of your mind; the naked line between you and your surroundings drops away. Whoever you are or think you are cracks off. We were soul bare together in the hollow, the place poor Swedish immigrants inhabited a hundred years ago in cardboard shacks.
Some people went down to the stream, put their hands in the cold water. I sat on a stone with my face in the sun. Then we continued on.
We didn’t get to the café until almost two o’clock. The place was empty. We filled the tables and burst into writing. I remember looking up for a moment into the stunned faces of two people behind the counter. Where did all of these people suddenly come from? And none of them are talking?
I’d forgotten how strenuous it was to walk so slow for so long. I was tired.
When it was time to leave, I had planned to follow the same route back. The students shook their heads and took the lead, almost at a trot. A shortcut across a bypass over noisy Interstate 94 to the zendo. We arrived breathless in twenty minutes.
Back in the circle, I inquired, “How was it?”
I looked at them. My face fell. I’d been naive. They had run back here for safety. That walk had rubbed them raw. One woman began: “When we reached the tunnel, I was terrified to go through. It felt like the birth canal.”
Another: “I didn’t know where it would lead. I looked at all of us walking like zombies and began to cry. I thought of the Jews going to the chambers.”
I remembered two kids in the hollow stopping their pedaling and straddling their bikes, mouths agape, staring at us. “What happened to you?” they asked.
I checked in with my own body right then. I felt the way I do after a five- or seven-day retreat, kind of shattered, new, and tremulous. They were feeling the same.
One woman said, “I physically felt spring entering the hollow. It was right there when I slowed up enough to feel it. I opened my hand and spring filled it. I swear I also saw winter leaving. Not a metaphor. The real thing.”
They were describing experiences I’d had in the zendo after long hours of sitting. But I’d thought only within the confines of those walls, and with that cross-legged position I loved, could certain kinds of openings occur.
I wanted to cling to the old structure I had learned with my beloved teacher, the timeworn way handed down from temples and monasteries in Japan that he painstakingly brought to us in America. Yes, I loved everything he taught me, but didn’t the Buddha walk around a lot?
What I saw now, with these students as witnesses, was that it was I who had confined my mind, grasped a practice I learned in my thirties, feeling that nothing else was authentic.
I told the world that writing was a true way, but even I didn’t truly believe it. I only wanted to be with my old teacher again when I came back to Minnesota a year ago. I’d returned to St. Paul, it turns out, not to let go but to find him. Like a child, I never really believed he’d died.
Zen was suddenly everywhere—in the notebook, on the corner, in the moon and lamppost. What was Zen anyway? There was you and me, living and dying, eating cake. There was the sky, there were mountains, rivers, prairies, horses, mosquitoes, justice, injustice, integrity, cucumbers. The structure was bigger than any structure I could conceive. I had fallen off the zafu, that old round cushion, into the vast unknown.
I looked at these students in a circle. This day we were here and we experienced that we were here.
I could feel Roshi’s presence. I thought he had died. No one had died. And in a blink of an eye none of us were here. Spring would move to summer, and if we were very lucky, no one would blow up the world. Maybe there were other summers and other winters out there in other universes.
If we can sit in a café breathing, we can breathe through hearing our father’s last breath, the slow crack of pain as we realize he’s crossing over forever. Good-bye, we say. Good-bye. Good-bye. Toenails and skin. Memory halted in our lungs: his foot, ankle, wrist. When a bomb is dropped, it falls through history. No one act, no single life. No disconnected occurrence. I am sipping a root beer in another café and the world spins and you pick up a pen, speak, and save another life: this time your own.
Early the next morning at 3:00 A.M., one of those mighty midwestern thunderstorms broke the dark early sky into an electric yellow. I gazed out the cold glass pane. Either in my head or outside of it—where do thoughts come from?—three words resounded: The Great Spring. The Great Spring. Together my students and I had witnessed the tip of the moment that green longed for itself again.