“Well, you can’t come Monday night and I can do Tuesday.”
I was discombobulated. I wanted to say, but what about a year ago with Scott, what about you being the Zen master and me just a dumb student, aren’t you more important, what about all the years we’ve done it one way?
“Anything else?” he asked.
“No.” I didn’t move. I blinked a few times. “Thank you.”
He smiled.
I left. I remember going down those carpeted stairs in my bare feet. A big lake had opened in me where before normal things like a stomach, kidneys, spleen used to hang out. The man was empty; Roshi was empty. He came from no angle. Not better or worse than I, not Zen master. From no time, no way it was done in the past dictating the present. At that moment, he came from nothing. No identity. No hierarchy. No schedule. He certainly didn’t come from a story a year ago about Scott Edelstein.
Everyone of my generation in those days was trying to find a center. Roshi didn’t have a center. There was no self. He didn’t exist in any way I usually understood my world. I’d known good people—my grandmother, Mr. Clemente—but this was different. I was profoundly moved and quiet. There wasn’t anything my brain could grab on to.
When training period did begin a month and a half later, lecture was on Monday night. Nothing was ever said or explained to me. Maybe a bunch of Zen students who had already signed up protested the switch from Monday to Tuesday. I doubt it. I taught my Monday night writing group. Roshi lectured that night. I didn’t hear his lectures on tape or check with another student. It didn’t matter. I woke at four A.M., and I went to the zendo. I went in the evenings, on weekends.
In January, I saw him about something else. “You did pretty good,” he nodded. He meant training period.
I smiled.
When Thich Nhat Hanh, a Vietnamese Buddhist monk, came over to this country to advocate a cease-fire in Vietnam, people who heard him speak asked, “Are you from the north?”
“No,” he said.
“Are you from the south?” they asked.
“No,” he said. “I’m from the center.”
It felt as though Roshi came from a bigger place than over here or over there. The important thing about being around him was that I saw between the cracks; I saw him when he wasn’t lecturing or sitting, officially being roshi. What amazed me was there was no difference in him. I’d known writers who were exquisite, deep, tender human beings on the page and monsters in person, rude, arrogant, alcoholic, undependable. There was a huge gap between what they wrote and who they were. I experienced Roshi as a whole, gapless.
I remember one Saturday afternoon I was sweeping in the kitchen. It was late March, gray, a bit windy, always cold, but bearable now, winter’s back had been broken. You could stand outside and your face wouldn’t freeze off. The phone rang. It was Pam. She was already twenty minutes late to pick up Roshi to drive him to the airport. She called to say she’d be another ten minutes.
Oh, my god, I thought. He’ll miss his plane. I frantically went looking for him.
He was standing outside by the curb next to a valise. It was not a suitcase, modern with zippers and nylon. It was a valise, square, gold colored, with latches. Roshi just stood there in his black robes as though he had no idea Pam was late. He stood, not waiting, not impatient, just standing.
I ran to him. “Roshi,” I called. “Pam will be another ten minutes.” My hands were thrown up in the air. I was probably shrieking.
He nodded, unperturbed. “Thank you,” and just continued to stand. He wasn’t waiting; he wasn’t coming; he wasn’t going.
I walked back up the walkway, broom in hand. Several times I looked back over my shoulder. He was still standing there, a green army jacket over his black priest robes. That presence, that being present, stunned me. My whole body relaxed. It seemed much more important than making the plane. Pam was going to get there when she got there. Meanwhile, he was standing. I became quiet as I returned to sweep the kitchen.
Until I saw that kind of equanimity I didn’t know it was possible. Nothing before in my American world had expressed it. I remember thinking, it’s actually okay not to get frantic, to allow things to be. I’d scrunch up my face. Naa, I’d say, the world can’t run that way—he’s an anomaly. But I wanted to be around it. My whole heart yearned for it. I was seeing something I couldn’t express, that actually wasn’t very interesting to talk about. I’d try to explain:
“Well, I saw him standing outside,” I’d tell a friend.
“Yeah?” my friend would reply.
“He was standing,” I’d say.
“What was he doing while he was standing?”
“Nothing.”
“Nothing?” My friend would scratch his ear. “So?”
“Like so,” I’d try to stand as Roshi stood.
“So what?” My friend would ask.
I didn’t know “what.” I just went over to Zen Center. It wasn’t explainable, in the same way writing wasn’t explainable. I learned more about writing from watching his feet, or the way he bowed, than I could from any poetry workshop.
Gary Snyder wrote:
Meditation looks inward, poetry holds forth. One is private, the other is out in the world. One enters the moment, the other shares it. … The one goes back to essential moments of stillness and deep inwardness, and the other to the fundamental impulse of expression and presentation.
(Introduction to Beneath a Single Moon, Shambhala, 1991)
It seemed to me that in order to “share” the moment in the writing of poetry, one had to experience it, know it, be in it. Being around Roshi, I got a taste of what a moment might be and how one might be in it. From there, my impulse to express it came naturally, but without Zen, without being present, my foundation for writing was shaky. Without some foundation, my writing was full of thought on thought; nothing down to earth; I was piling sand on sand. Finally, what was I talking about anyway?
I recently attended a one-day mindfulness retreat at my friend Cynthia’s, in Santa Fe. All day we had been doing sitting and walking meditations, eating, gardening, all mindfully, all with attention. At the end of the day, still sitting, we passed around tea and cookies and each person spoke whatever was on his or her mind. There were seven or eight of us. I listened to people speak. I blinked my eyes. My mind was quiet. I honestly had no thought, nothing to say, but it was time to share, to be a part of the community.
When it was my turn, suddenly a haiku I’d read many times in class when I taught workshops came floating up through my mind. I saw it and recited it.
Simply I’m here
Simply snow falls.
Then I turned to Cynthia. I looked at Naomi across from me. “I have no idea who wrote it. Shiki, maybe Shiki did.” My brain was not functioning. Just as I said “Shiki” for the second time, black space opened in front of me and out of it was thrown up the word “Issa.”
“Issa! Issa. It was Issa who wrote it!” I said, flushed and excited, and I interrupted the person next to me, who was about to speak.
Usually, it’s no big deal to say something, remember something else, and correct yourself, but what was so exhilarating for me was that I actually watched each thought arise. When I saw “Issa,” it felt as though the black chasm of time and space had opened up and Issa himself in a fit of indignation at his haiku being misrepresented had flung out his name through five hundred years, and it echoed, shimmering in front of me at the very top edge of its flight where it arrived in that living room late that May afternoon and I grabbed it and called it out.
Staying at that level of thought formation—where one can actually watch the thoughts arise—is very invigorating and vital, and the impulse from that level is a true place to write from. It is fundamental expression coming out of fundamental stillness. That is why I tell my students, “When you do writing practice, sometimes you get high, feel happy and whole for the rest of the day, and you don’t know why. It is because you contacted first
thoughts, before they became fettered with second and third thoughts. You stayed with the real grit of your mind.”
After four years at Zen Center, during a seven-day sesshin, I went to Roshi. “You know, the more I sit, the more Jewish I’m feeling.”
“That makes sense,” he said. “The more you sit, the more you become who you are.”
This feeling of being Jewish deepened in me. I wanted to know what it meant to be Jewish. Though my family was culturally Jewish—there were smatterings of Yiddish spoken by my parents and grandparents, we ate chicken soup and gefilte fish, felt the shadow of the concentration camps, lit Hanukkah candles—there was nothing spiritual or religious about our home. My father had been brought up religiously and he rebelled. When he was thirteen and had to change in the locker room for gym, his classmates made fun of the prayer shawl he wore under his undershirt. That night, he told me, he went home and told his mother, “No more. I’m not wearing it.” And at sixteen when he got his driver’s license, he snuck into the family’s navy blue Ford and drove it down the street on Yom Kippur, the highest holy day, when you are only allowed to walk. “I crashed the car,” he told me. “God was warning me, but, otherwise, that religious stuff is a lot of malarkey.” This was my religious instruction from my father. Later, as an adult, I heard that my great-grandfather on my father’s side was a holy man, that he wandered from family to family teaching Hebrew and the Torah at heder, Jewish school, that he had no home of his own.
On my mother’s side of the family, my grandfather often repeated, “It’s so good to be in America. You don’t know how good you have it.” He’d come over from Russia when he was seventeen to avoid the draft there. He’d seen Cossacks ride through his small shtetl and kill people. When he arrived in the United States, he threw off Judaism as archaic. He wanted to be an American. The day before Yom Kippur, he and my grandmother parked their car several blocks from their apartment in Brooklyn, and in the morning, when all Jewish families dressed up and walked to shul, to the synagogue, my grandfather and grandmother and their three children dressed up, too. They walked like the other families, but not to shul, to the car, got in, out of sight of their neighbors, and drove out to Long Island for a picnic. When I asked my mother once, “What is God?” she said, “It is goodness. Wherever you see good, you see God.” That was a good answer. It satisfied me.
Now, twenty-two years later, Judaism haunted me in the zendo. What was it? And what was this foreign religion, Zen, that I was practicing, when I had turned my back on something that was rightfully mine? There were no interfaith marriages in my family. I was one hundred percent Jewish—no mixed blood. What did that mean? Perhaps I had been arrogant. I had turned my back on my own religion and was studying something foreign.
I went to Roshi. “I’m going to study Judaism. I don’t know what it is. I’m going to leave Zen Center for a while.”
He nodded. “Remember, whatever you do, the one true test of a religion. Ancestors, history doesn’t matter—what matters is that it can help you here and now in your life.”
I was naive. I’d never gone to temple, never met a rabbi, except Zalman Schacter, and that was at Lama Foundation, not in a synagogue. I called several in the Twin Cities and asked them to meet me for lunch. I thought rabbis would be like Roshi. Roshi was my archetype for someone spiritual.
The rabbis I met—all men—one from a reform synagogue, one from a conservative orientation, another from the Lubovich organization, were friendly, warm, opinionated, distracted, talkative. With one especially, I wanted to say, “Please, slow down, connect with your breath.” None had the presence of Katagiri. Each one at some point in the conversation bent close to me. “Zen, Buddhism, it’s not as deep, big as Judaism. It’s okay, but it’s not the same.”
I was surprised. “Do you know much about Zen? Have you sat?”
“I don’t need that. I’ve read a little,” the conservative rabbi said.
We went on to talk of Minneapolis, intermarriage, education.
This couldn’t be. Where was a person like Roshi in all this? I took some classes on Judaism; I went to services; I studied Hebrew. In Hebrew class, we had an Israeli instructor named Tuvia. He presumed we all pretty much knew Hebrew; after all, it was his native language. I knew nothing, not even the alphabet, but I loved the class. I constantly nudged Carol, the woman in front of me, to give me the answers. She was a dermatologist, brought up on a North Dakota farm, who planned to convert. At the beginning of the course, we all chose a Hebrew name. I chose Malka, which means “queen.” I liked playing at a new identity, an ancient Hebrew one.
After taking the Hebrew class for two quarters, I won a Bush Fellowship in poetry and with the money I went to Israel for three months. In Jerusalem, I went to Sabbath dinner at the homes of different Hasidic families. One Hasidic sect had a movement to bring wayward Jews back to the fold. I went often because the Hasids felt closest to what I knew of religion.
At one Sabbath in the Old City, I asked the head of the family over dinner, “What practice is there that I can do every day?”
“Get married and have children,” he told me. There were thirteen of his children at the table.
I liked this man; I liked his family. They liked me. It was obvious I was a religious person; I accepted and appreciated their Hasidic tradition.
“Yes, but I’m not married. I don’t have children. What can I do?” I asked again.
It seemed obvious to him. “Get married and have children.”
I walked home that night through the streets of Jerusalem, past Hasidic Jews in fur hats gathering in front of a small synagogue, the air smoky under street lights. I felt I was back many centuries. I passed rose vines climbing up Jerusalem pines, down cobblestone streets and houses built of pink Jerusalem stone. This was ancient and beautiful, but I could not find a way in. I was a modern woman, a feminist, a writer, an American. I wanted a practice, and so far I had discovered it only in the Eastern world.
I envied my parents when they visited me in Jerusalem. They seemed comfortable there, at home. They spoke Yiddish, the language they had learned in their Brooklyn homes, with people they met on the streets. One Israeli man came up to my father on Rehov Jaffa, tapped him on the stomach, said something, and then walked arm and arm with him for a block. My mother and I trailed behind. When we came to the corner, the Israeli waved good-bye.
I turned to my father. “What did he say to you? Did you know him?”
“Naa,” my father shook his head. “We spoke Yiddish. He said I should lose some weight. Did you notice how trim all the men are here? It must be because of the army. I told him I was American. He said he knew.”
“How do you feel so comfortable here?” I had struggled for three months to feel at all relaxed. There were Jews here, my people, but it was also a foreign country.
“Oh,” my father waved his arm, “it’s just like old Brooklyn.”
My parents had a natural Jewish identity from being brought up in a Jewish neighborhood. They took it for granted. They never felt the need to pass it on. I was brought up in suburban Long Island, many times the only Jew in my class. I had no such strong identity. Suburbia had neutralized my roots, washed them away.
When I returned from Jerusalem, I went to Roshi. “Roshi, I think it’s driving me nuts. It’s like an ornate tapestry. I can’t find a way in. I get lost in the history, the holocaust. Judaism seems sexist, opinionated.”
He shook his head. “Pay no attention to that. Stand up with what you have learned here and continue to penetrate. When you get to the heart of Judaism, you’ll find Zen.”
I took a deep breath, nodded, and left.
One late afternoon in early October at a Yom Kippur service in a synagogue on Dupont Avenue, five blocks from the zendo—I’d been fasting all day and had walked early that morning through fallen brown leaves—I touched it, touched something. I held the prayer book in my hand, “Let there be grace and kindness, compassion and love,” we recited—a mom
ent when everything opened. There among my Jewish brothers and sisters, I felt that deep stillness, that quiet, that golden joy I felt in the zendo during sesshin—it was everywhere.
After that I could return to Zen Center, knowing that yes, where I came from, the religion of my ancestors had it, too. There was no barrier in me: Zen versus Judaism. It was evenywhere. There was a peace in me after that. I did not need to turn my back on anything.
Neil and I were divorced now. He had moved to the West Coast six months earlier and I was in the deep north on my own. Everything I looked at seemed to be dying. Something was dying in me and that sorrow slowed me down. Slowed down, I saw things more: the sparrows on the fire escape of a brick building, corn stalks dry in the November wind, the moon over the Mendota Bridge, long shadows at noon because the sun was so far south. I saw a broken man, a Chippewa down from the reservation, on the corner of First Avenue early one morning, the breath of cars and buildings coming out in blasts of blue smoke against the steel cold air. He had only one glove on and that one was torn. I stood and looked at him. I pulled off my wool mittens and walked to the corner. “Here,” I said and stretched out my bare hand that held them.
His movements were jerky, hesitant. He took the limp gloves. He nodded. I nodded. There was a scar under his right eye. He wore a green army jacket, open where the zipper should have been. I walked on and turned right at Nicollet, looked back, and then walked through the swinging doors of Woolworth’s.
Without Neil in the Twin Cities, I missed Taos even more, but I never spoke about it. How could I explain the modulation of adobe in this land of brick duplexes and square lawns? If I smelled wet pine in Minnesota, the smell would bring me back to Taos, to that big land, the sage, the cedar smoke, the sky, the sacred mountain. Friends wrote to me, “Come home. It’s too cold to come up there to visit. Visit us down here.” I’d fold their letters, put them back in their envelopes, and put them away in the top drawer of my bureau. I was still teaching in the public schools, but it had become dreary. I was tired of it. I thought, you can’t go home again; this is where you are. I looked around at the thin-gray-carpeted duplex I lived in, the bare branches snapping against the window pane, and a shudder moved through me.
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