It was one of those hard weeks. I was in Italy with forty American students from the East Coast who were poorly prepped to study with me. They wanted their Italian holiday, which included drinking. You don't drink at my retreats. They couldn't shut up during the silent periods. And there were five women in particular I called the bad girls. Skin-tight jeans, thick Jersey accents, they hunched in the back of the room together, giving the high five when one of them read aloud, and poured into the local bar each evening in the small town adjacent to this eighty-acre organic farm. One even brought a local boy home for loud sex through the night. I had definitely become a public high school teacher again, telling her that this was not allowed.
On top of this, the last day I caught a cold virus going around and had to lecture on creative writing in Rome to a room full of university students majoring in engineering. (“Who thought up this trip?” I asked myself.) It turned out the engineering students had gravitas, an ability to concentrate, to listen and be curious. Ah, I thought, the Italians. Serious young men and women, Europeans with history behind them.
Though I was sick, we—Wendy Johnson, my co-teacher and I—managed to be guided around Rome for two days by Paulo, an Italian student, and his ardent American friend Paul. Time stopped in front of Keats' grave at the non-Catholic cemetery for foreigners at Via Caio Cestio; Keats was only twenty-six when he died. I remembered my heavy navy cloth Norton Anthology of English Literature, the thin pages, and the “Ode on a Grecian Urn” I'd read over and over.
Further down the line of stones and Italian cypress was Shelley's grave and right close in front, Gregory Corso's. Corso didn't die in Rome. His daughter brought his ashes from St. Paul, Minnesota. At seventeen Gregory was the youngest prisoner ever to be in maximum security in Clinton, New York on three counts: stealing a suit to go to a wedding, sleeping in his teacher's room, and the final straw, stealing a toaster. The last inhabitant in the cell was Lucky Luciano, a Mafioso, who also showed the Allies the way into Italy through Sicily. He'd left all his books behind and it was there that Corso discovered Shelley. His life was saved, turning in the direction of poetry, and he always wished to be buried near the great master romantic poet. On Corso's stone was writ:
Spirit
is life
it flows thru
the death of me
endlessly
like a river
unafraid
of becoming
the sea
That last night I took Wendy out for a fancy dinner for her sixty-fifth birthday at a café on a broad avenue across from the nunnery where we were staying. Coughing, nose running, having just got word a friend canceled the next leg of my trip, I decided to fly home with Wendy as far as Atlanta, then on to our separate destinations. This change in plans cost the price of the original round trip, but sometimes money shouldn't matter. You take a step outside logic—or into a bigger logic.
The nine hours crunched in a small seat with Wendy, who was ensconced in The Leopard half a plane away, was no fun. Blearyeyed and jetlagged, I waited at Customs. A guard dog had sniffed three Italian lemons in Wendy's duffle. She wanted to bring them to Peter, her husband, a Dante fan. The lemons were confiscated and she turned left to find her next plane to San Francisco and I turned right, leaving the dry, stagnant air of the airport for two hours. My friend and former student Bill Addison picked me up for a short visit. What's near an airport? He managed to take me to a bleak, grey neighborhood with faded clapboard houses, cracked sidewalks, and crumbling asphalt.
“Ohh, I love this,” and I meant it. I was in the unflashy underbelly of my own country.
Grant Park dated back to the 1800s. We settled into seats at the Little Tart Bakeshop late in the afternoon with little selection left. I had a bowl of yogurt and granola and we snagged the last chocolate-caramel tart. I sipped chamomile. Bill had a macchiato and we settled across the table from each other the very day Atlanta dropped into fall weather.
His friend Leon had suddenly died two days earlier. Having just climbed over the hump of forty, this was Bill's first close death. In a way he was lucky, but it didn't hurt less. I listened—his waking this morning in stunned shock, the details of Leon's physical problems, visits in his last weeks. A thin black time-out-of-mind headache was forming over my left eye and my shoulders were concrete blocks. At the same time I was jittery from the plane ride and happy and amazed to be in this on-the-spot, face-to-face connection with my long-distance friend.
“Bill, remember Kobun Chino, the Zen teacher I've told you about?”
He nodded. Where was this going out-of-the-blue?
“Wendy just told me this last week. Years ago a whole rash of important teachers had died and her friend was freaked out.
“She went to Kobun, a bit hysterical. ‘I can't take it Kobun, I don't know what I'll do when you die.’
“‘Who say I die first?’ Kobun flashed back in his ungrammatical English.”
The fork traveling to Bill's mouth stopped. My water glass froze in hand. Kobun's comment was falling through Bill's body and reverberating through mine. We tumbled through space, up for grabs, free for the moment, defending nothing, drenched with a cutting truth. The sad tale of teaching in Italy, a friend's death—it all splashed with a crystal clarity. We both burst out laughing.
“Oh Nat,” Bill shook his head.
“Nothing like Zen,” I concluded.
How happy I am that Sean Murphy has spent a year and a half of his life gathering these stories of crazy Zen American teachings, stories that rivet the mind and turn things upside down—a searing push into awakening. And he did such a thorough, beautiful job, mixing in his own journey to these stories and teachers, which takes the book to another whole, rich level.
I remember him sitting—and sleeping—on my old yellow couch in St. Paul at one point while he was interviewing Midwesterners on one of his journeys, traversing the country, digging out any crag or corner, angle or tale he might have missed. At the time I commiserated: it was hard work, taking determined concentration. Think of the koans from 8th, 9th, 10th century China: what are they but interactions between teacher and student, teacher and teacher, student and student, and a few reveal transactions in heavenly realms—but all well-digested, at this point through so many years whittled down to bare sticks of raw teaching for us to decipher. Someone had to collect them.
This is what Sean has done in One Bird, One Stone, begun the large job of collecting wisdom created on American soil, keeping the lineage alive, carrying it over seas. Who knows how terse, arrow-like our tales will become, continuing the resounding bell, calling all to their true home. Maybe even the bad girls in my Italy class, seen from a thousand years from now, may hold the germ of a new beginning.
In the way of books, One Bird, One Stone disappeared, went out of print. Now with the foresight of Hampton Roads, they are calling back these stories, making them thankfully visible again. The process of turning them over, composting them for future generations has begun. I loved this book when it came out over a decade ago, but now with hindsight I appreciate even more what important work Sean Murphy has done and I thank him. Stories are the most vibrant way to pass on the teachings.
Natalie Goldberg
Santa Fe, NM
November 21, 2012