“Here, try it.” Larry put one alfalfa sprout in his mouth, and Greg asked, “Well, what does it taste like?”
“Nothin’.”
That night Larry told his wife, Marie, about the alfalfa sprouts, and Marie asked what they tasted like. “Nothin’.”
Two days later, Larry drove up in the middle of the afternoon. Greg came out of the kitchen to greet him, eating a rice cake with peanut butter. Larry sat in his blue pickup, left arm hooked over the door, and stared. “Now what the hell are you eating?”
“It’s made of puffed rice. Wanna try it?”
“Nope.” But while Larry talked about how Jim Larsen gypped us on the price of our generator, he watched the rice cake as it went from Greg’s hand to his mouth, as he chewed and actually swallowed it.
One morning as I was walking from town on the dirt road, Larry Donahue’s father, now in his sixties, picked me up in his red Oldsmobile. Whiskey breath. His speech slurred. We wove down the road for a mile and came to a quick stop, where I got out in front of the Solberg barn, tin siding slapped over gray peeling wood. Donahue’s wife had gone crazy in their big white farmhouse and killed herself ten years ago. Now Mr. Donahue wakes up early, like he did as a farmer, drives into town, and drinks until ten in the morning. I point to the fields ahead and tell him they’re pretty. He looks. “I guess they are.”
I realize this place isn’t beautiful if you live here all of your life. It’s deeper than that. The crickets fill your summer days; the hills turn brilliant in fall and white in winter. You don’t make payments on your own land; you have buried your parents on it.
Duane is the best pool player in the county but says anyone from the city could beat him. He lives alone on the family farm and comes to the High Chap for company on Friday nights. The Zen students put quarters in the red flashing jukebox, and country song after country song twangs out into the dark light of the bar. We get up in our jeans and sweatshirts and work boots—I am wearing Chinese sneakers—and dance near the pool table with no apparent partner or pairing of male and female. We dance loose limbed, the way we learned in the sixties.
The three men at the bar—plus Herb, the owner, and the farmer with his pale wife and two children—watch us. The moon is almost full, and for some reason it feels extraordinary that this night we are all here together. Duane, with pool cue in hand, joins us and dances a few excited, shy steps. For moments during “Sioux City Sue,” there is so much happiness that Greg kisses Duane, even though he’s just lost another game to him.
I smoke a thin stogie at our long table, where David eats french fries, then Ellie Mae’s peach pie à la mode. Everyone agrees that the High Chap is sophisticated tonight, with people from all over the country—New York, California. There’s even a Jew and a black person. Lots of Buddhists, a woman with a cigar, and a man kissing a man—and the people from New Albin even know our names, and we know theirs.
Outside, Ford pickups with bumper stickers are lined up in the parking lot: DON’T CUSS THE FARMER ON A FULL STOMACH. Our Toyota is parked next to them with our bumper sticker: MY KARMA RAN OVER YOUR DOGMA.
Greg, Kevin, and I drive home in the white flatbed truck the Zen center is renting. I walk to my tent. In the moonlight the Richter cornfield next door looks smoky blue, with high tassels swaying slightly in the breeze.
In a few days the new zendo will be completed. Carpenters, who spent their whole summer here without pay, are almost finished. Dana, whose family are rich grain merchants from Kansas City, tells us that if his mother calls, whatever we say, don’t tell her that he’s helping to build a Midwest Buddhist monastery—just tell her he’s out camping for the summer.
Two carpenters from San Francisco Zen Center have come to help. The blond one repeats often: “This place has no culture! Only cows, corn, and mosquitoes!” Paul has given him the Most Miserable award—a one-inch square piece of khaki canvas. We safety-pinned it to his shirt. The material was Paul’s from an earlier accident. One afternoon in June he had found three big black-and-white neighbor cows standing in the middle of his collapsed tent. Deep yellow piss formed pools in the creases. The cows mooed loudly.
Katagiri Roshi drives down from Minneapolis near the end of September. Greg shows him around. He examines everything, bending down close to have a better look at a doorknob, not saying a word, his hands clasped behind his back. The rest of us are hammering, sweeping, sanding, but breathless, waiting for Katagiri’s response.
Finally he turns to Greg. “Thank you.” He bows, hands in gassho.
“It’s a great honor.” Greg bows back.
During lunch, Roshi hears about Kevin, who has spent the last three weeks searching in an empty riverbed for perfect stones for the zendo entrance. He was stung twice by bees, almost in the same place inside his nose.
Roshi grins, exposing a mouthful of teeth, and says in English, with his Japanese precision, “Very un-u-sual case!”
We all laugh and slap Kevin on the back.
The next day we sit our first seven-day sesshin in the new Hokyoji zendo. On the first evening a big harvest moon hangs in the dark sky and lights a silver path to our tents.
The next night we listen to rain on the roof as we sit zazen, and then wake to a morning fog filling the valley.
By afternoon I look up to see two hawks riding the cycles of air forty feet above our heads. As I reach for a towel in the new bathhouse, I glimpse Napoleon, the ratty yellow cat we brought from the city, whom we thought we had lost, dash by through the grass.
This was the vital, wild beginning of planting Zen in the Heartland. In the beginning you can discover the secret of all that is possible to come after. But you have to pay close attention.
AFTERWORD
The Smoke of Memories
All of my life I strove to liberate the dull hours in rows of wooden desks with attached seats, the chalk dust, the unbearable long hand on the Big Ben hanging over the door, not moving fast enough. I wanted to break the tight structure of eight fifty-minute periods punctured in the middle by a cafeteria-gray lunchroom.
All of my life I wanted to communicate how light quivered at the edge of sorrow and what it was like yearning to penetrate Zen mind. I wanted enlightenment and had no idea what that was.
All of my life I have traveled, studied, taught, and searched, but it was all right here: my grandfather buttering toast in the morning, washing a glass, hanging a white sheet on the line in our suburban backyard with the mimosa out front, the soft summer breeze, the overcast sky. My grandfather once existed with his stogie cigar, Yiddish paper, strong brown calves, and fallen old chest. We all once existed—is that not amazing enough? But I had to go to Japan. I had to go to France. They were part of my existence, my time on this earth. And I am thankful for every grain of pain and every happy moment. How can I separate the good from the bad?
The Great Spring includes the Great Failure, the thoroughgoing reduction to nothing, to loss, disappointment, shame, betrayal. If we can stand still and attentive in our lives and not run away, even right in the middle of the ruins, we will find fertile ground. We will hear the sound of a songbird in a Paris chestnut tree—we may not know whether the song comes from inside us or outside. We may never have been to Paris, but it doesn’t matter. We are penetrated through and through.
CREDITS
Some of the pieces in The Great Spring originally appeared (often in different form) in these publications:
Creative Nonfiction: “A Time of No Place” (originally titled “New Century,” 2005)
Five Points: A Journal of Literature and Art: “The Lineage of Literature” (2006)
The Los Angeles Review: “Archer City” (2011)
Shambhala Sun: “Blossom” (originally titled “Blossoms Falling,” 2010), “The Great Spring” (2013), “Rain and the Temple” (1999), “Losing Katherine” (2014), “Another New Year” (2012),“Meeting the Chinese in St. Paul,” “A Time of No Place,” “Zen at the High Chaparral” (originally titled “The Midw
est Zen Summer of 1983”), “On the Shores of Lake Biwa” (2006)
Yoga Journal: “Dog-Bite Enlightenment” (1997) and “A Long Relationship with Zen” (2001)
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
NATALIE GOLDBERG is the author of fourteen books, including Writing Down the Bones, which has changed the way writing is taught in this country. She has led workshops and retreats for forty years nationally and internationally. She has also painted for as long as she has written. She lives in northern New Mexico. For more information, please visit www.nataliegoldberg.com.
ALSO BY NATALIE GOLDBERG
MEMOIR
Long Quiet Highway: Waking Up in America
The Great Failure: My Unexpected Path to Truth
Living Color: Painting, Writing, and the Bones of Seeing
POETRY
Chicken and in Love
Top of My Lungs: Poems and Paintings
WRITING BOOKS
Writing Down the Bones: Freeing the Writer Within
Wild Mind: Living the Writer’s Life
Thunder and Lightning: Cracking Open the Writer’s Craft
Old Friend from Far Away: The Practice of Writing Memoir
The True Secret of Writing: Connecting Life with Language
NOVEL
Banana Rose: A Novel
NOTEBOOK
Essential Writer’s Notebook
DOCUMENTARY FILM
Tangled Up in Bob: Searching for Bob Dylan
(with filmmaker Mary Feidt)
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