Lunch with Buddha

by Merullo, Roland

  I got up. I badly wanted coffee. Very badly. For me, coffee is not an addiction, it’s a necessity. One, perhaps two cups on waking. And then, later in the morning, one or two more. Either black or with a little cream, no sugar, strong as you can make it. In the tiny kitchen I went through the boxes of tea, seeing my sister’s fingerprints on each one. Mint Mindfulness. Joyful Morning. Restful Evening. Hibiscus Blend. Cactus Orange Cinnamon Nut Good Mood. After a small period of indecision, I went with Joyful Morning—three cups—and remembering Rinpoche’s remark that I could eat as much as I wanted for breakfast, I made myself seven pieces of sawdusty toast with butter and jam. Added a bowl of grapes. And then, for dessert, one small serving of oatmeal with local honey. The entire feast lasted almost an hour.

  Too much. There was a distended feeling, not pleasant. I knew that if I tried yoga with a full belly like that I’d end up with some kind of rupture, so I paced the living room to work it off. My watch read 6:20, which seemed impossibly early. By reflex I went to check it against my phone, but the phone wasn’t there. Confiscated. I’d not had anything confiscated since my Bic spitball shooter in fourth grade. I tried to meditate, but the overdose of grain seemed to have an adverse effect on my ability to focus, so I made twenty loops around the outside of the house, watched the rain clouds approach, then went in and sat on the couch and listened to the first drops tap the metal roof, and then a deluge against the window.

  From the shelf, needing lighter fare, I took The Inner Life. I read fifty pages and clung to two things: On page 18, something very much like what Rinpoche had told me on the road in Montana: “Once man has experienced the inner life the fear of death has expired, for he knows death comes to the body, not to his inner being.”

  I read that over four times and set it, in my mind’s eye, beside the Daily News headlines. They’d go out of business if people lost their fear of death. They and the rest of the news organizations stoked the fear of death like Inuits around a winter campfire a thousand years ago. Let it expire and all was lost.

  And this, on page 31: “Very often therefore it becomes difficult for an intellectual person, who through life has learned things and understood them by the power of intellect, to attain to the inner life, for these two paths are different. The one goes to the north and the other goes to the south.”

  With that, the universities would go out of business. Everyone’s daughter would move to a farm.

  I set the book down and decided I’d meditate for one hour, cross-legged, on the cushion that had been provided. I lasted fifteen minutes. Leg pain. I moved to the couch, but there it was the same story as in the previous session: worry about the kids, the Haters, thoughts of food, scraps of distraction about the trivialities of life—who, for instance, had named the different kinds of teas? How much was he or she paid? What was her official title? Leaf logician? Sales associate for the cataloguing of consumable leaf beverages? When he went on a date, what did he tell the person across the table about his daily regimen?

  My mind was, in other words, whitewater.

  At some point in the last third of the hour I did enjoy a stretch of peace for a minute or so. Not thoughtlessness so much as a slowing down of the whole process, an awareness, an unwillingness to follow my foolish notions as they veered off this way and that. I’d known this feeling, the great pleasure of this peace, before. I recognized it the way one recognizes the familiar gait of a friend from a distance of several blocks. When I at last opened my eyes I asked a blessing on Jeannie’s soul, went to the refrigerator and took the half-eaten candy bar and gobbled it. I opened another one and gobbled it, too. Both pieces. I felt proud of myself, in spite of that, on the road to some weewization I could not imagine. I did another half hour of yoga, had a shower, read another few chapters of Inayat Khan, did another, shorter meditation, and was thrilled, again, to hear footsteps on the path and see Shelsa tentatively opening the door and looking in. It was noon. It felt like 4:00 p.m. the next day.

  There was the picnic basket—she could barely lift it onto the table—and the rite of naming each piece of food and setting it out for my reaction. An avocado this time. A container of sunflower seeds. Carrots. A salad with an oil-and-vinegar dressing. And the main course, one large baked potato onto which we dropped a large chunk of butter and into which, with some delight, we dipped our spoons. There was something so adult in my niece’s manner—in the way she carried herself, in the utter sincerity with which she spoke her amusing dialect of English—that I found myself wanting to say, “Tell me about your mission here on earth,” or “Do you believe what people say about why you were born?” Something certifiably absurd like that. Watching her remove a white crumb of potato from her lower lip with a delicate dab of napkin, I had the thought that even the Dalai Lama probably hadn’t been aware of his role when he was five and three quarters. Not consciously aware, at least; not able to verbalize it. Tibetan legend had it, of course, that the time of his birth had been known to certain great living masters, that news of it had been sent to them, like the news of Christ’s birth, in a dream or vision. They were the Wise Men from the East, these great teachers. They were told where he was to be born, and approximately when, and a committee of them then traveled to that Himalayan Bethlehem with objects from a previous lama’s life and interviewed these young boys. One of the boys picked the correct cup and eyeglasses out of a lineup, and they had their man.

  I was musing along these lines, watching Shelsa sip water and wondering where I might teach her to really swim—Cape Cod, next summer, perhaps—when I was hit broadside by a new idea. On our earlier road trip, just before the famous Wisconsin yoga debacle, I’d eaten in a Nepali restaurant with the good Rinpoche. After the meal he’d pointed to a religious painting on the wall and told me—hinted, was more like it—that Cecelia would bear a daughter, that this daughter would be a special creature with an important mission, and that I would have some essential role to play in her life. What if by “special creature” he’d meant something like the next Dalai Lama? Why should it be a boy? Why should he be born in Tibet? Why shouldn’t the great spiritual masters of our era—Rinpoche and his ilk—have an inkling of her birth before it actually occurred? And what if it were true, and I was watching the next Dalai Lama wipe her mouth?

  On the heels of this run of thought came another, more disturbing notion: what if the Chinese heard about her and her mission? Wouldn’t there be a chance, at least, that they’d do what they could to prevent the succession? Hadn’t they proven themselves willing to do more vicious things to suppress the Buddhist faith? A million Tibetans slaughtered, for instance? Couldn’t that mean sending some sort of team of assassins here to Dickinson with Shelsa as the target, guided by the likes of Rundy and his friends, those Muslim-haters?

  No doubt I was beginning, thanks to the food and coffee deprivation, to sink into the swamp of insanity. But the thought persisted, and, really, to call it a thought is not quite accurate. It felt like more than that; it had more weight. Not quite a premonition, it nevertheless felt somehow as though, in separating myself, however briefly, from the usual distractions—phone, food, TV and newspaper, other adults—I’d allowed a kind of interior smog to disperse. As the sky cleared, this new possibility was revealed: Shelsa was the next great spiritual leader, a Jesus for our time, or a John the Baptist, a Mahatma Gandhi, a Martin Luther King. And look what had happened to those good souls.

  In order to protect myself from this line of thinking, I decided to make conversation. Shelsa was sipping from her water glass now, eyeing me, expecting a word.

  “You were sick a little while ago, your Papi told me.”

  “Yes,” she said.

  “Was it bad? Did it hurt?”

  “A little.” She laughed the way he did, a big river of a laugh that turned to a trickle of chuckling and then dripped and dripped for another little while. “I saw the hospital!”

  “Were you scared?”

  “No, no, Uncle,” she said. “The nurses
were wery nice. But the pool scared me.”

  “You were almost swimming there, you know. When you come visit us in New York, I’ll take you again and you’ll really swim. You’ll never be scared after that.”

  “Aunt Jeannie won’t be there.”

  Another quick rush of tears, more lumps in the breathing apparatus. There was no end to it. “No,” I said. “Aunt Jeannie passed on. She died. You won’t see her.”

  “I hear her,” she said.

  “No, honey, you won’t hear her, either. She’s gone. She loved you, though.”

  She looked at me as if I were making a joke, another foolish adult misinterpreting the world’s signals, coming to all the wrong conclusions. We thought people died. We thought the world was round. We thought children lacked understanding. “I hear her, Uncle Ott,” she repeated.

  I couldn’t argue. I smiled in a strained way, nodded like a fool. Shelsa and I packed up the basket and hugged, a new ritual for us, a retreat rite, and then she was gone again, trotting through the light rain, and I was watching her. This time, though, the premonition hung there like a scent. I went back and did a meditation, the less hurried run of thoughts interrupted now and again by my wondering how difficult it would be for the Chinese team, those murderous heathens, to find Dickinson, North Dakota.

  40

  The second afternoon and evening were the worst of it for me, a kind of dark night of the soul—though I’d bet that an actual dark night of the soul is a bit more trying. Time, it seemed, had completely stopped. Hunger was an issue, yes, but worse than that was a major-league boredom, an emptiness I couldn’t seem to fill. I read the rest of The Inner Life, which I found to be a wonderfully open-minded treatise on our common humanity, clearly the work of a special soul. I did three more meditation sessions, an hour of yoga. Then there was a nothingness as vast as the prairies of eastern Montana. I wasn’t tired enough to sleep. I’d had my fill of reading. I slowly made a cup of tea, slowly drank it, but even then it was only a quarter to nine and there was no TV, no going into town with Jeannie for a late glass of wine at Sammy’s, no newspaper, crossword puzzle, game of chess, or walk with the dog.

  Though it was almost physically painful to do so, I made myself sit on the couch for one more meditation session. I would try, I told myself, for half an hour. Beforehand I took one last peek at the pages of The Inner Life, where I read this: “Many people make a profession of clairvoyance and spirit communication; these are a degeneration of real mysticism.” Maybe that was why Seese had given it up.

  I tried to do what Rinpoche had encouraged me to do: step out of myself into some mysterious territory where my spirit and Jeannie’s spirit overlapped. There was the usual circus, and then a settling, a peace, and then, for a little while, it seemed to me that all the “I want” had been confined to a certain space. I felt this space—oddly—as a pickle barrel. The urge for television, companionship, food, and busyness was all there in the barrel, so many pickles floating or, better, so many fish swimming this way and that, bumping the sides, frantic to get out. And then there was something else. For a little while there was this something else. I don’t know exactly how to describe it. The sense that I was not limited to my body, perhaps. The notion that Natasha and Anthony and Shelsa and Cecelia and Rinpoche and the other seven billion of us were not limited to our bodies either. We breathed the same air. It linked us. We shared, all of us, the marvelous surprise of being.

  An old mocking voice appeared. The notion fled.

  41

  I woke on the third day feeling like a runner who had lost faith in his ability to finish the marathon and then realizes he’s in the twenty-fifth mile and, really, there isn’t that much farther to go; it looks like he’ll make it. I had a shower, cleaned things up a bit, sang to myself while preparing breakfast. I’d cut down to only four pieces of toast, fruit, tea, some leftover sunflower seeds. The last Mounds bar tempted me but I decided to wait.

  I’d saved Intimacy with God for that last day. It turned out to be the easiest read of the three spiritual books. Straightforward, Christian in essence though broad-minded in its approach. It was all about what the author called “centering prayer,” which seemed to me indistinguishable from what I called “meditation.” “Our spiritual journey may be blocked,” Keating wrote, “if we carry negative attitudes toward God from early childhood.” And, a bit later, “God has to lead us into a place that involves a complete reversal of our prepackaged values, a complete undoing of all our carefully laid plans, and a lot of letting go of our preconceived ideas.” And, last: “There is really no such thing as private prayer. We cannot pray at this deep level without including everyone in the human family, especially those in great need.”

  Keating, it appeared from the book jacket, was still alive. His tone was so good-hearted, so forgiving, so determined to give mouth-to-mouth resuscitation to the idea that it was possible to be spiritual in this world without being a Pollyanna or a simpleton—that I found myself wanting to meet the man, to see such a Catholic in the flesh. I wondered, too, if he and Rinpoche knew each other, if they read each other’s books, sneaked out of tiresome ecumenical conferences in St. Louis or L.A. for a quick round of miniature golf and a Coke.

  The meditation I had then was the quietest of the retreat. For forty-five minutes I sat in a calm, warm pool. There were thoughts, but they were set against a larger, thought-free background. For long periods of time I watched them arrive and depart without being tugged along in their wake. It wasn’t that the true cares of the world had ceased to exist, that I was no longer missing Jeannie or worrying about Natasha. But I could somehow let those things go without abandoning them, or feeling guilty about standing outside them in an unworried place.

  With that, one hour of yoga, and my usual circumambulation of the cabin, the time before lunch passed quickly. Shelsa’s quiet knock came as a welcome surprise. I watched her unload the basket: the usual assortment of fruit, seeds, greens, and today’s entrée—one large acorn squash, baked and sliced in half with fresh strawberries in the center. This time, though, Shelsa took a folded note from the bottom of the basket and handed it over.

  My Darling Brother,

  I know this must have been hard for you, but I can feel that you have turned a corner today. Trust me, I can feel it. And please trust Rinpoche. Let him guide you.

  It is such a pure joy for me to have you here. I really, really wish you would consider making this your home.

  Love,

  Your sister Cecelia

  Ravenous as I was, I enjoyed sharing the modest lunch with my niece. I watched her as we ate, looking for I don’t know exactly what, some sign that she wasn’t an ordinary six-year-old girl, some confirmation of the things I’d been hearing—and doubting—since before she was born. There was, I have to say, a certain shimmer about her, a glow. But isn’t it true that all children, if they’re surrounded by a normal amount of warmth and if they live without abuse or craziness, have a certain glow about them? I remembered it so well from Natasha and Anthony’s early years. I remembered seeing it in my neighbor, Levi, on the flight west. It could be simply a lack of suspicion or worry, an absence of guilt, a full embrace of the present, the sense that one is lovable and loved. Or it could be something more profound than that—an as-yet-unforgotten link to another world.

  The odd thing was, as Jeannie drew closer to death, there was something of that glow to her, as well. She became not more childish or childlike, but more open and vulnerable. The phrase I want to use is less veiled, but that would seem to assert that she’d been a woman of false personality, of armor, and that wasn’t the case. Even as her body weakened, there remained some force there, some essence, and I remembered puzzling over that, feeling as if she were becoming larger in the room. I am miles past romanticizing her suffering. I’m not saying that. I’m saying there was this mysterious her-ness that swelled up around my wife even as her body and personality grew frail. I am saying I saw it very clearly, beyond her su
ffering, and I’m wondering if she saw it—or felt it—too.

  In our last lunch at the retreat cabin I felt that same thing with Shelsa. What words can one put to it? There is the body, the personality, and then there is this something else. In her, in every childlike gesture and look, this something else was enormous, enveloping; it filled the room like oxygen. She looked into my eyes and smiled a small Buddha smile and for some reason then I found myself comparing her to Gilligan Neufaren. A brilliant, personable, enviable man, he nevertheless seemed to be someone in whom this essence was tiny, covered over, a seed in the center of a huge, pulpy piece of fruit with sugary skin. He had a hunger about him, and wanted to endlessly eat and take and ask and harvest. Shelsa gave.

  “Did you have a weewization?” she inquired, fixing me with the bottomless brown eyes.

  “I’m having it,” I said.

  And she smiled more widely then, in a way that could almost be described as ecstatic, and said she was going back to tell Papi and Mami and Tash.

  “Tell Jasper, too,” I said, and that made her laugh and clap her hands.

  When she was gone, I went to the meditation cushion. The reading for the day came from the very last passage of Leaves of Grass:

  Dear friend, whoever you are, take this kiss,

  I give it especially to you—Do not forget me,

  I feel like one who has done his work—I progress on,

  The unknown sphere, more real than I dreamed, more direct, darts awakening rays about me—So Long!

  Remember my words—I love you—I depart from materials,

  I am as one disembodied, triumphant, dead.

  I sat on the tattered couch and closed my eyes. I felt that I was sitting there not as a Protestant or a Buddhist, not as anyone’s disciple or student, not even—and this is strange—as father, husband, uncle, or friend. I was a presence in the world, unnamed.