I’m back in the old zendo, the one on Cerro Gordo Road in Santa Fe, adjacent to the stupa. A square room, white-plastered adobe walls, wood floor, a skylight overhead in the center. I’m sitting in the corner on a Thursday night. The sitting has already started with six people. But this is not the old Zen, not strict. I can find my place even though I’ve come in late.
In 1984 Baker Roshi taught here. Philip Whalen, the great poet/priest, would sit opposite me; Issan, who eventually became the abbot for the San Francisco Hartford Street Zen Center, with his head shaved, was to my right; a stodgy, delightful woman named Miriam Bobkoff sat diagonal to me in black robes. An ex–prize fighter, muscles bulging, sat a few cushions away, and also a young man with a long beard named Robert Sycamore. Baker had recently resigned from San Francisco Zen Center for indiscretions that at the time were unclear, and this was the part of his group that had followed him.
In 1984 I had just returned to New Mexico from practicing at the Minnesota Zen Center. Wherever Zen was, near where I lived, I went.
Besides, I liked Baker. I was not part of the brouhaha and felt comfortable continuing to like him. I was in that heaven place before my own perfect teacher’s betrayals were discovered. At that point I ignored—or tried to ignore—anything that got in my way, not knowing then that the obstacles were part of the way and I needed to figure out what—or what not—to do with them.
Now it’s twenty-four years later, mid-March. The wind is moaning outside. The wind will go on well into May. Spring is a miserable season in New Mexico. But you should have seen the twilight as my ten-year-old Volvo bumped along the dirt road. Soft, gray-blue, and big. Tentative, lonesome, home.
The day before, our small group had messed around with a koan about mending. Two Zen friends from old China have a discussion, and you almost think one of them gets it right, but then you realize it’s not quite like that. You can’t hold one side and forget the other.
I left the Quaker Meeting House on Canyon Road, where we have these koan salons every Wednesday afternoon from three to five. It has nothing to do with the Quakers—they lend us this beautiful but cold room. And we sit huddled even though the heater—too far away—is blasting.
Joan Sutherland, who leads these salons, hardly says a word, but this time out of frustration I turn to her. “Speak or we won’t come back.”
She laughs but gives us a heavy hint.
I’m suddenly desolate. It makes the koan worse, even if I understand better. My whole body wants to be involved. It is like pointing out a person across the room and saying, “Someday you’ll love him.” No help at all. I have to find my own way to him and into love.
The rest of the group was delighted by the help.
I was miserable. That’s how I ended up the next night in the zendo. I don’t usually go on Thursday nights. I was hungry and at the same time felt trapped.
Not only had my mother died in December but the man next door to me died the next day, and my landlord in the house behind took his last tough breath a few weeks later, and a forty-eight-year-old I cared about in New York surprised me and died too. All at once no one was sick and got better. They stopped breathing for good.
You would have liked Sandy, the ninety-four-year-old retired surgeon I paid rent to. He’d pass my kitchen door in the passenger’s seat—Louise, his wife of forty years, drove their station wagon—and I’d come out and lean into his window, and the three of us would chat.
“Do you see that bird’s nest on top of that telephone pole?” He pointed.
I’d have to squint hard. “Yes, you’re right. Wow.”
He was clear almost to the end. I’d stop by, bring watermelon—his favorite—out of season, while he was propped up in bed reading the New York Times.
Gone now. A rush of death in a month’s time.
It was the forty-eight-year-old in New York who was the hardest for me. I’d walk down Camino del Monte Sol at the edge of the road and whisper, “Adele, I am so sorry,” and there was no consolation. My stomach in a tight fist against that other place that I feared was no place, only a hole a body is dropped into. No more Natalie. Or Mr. Digneo next door.
I remember going to Baker during retreat. “I get sick of my thoughts, but every time I become present, the fear is so great it drives me into panicked thoughts again. I’m afraid of being nothing.”
“That’s the main dilemma for most of us.”
Another time, after I learned my teacher in Minneapolis was going to die, I went to Baker. He had experienced the death of a teacher when Suzuki Roshi died and passed the lineage on to him. “How did you handle Suzuki’s death? I’m going to so miss Katagiri.”
“Oh, I didn’t miss him. I had to step up and do his job.”
“You didn’t miss him?”
He shook his head.
I left that day thinking, That’s not me. My heart was so broken, but I miss that time. It was good to love someone that much.
Now I’m caught in the dark web of a koan, a conversation, an interchange from more than a thousand years ago.
I’m missing the point of the interchange because my mind is too complicated. There’s no trick. It’s right in front of me. I can’t see it. You say water and I hear mud. You say dead and I say wake them up. I say I am sixty years old and I don’t accept it. Then I have a huge sense of urgency. I have to fill in every inch of the next ten years. And the anxiety intensifies. Where will all of this lead? I suspect the truth is not one way or the other. It is both: I am alive and I will die.