The Mama Sutra

by Anne Cushman

  For some answers, Forest and I can turn to the dictionary, the encyclopedia, or the Internet. I buy him a beautiful book about the origins of the universe called Born with a Bang, which tells him that every particle of his body is made from stardust formed in a mother star that exploded billions of years ago. Curled on the couch by the fire with him in my lap, I read it aloud to him, and we marvel together.

  But ultimately, I want for him what I want for myself—to be able to live in the mystery itself and trust its creative unfolding. I want him to wrestle with the challenge of how to live with peace and integrity in a complex and sometimes violent world. I want him to learn, as the poet Rainer Maria Rilke writes in Letters to a Young Poet, to “try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books written in a foreign tongue.” I don’t want the illusion of definitive answers to form a tough skin on his tender heart, which still vibrates with equal sympathy for yeast, soldiers, cockroaches, John Lennon.

  Forest still thinks that I can give him answers. But the truth is that he is the one who is teaching me. His endless questions remind me again and again of the joy and heartbreak and unsolvable koans that surround us at every moment. And they remind me to be grateful for the chance to be alive in the middle of this vast unknown.

  Every night before dinner, Forest and I hold hands and he offers an improvised blessing. One evening, as the relentless spring rains beat down on our roof, he takes my hand, looks at our baked tofu, rice, and salad, and says, “Thank you to the earth for making all this food. Thank you to the rain for helping to grow it. Thank you to all the great people we love. And thank you to the big bang for making it all happen.”

  It’s the first time I’ve ever said “thank you” to the big bang. But I have a feeling that it won’t be the last.

  SUTRA 10

  Astronomy Lessons

  • • • • •

  ON A CLEAR spring evening when Forest is six years old, we drive to the Chabot Space and Science Center in the Berkeley hills to look at Saturn through a twenty-eight-foot telescope.

  Outer space is Forest’s latest passion. He pores over jumbles of books with titles such as 100 Things You Should Know about Space. He has a deck of cards bearing images from the Hubble Space Telescope on one side and space trivia on the other: “How is a supernova formed?” “How can scientists tell which direction a galaxy rotates?” Space has never been something I’ve thought much about, so Forest’s books, which he likes me to read aloud to him after dinner, regularly blow my mind. “ ‘Dark matter’ is what scientists call all the stuff in the universe that they know is there but can’t find!” one book has informed us cheerfully. It goes on: “Scientists can guess how much matter is in the universe by measuring how galaxies move. This shows them that stars and planets only make up a small part of the universe. The rest is invisible!” I’d thought about that one all week, astounded that astronomers aren’t all raving mystics, prostrating in abject awe before their telescopes.

  “What’s outside the universe?” we read in the same book a few nights later. “Scientists are still trying to guess, by using clues left behind from the birth of our universe. They are pretty sure there would be no time, distance, or things there.” That last sentence sounded like a chant that should be intoned in a Zen temple to the beat of an enormous drum. But instead I was reading it at my kitchen table while Forest nibbled on a pink, egg-shaped cookie that he believed was hidden in our house on Easter morning by a giant magical rabbit. And who could blame him? In a world of big bangs and wormholes to other galaxies, I could almost believe in the Easter Bunny myself.

  Forest and I go to the Chabot observatory with one of Forest’s best friends, Nick, a bright-eyed, dimpled kindergartener three months younger than Forest, who shares Forest’s passion for science. Nick is fascinated by microbiology—his favorite toys are his stuffed microbes (cuddly renditions of germs ranging from influenza to anthrax). One Halloween he went trick-or-treating costumed as “athlete’s foot.” Forest and Nick have been friends since before they could walk, when Nick’s mother, May, and I used to stroll to the neighborhood park with the boys in frontpacks over our hearts. On one of those walks, May and I discovered that we shared the same birthday, and we’ve celebrated together ever since.

  When Forest needed social skills therapy when he was three for what was being called an autism spectrum disorder, it was Nick I called over to be his playmate in coached games in our living room. And it was May, herself a special-education teacher, who was most vocal in reassuring me that he was going to be just fine: “Your child is bigger than his diagnosis.”

  A few months later, Nick’s preschool teacher noted that he was behind on his physical milestones and recommended a checkup with his pediatrician. “It’s probably nothing,” I reassured her. “Kids develop at different paces.” But the following week, May called me, sobbing, and told me that Nick had just been diagnosed with Duchenne muscular dystrophy, a genetic disease that causes severe muscular degeneration. “Most kids who have it die by their early twenties,” she told me. My heart aching, I told her Forest and I would always be there in whatever way we could.

  At six, Nick is now undergoing experimental genetic therapy that, over the next decade, could mean the difference between life and death for him. He can’t run as fast as other children, and he has a hard time climbing stairs. But in the presence of his bubbling laugh, it’s often hard to remember his illness. It’s hard to remember that left unchecked, the disease will claim his legs, and he won’t be able to walk. Eventually, it could stop his heart.

  Of course, over the course of their friendship, Forest has had his own set of developmental challenges, although none life-threatening. Over the years, this friendship with Nick has often been a refuge for them both, a safe place to celebrate each other in all their gifts and difficulties. They’ve shared their mutual passions for things most of their peers just don’t get, such as making an elaborate map of the 101 freeway with crayons and construction paper. They’ve created their own code language, which involves things such as naming a favorite dessert made of ice cream and cookies “peach flavored bunny rabbit.” Once they organized their own protest march in Nick’s kitchen, objecting to the fact that they couldn’t play upstairs in his dad’s home office. Carrying hand-lettered signs, they stomped back and forth through the kitchen, bellowing out faux-hippie freedom chants about their right to access the upper reaches of the house.

  Before our visit to the space center, Forest and I meet up with Nick and his mother on the outdoor patio of a Thai restaurant. “Boosey-duck!” the boys greet each other in their private nonsense language. Then they discuss—over spring rolls and pumpkin curry—the size and speed of the asteroid that smashed into the earth sixty-five million years ago, rendering the dinosaurs extinct. Nick says the erupting lava burned the dinosaurs to a crisp; Forest argues that the cloud of dust and ash blocked out the sun, causing them to freeze and starve. They punctuate their scientific debate by blowing through straws into their water until it sprays all over the patio and then stomping in the puddles. While May and I finish eating, they dance to the country-western band playing in a nearby courtyard—waving their arms over their heads, rolling on the ground, and leapfrogging over each other.

  We arrive at Chabot just as the sky is darkening over the dome-shaped observatory, which houses the largest telescope in the United States open to the public. As we wait in line, Nick and Forest regale us with Saturn trivia: Its rings are actually made of chunks of ice and rock. It’s almost 800 times the size of the earth, but it’s so light that if you put it in a giant ocean, it would float. Forest chats with the woman behind us—a fellow space geek in her midthirties—about Jupiter’s 62 moons and about Proxima Centauri, our sun’s nearest star, which is four light-years away. “Do you know how far that is in miles?” the woman asks. Forest frowns thoughtfully. “To calculate that,” he said, “you’d have to multiply 186,000 miles
per second, times 60 seconds per minute, times 60 minutes per hour, times 24 hours per day, times 365 days per year, times 4 years. I can’t do it in my head. There are too many zeroes.”

  When it’s our turn, we climb up a stepladder one at a time to peer through the telescope’s eyepiece. “Mom, you’ve got to see this!” Forest gasps. I climb up for my turn and press my eye to the viewfinder. There, nine hundred million miles away, is Saturn—bright yellow, ringed, and as shiny as candy. It looks just like the plastic Saturn suspended by string and putty from Forest’s ceiling. Dotted around it are the five shiny specks of its largest moons.

  On the deck outside the observatory, more space buffs are gathering. Many of them have brought telescopes of their own—a kind of astronomer’s potluck—and they are training them on different celestial objects for anyone to see. Forest and Nick race giddily from telescope to telescope, checking out Venus and craters on the moon, shouting out “I newt you, newt you, newt you!”—another mysterious game that only they understand.

  “Nick, come see this red giant!” shouts Forest, peering at a distant star named Betelgeuse. A red giant, I know from Forest’s space books, is an ancient, immensely swollen star on its way to blowing up or fading out. Some astronomers predict that Betelgeuse will go supernova in the next thousand years or so, in a massive explosion that will be as brightly visible as the moon in our night sky—a smaller scale version of the ancient exploding star that created every element in our solar system. But that night, even through the telescope, Betelgeuse is still just a blurry reddish speck, five hundred light-years away.

  The moonlight is so bright tonight you can almost read by it. Forest and Nick, momentarily satiated on outer space, practice their cartwheels. May and I sit on a low cement wall and watch them: two boys as mysterious and impermanent as spinning planets, their bodies made from stardust forged in the belly of an ancient sun. I imagine the awe of the first astronomer to point a telescope at the sky and see Saturn’s rings—when for millennia humans had only been able to see a dot in the sky, a deity whose movements they believed could plunge their own lives into chaos.

  Years earlier I had asked May how she managed to stay so cheerful as she worked to keep Nick healthy—researching treatments, taking him to doctors, keeping him strong with supplements, and praying for science to come up with a cure. She’d said, “No one knows how long they’re going have with their child. I just try to enjoy every day.”

  As I watch the boys turn cartwheels under the moon, a Zen chant runs through my head: “Within light there is darkness, but do not try to understand that darkness. Within darkness there is light, but do not look for that light.”

  No one knows what gravity is, Forest’s space books have informed me. It’s just a convenient name we give to the attraction that keeps the moon wheeling around the earth and the earth around the sun—that keeps the different pieces of the universe yearning toward each other, instead of ricocheting off into space.

  With human beings, maybe that job is done by love.

  Watching Forest and Nick turn cartwheels, I remember Sierra kicking inside me. And I ache with my longing to keep both Forest and Nick happy and safe in a world of car wrecks and viruses and guns and bullies and malfunctioning genes. It is a wish so huge I can’t even calculate its size; there are too many zeroes.

  All I can do is be present with them both—feeling the tug on my heart of everything in the universe I know is there but can’t see, peering through telescopes at stars dying and being reborn, light-years away.

  SUTRA 11

  A Passage Back to India

  • • • • •

  TWO DAYS INTO my trip through India, I realize just how much has changed since I last backpacked through here a dozen years earlier, as a footloose young traveler researching an ashram guidebook.

  This revelation arises as I check my email in the Vishnu Internet Café in Bodh Gaya, a pilgrimage town in rural northeastern India, down the street from the temple marking the spot where the Buddha is said to have attained enlightenment almost 2,600 years ago. Last time I’d been to what was then the sleepy little town of Bodh Gaya, there were no Internet cafés for travelers in India—in fact, I’d only recently gotten an email address myself for the computer I’d left behind in California—and I’d felt as if I’d time-traveled to the land of the ancient rishis. Now, outside the window, a pony pulls a cart emblazoned with an Airtel ad past a group of Tibetan monks shopping for Nikes. Inside, at a public computer topped by a garlanded shrine to Ganesha, the Hindu god of new beginnings, I pore over pictures of Forest—now almost seven years old—currently snorkeling with his dad in Hawaii.

  Hijacked by homesickness, I log off and try to call them, but the rural phone lines won’t let the call through. Letting go of personal ties is part of the spiritual path, I remind myself as I struggle with my disappointment. The Buddha himself left a young son behind so he could meditate in Bodh Gaya. “No problem, madame,” the phone wallah interrupts my musings—and hands me his personal cell phone. I tap in Forest’s dad’s number—and as I hear it ring, I feel the wireless bonds of family that connect us around the world.

  I’ve come on this trip to do some last-minute site research for the novel I’m just finishing—Enlightenment for Idiots, the tale of a young American wannabe yoga teacher looking for awakening while floundering through her increasingly disastrous love life. I’d begun writing the novel when Forest was just two years old, as an attempt to synthesize wildly different transformative experiences from my personal life—traveling through India, becoming a mother, going through a divorce. In its first incarnation, it had been written in the form of letters back and forth between two best friends who had planned to go to India together, until one of them gets pregnant through an affair with her yoga teacher and has to stay behind. But six months into the writing, someone in my writing group told me that she was having a hard time telling apart the voices of the two characters. That’s when it had hit me—What if they’re actually the same person?

  Now the novel is almost finished—in a month I’ll be handing it over to my editor at Random House. But first I want to update my impressions of places I’d visited over a decade ago, while looking at them through the eyes of my novel’s twenty-nine-year-old protagonist, Amanda. Rishikesh, the Himalayan town where Amanda goes to find a yoga master and get over her breakup with the cheating boyfriend she’s vowed never to see again. Varanasi, the city of Shiva, where devout Hindus come to die and be cremated in open fires along the banks of the Ganges, and where Amanda learns that her ex has followed her to India to try to win her back. Bodh Gaya, where he and Amanda quarrel outside the cave where the Buddha used to meditate, and she gives him the unwelcome news that her spiritual journey is now going to include a baby.

  I didn’t want to travel in India alone, the way I had a decade earlier. So I managed to convince the Indian Tourism Office in Los Angeles to give me not one but two free tickets in exchange for the great PR my novel would provide to Indian tourism. My dear friend Janice, a fellow yoga teacher and mom whose daughter is two years younger than Forest, would be going with me. She is part of the sisterhood that supported me after my marriage fell apart, when I’d moved to the tiny hippie town in West Marin where she lived. We’ve raised our kids like brother and sister. Neither one of us has ever been away from them for more than a few days. As we’d stuffed our carry-on backpacks into the overhead racks and sat down in our Air India seats, we looked at each other in amazement. “It feels fantastic,” Janice said. “But it also kind of feels as if I’ve forgotten to bring one of my arms.”

  I had first come to India when I was roughly my character Amanda’s age, on a guided tour of Buddhist sites led by an Indian friend I’d met on a meditation retreat. Admittedly, I’d been distracted from my spiritual quest by the fact that I had developed a major crush on my tour guide. I spent most of my meditation under the Bodhi Tree—a fourth-generation descende
nt of the actual tree that sheltered the Buddha while he eradicated all desire—wondering if it would be possible to lure him into a romantic evening in the baths of the Japanese resort in Rajgir. (Alas, it wasn’t.)

  My crush melted away as soon as I got on the plane home. But my love affair with India didn’t. A year later, I’d gone back, armed with a book contract, a travel-weight yoga mat, and a laptop computer (which I abandoned in favor of a spiral notebook after I blew an ashram’s electrical circuits).

  Over the next couple of years, I spent almost eight months in India, trekking from guru to guru. I’d sweated through back-breaking yoga classes, meditated with Tibetan lamas, bowed before orange-robed swamis with names as long and curly as their beards. I’d careened in decrepit buses down roads jammed with cows and elephants and fume-belching trucks, their windshields decked with streamers and images of blue gods. I’d learned to tie a sari, to go without toilet paper, to eat rice and dal with my hands, and to ask at least three people before assuming that I was on the right train. Hiking toward the source of the Ganges River, I’d gotten caught in a Himalayan blizzard and spent the night in a cave with a sadhu, one of the wandering renunciate mystics who have been part of the fabric of Indian society since long before the time of the Buddha.

  Then I went home to California—and as the years went by my memories of India had dissolved like incense smoke. I’d gotten married in a Zen temple, given birth to a beautiful daughter, wished that I could have died in her place. I’d given birth to a healthy son and learned that green shoots of joy can sprout from the scorched earth of despair. My marriage had unraveled, and I’d wept and smashed wedding china on the deck behind our house. I’d divorced and moved to a mountaintop home, where I had watched hawks circling on the currents of wind below my windows. My son had started kindergarten, lost his first tooth, and had his first piano recital. His dad and I had sat side by side in the audience and cheered.