I moved deeper into Zen and writing. They were mine alone, and the loneliness I felt was a dark background in this northern city where I always felt a foreigner. That loneliness pushed me deeper. I wanted to find a way out.
In one lecture, Roshi told us a koan from the Mumonkan or Gateless Gate:
One day a big congregation of monks had been arguing about Buddha nature. When Nansen heard them, he held a cat up in front of them.
“Does this cat have Buddha nature?” Nansen asked.
No one answered, so Nansen cut the cat in half.
That evening, Joshu returned and Nansen told him what had happened. Joshu put his sandals on his head and walked out.
Nansen said, “If you had been here, you could have saved the cat.”
I had heard this before. I always got stuck on the sandals.
Then Roshi began talking about the pickles he ate in the monastery after the war. Everyone was very poor. Often they were served hot water with three grains of rice floating on top and those pickles—“We had to eat them silently.” He turned to us, “Can you chew a pickle silently?” He made a face and imitated eating a pickle silently.
Well, I’m not sure, I’d think to myself.
At this point, if you were a new visitor you’d be laughing as I had when I first came to Zen Center. Eat a pickle silently? You’d think this Zen master was very funny and he was, but the Zen students did not laugh; we were odd, serious, poker-faced. The visitor might comment later how dead the Zen students seemed.
Mostly the visitor never returned, but the students continued to come. What the visitor experienced in the Zen students was their basic human resistance. We had passed the stage of enthusiasm; we were coming up with our defenses, our resistances. Often as I listened, I projected my feelings onto Roshi and thought, he’s boring, he’s not clear, Zen is dumb. But something in me didn’t quite believe it. I still wanted to know whether the cat had Buddha nature.
Last Januarys I taught a week-long writing workshop in Taos for people who had studied with me before. After Tuesday morning’s class I thought to myself, these people hate me. I know them and they hate me and they hate writing too. Why did they come? They’ve been here before. They know what it’s like.
Then I remembered the zendo. The love affair with writing was over. They were taking it more seriously. All their resistances had come up. That afternoon I explained it to them: “Last year, when you came it was all new. Writing practice was a joy. You discovered you could write, you recovered old memories. This year you want writing more, you have expectations, you suffer. It’s okay, just keep doing it. You’re meeting more of yourself.” They felt a bit relieved, but not much. Resistances are painful, and they deepen as we deepen.
Roshi said, “Nansen didn’t need to cut the cat in half. In Soto Zen you don’t cut the cat, but Rinzai is very swift.” He motioned with his hand cutting off his head, showing the way he imagined Rinzai to be. Soto and Rinzai are two different sects of Zen. Katagiri was a Soto Zen master. He laughed. “Soto is different,” he said. “It’s like the not-too-bright, kindly older uncle.” He liked that image. He laughed and laughed. I tried to grunt up a half smile. My knees hurt. It was nine-thirty on a Wednesday night, bitter cold outside. Someone over in China centuries ago was cutting up cats in the zendo. This is a weird religion, I thought. Mostly I never called it a religion. That word made me nervous. Zen was just something I got caught up in, and I was somehow trusting this little Japanese man in a way I had never trusted anyone. He wanted nothing from me and spoke to me from the bottom of the earth, at least from the bottom of his mind with no distortions.
Minds, my mind and yours, are run by the same principles. We are not unique. We mirror what is around us. If we walk into a red room, we become red. If we are always in a group of angry people, it is hard not to become angry. If we are with someone who is clear, our mind reflects that back and we become clearer. Roshi gave me a vision of a different kind of mind.
After the first sesshin we sat together, Neil said to me in amazement, “Nat, he knows his own mind. He knows what he thinks. How many people can you say that of?”
One spring, the sangha, the Zen Center spiritual community, decided we had to reach out to the Twin Cities community in the hope of receiving some big donations. Minnesota Zen Center was not good at raising money. We had our yearly summer rummage sales, where I had my spontaneous poetry booth, and we baked breads that people bought after lecture on Saturdays, but we decided that not enough people knew about us. We would have a lovely Sunday afternoon tea and invite guests who could potentially contribute large sums to our waning funds. We set up card tables in the zendo—we didn’t want our guests to have to sit on the floor with their legs crossed as we did. We wanted them to be comfortable, and we rented lovely white linen tablecloths. We baked small square tea cakes and thin butter cookies. We served tea from beautiful rented silver tea servers. We wanted people to feel the elegance of Zen. We wanted them to like us.
Prestigious people came: lawyers, university administrators, a journalist, even the owner of a downtown department store. There were about thirty-five people in all. After a time of tea and cookies, cordial conversation, we asked Roshi to come down and give us a lovely Zen talk—maybe he’d talk about generosity, about being in the moment, or something Americans are wild about from the movies: the samurai. Roshi was ideal for a fund-raiser. With his erect posture, his beaming, alive face, he was just what you’d envision a Zen master should look like.
Roshi came down the stairs in his black robes, stood in front of the group seated at the tables, bowed, smiled, nodded, and then began.
“You know, all of you are going to die someday.”
No, Roshi, no, we thought, and the visitors drinking their tea out of lovely white tea cups stopped their cups in midair, before they got to their mouths, the steam from the hot water covering their faces.
Roshi went on. It was one of his long talks, punctuated often by our impermanence and imminent death. As soon as it was over, people bolted for the door. Not a dime was put into the donation box.
Please understand that Roshi did not give this talk to be mean or sarcastic or rebellious. He spoke evenly, kindly. The morning before, he had lectured on this very subject and he was merely continuing the conversation. It would never have occurred to him to adjust a talk to please people or not to tell the truth of his mind. He said to me often, “I’m sorry for you. I do not give you a piece of candy.” I do not give you what you’d like, what would please you, but would not be true. I do not feed your illusions.
Once I checked with him before I asked him something, “No candy?”
“No candy,” he said and shook his head.
I was pleased. I trusted him. I knew he’d give me an answer I didn’t usually understand, but I’d chew on it for a long; time until I tasted its noncandy flavor.
I was absorbing Roshi’s mind, trying to fathom where he came from. I knew it was a big place, the biggest I’d ever seen. I wanted that largeness for myself; mostly I thought that immense mind might be impossible to attain, but I continued anyway.
A beginning writer loves an author and studies her until she has absorbed that author’s style and moves and ways, until she realizes that what she loves is also in herself and that she, too, has the possibility of being a Toni Morrison, a Rita Mae Brown, a Carson McCullers. This is one of the best ways to learn writing.
In this same way, I was digesting Roshi’s mind, the mind of no-self, of the Zen present moment, of wisdom and compassion, detail, care, and humor. He became my Great Teacher, yes, and also my Great Writing Teacher. It was through him I understood the mind, and the mind after all is the territory all writers must journey through.
At the end of his lecture on Nansen and the cat, Roshi turned to us. “Do you understand what I mean?”
We nodded.
He shook his head. “No, you don’t,” then he made a face, “and it’s not because of my Japanese accent.” He pa
used and his face lit up. “I’ll give you a hint,” he said. “If you want to find Buddha nature, love someone and care for them.”
Every fall and spring Zen Center offered a hundred-day training period, which meant being at the zendo every morning except Sunday at four-thirty A.M. The students who signed up took turns each morning to talk from four-thirty to five on a given topic. Then we sat for two periods, chanted, cleaned the zendo and left by eight A.M. to go to our jobs in the world. We returned at seven P.M. for two sitting periods before we went home to sleep. The training also required being at the zendo every Saturday, all day, sitting a weekend sesshin once a month, and at least one seven-day sesshin during the hundred days.
After being at Zen Center a year and a half, I signed up for a training period in the fall. Getting up at four A.M. every morning to get to the zendo by half past was one of the hardest things I’d ever done and one of the most secretive, deep, wild, and scary. I’d rarely wakened at four except to turn over and go back to sleep. And there I was doing it every day. I found a pocket of darkness I’d never known before and it felt like it was all mine. The people in the houses I walked past were all asleep and there was rarely a car on the street. The traffic signal blinked red, then green, then yellow for no one. Down the alleys I’d grown to love, behind people’s houses along their backyards, I’d walk on solid ice in weather well below zero as we moved into late November and December and I was wrapped in more and more clothes against the wind chill that was no longer just the news announcer’s term; I was experiencing it with everything in me. During that training period, I entered another part of my life, something that was always there, but usually I was asleep when it was happening. Now I and fourteen other Zen students carried our unconscious minds still raw from having wakened in the middle of our dreams and sat on black zafus in a white-walled room lit by a candle, the smoke of incense wafting by, watching our minds and feeling our breath.
At the time I was not attuned to the wonder. I was mostly tired.
I went to Roshi: “Roshi, I’m exhausted. I need to sleep.”
“Oh, you don’t need sleep. If you’re tired, just take a little catnap at the bus stop, while you’re waiting for the bus.”
“Um, hum,” I said and yawned.
At the time I was resident poet at Andersen elementary school. A newspaper photographer came in one day to snap pictures of our class. One photo was in a neighborhood newspaper the next week. You can see me droopy-eyed in front of the class. The funny thing was that while my body was sleepy, I had tremendous energy and vigor.
One girl in a sixth-grade class I was teaching—her name was Tonya, black, bright, sassy—said out loud to the girl next to her so everyone could hear, “You know, I been thinking lately. Natalie looks like one of them people I see on TV. You know, they cross their legs and close their eyes. Suppose to be peaceful.” She scrutinized me up and down. “Know what I mean?”
I was copying on the board the poem, “The White Horse,” by D. H. Lawrence, and I turned in the middle of the last line. I gave Tonya a big smile. “You’re smart. How did you know?”
“I just did,” she said, pleased. “Show us.”
I turned to the rest of the class. “Do you know what she’s talking about? It’s called meditation.” With one sweep of my hand, I pushed aside everything on the teacher’s desk and hopped up. “Here.” I crossed my legs, put my hands on my knees, straightened my back, and told them, “When I close my eyes, I’m going to feel the breath going in and out at my nose.” I closed my eyes and felt my breath for three inhales and three exhales. The kids were mesmerized by my stillness, as though feeling one’s breath was the most magical thing.
“Do you want to try?” I asked.
They nodded cautiously. They all sat at their wooden desks, I explained how to meditate in a chair, and at two-thirty in the afternoon in a Minneapolis public school they felt their breath.
When we all opened our eyes again, I said quietly, “Amazing, huh?”
Some nodded tentatively. Just then, the classroom teacher walked in. She abruptly stopped at the door. I was on her desk.
“Oh.” I smiled. “I am teaching them the measure of a poetic line.”
“Uh-huh.” She nodded and turned abruptly to leave.
Sitting on her desk top, I put my palms together and bowed to her back going through the doorway and then I turned and bowed to my wonderful breathing students sitting all in rows before me.
That first training period was hard. It broke me, because I wanted to do everything in my regular life—go to my teaching job, write poetry, meet friends for dinner, go to movies, go dancing with Neil (we were still together then)—and do training period. Usually, I managed to do whatever I wanted. Training period taught me I was limited: I had a human body. I had to make choices. I struggled a lot with this. I remember one Saturday night falling asleep on the floor at a party Kate was having.
I came face to face with my profound rebelliousness. I wanted to do what I wanted to do. I went into the Zen kitchen right after a lecture about mindfulness in taking care of our cups and spoons so as not to pass around winter colds and flu. I walked up to a big jar on the shelf, opened it, stuck my finger in over and over, and put big gobs of peanut butter in my mouth as I stood by the back door in full sight, just as all the Zen students were leaving for the night.
Training period ended on a cold Saturday. That night we had a poetry reading in the zendo and a lot of my non-Zen poet friends came. As a Zen student, I was supposed to wear black or at least quiet colors. That night I wore a bright red skirt and a purple sweater. When the reading was over, a bunch of us were headed out to a bar. I was very happy. Training period was over; I didn’t have to go back to Zen Center and sit in the early morning for months if I didn’t want to; though I knew Monday morning Roshi would be there, training period or no training period.
About to leave the zendo, I was standing by the steps that led up to Roshi’s apartment with my poet friends surrounding me. Roshi was walking toward the stairs. I waved to him gaily, “Bye, Roshi, you won’t see me for a while.”
He stopped, looked straight at me. “I’m sorry for you,” he said.
Everything stopped for me in that moment. I don’t think my friends even noticed the interchange. I didn’t care if they did. He didn’t say it to shame me. He handed me the truth. It was an even statement. He was telling me you can’t pop out of your life, run from who you are. I had the illusion that if I didn’t come to sit, I was getting away from something. I heard what Roshi said and understood what he meant. I never forgot it, but I wasn’t ready to receive it just then. My rebellion was too deep; my lack of surrender too apparent; though what was I rebelling against but myself? At Zen Center I could come and go as I pleased.
A year and a half later I wanted to do another training period. By then I had digested what had happened the last time. I saw that I had to make choices; I couldn’t do everything. Plus I was in the middle of a divorce. Neil and I had already separated our stuff. He got the kitchen table; I got the rocker. We both wanted the couch; I took the dining room table instead. There was a resignation now, a painful quiet. I was slowed down, sad. I resolved to give this training period my full attention, broken only by my work.
However, just before I signed up, I heard from someone that a year earlier Scott Edelstein had wanted to sign up for a training period but he couldn’t attend the Monday night lecture, which was only for training period students. He had to teach a class on Monday nights. Roshi told him to forget it if he couldn’t come Monday nights, that the lecture was important, that he should sign up another time.
Coincidentally, I had to teach writing on Monday nights of the training period I wanted to sign up for. It was at a community college, and I had signed a contract to do it several months before. I didn’t think it would be a problem until I heard about Scott. I decided to go to Roshi and explain my situation. I was sure I could talk him into letting mc sign up. It was a ridiculous ide
a, the idea of trying to talk him into something. His grounding was different from mine. I went trying to defend, argue. He was defenseless, still. His grounding was groundless. I went with a sword and when I put it through him I found there was nothing there, nothing to fight. Each time I was startled, but did that stop me? No. The next time I went to him for something I would rev up for a fight.
Here I was again, this time trying to persuade him to let me sit training period and be absent on Monday nights, because of my teaching commitment. I’d tell him I’d have another Zen student take copious notes on Monday night; I’d listen to the taped lecture immediately on Tuesday morning, I’d... I’d... I can’t remember now all the angles I figured, but I do remember walking over to Zen Center one morning at the end of August, down the tree-lined street full of September marigolds and petunias, going over my tactics in my mind to make sure I had included everything, that I couldn’t imagine one place where Roshi could catch me. I was determined this time that he would not surprise or shock me.
He was sitting behind his low desk on a cushion. I’d made an appointment earlier. I walked in. I sat down on a zafu and faced him across the desk.
I began: “I want to sit training period. You told Scott…” I began the recitation of all my carefully planned tactics. After I had completed only a sentence or two, he turned and looked out the window. I felt ridiculous. I was talking to the side of his face. He’d never done this to me before. I rattled on until I was finished. I didn’t know what else to do.
When I was done, he turned to me: “What do you want?”
“I want to sit this fall’s training period, but I have to teach Monday nights and I can’t come to lecture,” I said.
“I’ll lecture on Tuesday nights,” he said.
“You can’t do that!” I was startled.
“Why not? You said you can’t come on Mondays, can you?”
“No,” I shook my head.
He opened his calendar book. “Yes, I can do Tuesdays.”
“But, Roshi,” I was getting a little hysterical, “training period lecture is always, on Monday nights. For years! You can’t change it.”
Long Quiet Highway Page 14
