“My work partner motioned me in silence to get to the back end of a trunk and together we’d lift it up on our shoulders and carry it down. Well, I knew that it was impossible for me to do it. I can’t remember who I was with, but he was huge—probably was a football player in college. I couldn’t think ‘impossible’—I couldn’t think. I’d freak out. So I just did it. I walked across this long field with that huge trunk. If I thought, I would panic and the trunk would come crashing on top of me. At one point we passed Neil. He was raking. I saw him out of the corner of my eye. I think he stopped dead and was staring with his mouth open.” My friend and I laughed. “But I didn’t dare look at him. No thought. No thought. I just had to keep walking with that trunk.”
Later my friend and I took a walk. When we got to the top of a hill, she turned to me. “You know, I realize you did something in Minnesota. You were gone and now you’re back, so I forget those years, but something happened.”
I nodded. It was true. And I remembered more about that weekend. I had seen wild turkeys up the hill in the afternoon, and the full moon crested the bluff near the Mississippi just as we stepped out from evening zazen.
The next morning had been very cold. There was frost on the bell. We hadn’t expected it to get that cold that early in the year. After all, we slept and sat in tents. After the two periods of zazen beginning at five A.M., I was signed up to be the breakfast server. Servers never wore socks or gloves. I had to bow, barefoot, with my big pot of steaming rice in front of each student, then kneel on the ground and serve them—they were all sitting on the floor on cushions—then lug up the pot and go to the next person. I was cold. Roshi was the last person to be served. I couldn’t wait to get it over with, to run out of the tent and put on my socks and gloves. As I knelt in front of Roshi, about to scoop a ladle of rice into his bowl, he sharply, clearly said to me, “Eat the cold.” I took a deep breath, slowed down, and tried to open to weather. This man wasn’t kidding around. Don’t run away, not even from cold—digest it, he was saying. And he meant this for all my life, not just the moment I was there.
Now I was a thousand miles away from him. My deep love for him bound me to the teachings, kept me in them when I forgot them, now that I was back in New Mexico, far from the Minnesota zendo.
That is one of the things a teacher does for a student. She gives the student a personal connection to the teachings. They are no longer abstract high ideals. They are real. The Buddha dharma became a reality for me, because I saw Katagiri Roshi living it.
This is no different from an English teacher sharing a poet with you. Mr. Clemente read Dylan Thomas and Brother Antonius aloud to us at the beginning of class and said, “I like this.” I liked Mr. Clemente and I wanted to hear what he liked. It is much harder—almost impossible—to enter the teachings, even of poetry, on our own. Somewhere along the way someone showed us the beauty of one poem, so then we could enter other poems.
Jack Kerouac, the famous Beat author who wrote On the Road, read the Buddhist sutras and tried to sit meditation alone without a teacher. It was too hard. He did not succeed in any regular practice. He died an alcoholic, choking on his own vomit in Florida, living with his mother.
But, of course, being on the Buddhist path is no guarantee. We each have to eat the teachings ourselves. I remember Roshi telling me that there were ten monks ordained when he was ordained. One was now in jail; one went crazy and now was in a mental hospital; one physically attacked his teacher; and one committed suicide. He didn’t know what had happened to the others. “Life is no guarantee,” he said often. “You must make effort.”
I finished Writing Down the Bones and began a novel, Banana Rose. I left Santa Fe, moved back to Taos, and had a solar one-room house built on the mesa next to my friends Gini and Michael. I went up to Minnesota about once a year, and when I was there, I’d visit Roshi. There he is, I’d think to myself when I saw him. Still here. Still studying the sutras, still sitting.
I asked him a question. “You know, Roshi, I’m writing a novel. Some of it’s about me and Neil. I think I’m still protecting him. My friends say, ‘You have to tell the truth.’ I don’t want to hurt him. I’m not writing the book to be mean.”
Roshi didn’t hesitate. He nodded. “Yes, you have to tell the truth.”
Then his face lit up. “Don’t worry. You won’t hurt Neil, you’ll help him. He’ll read the book and know you better. He’ll read the book and know what a woman is.”
I smiled. My face lit up. He gave me tremendous permission. “Thank you,” I said and that one short interview carried me easily for a year. I brought it home to Taos, chewed at it, shared it with my students: “If you write the truth, it doesn’t hurt people, it helps them. They know you better.”
Roshi went on sabbatical for a year to Japan. I was deep in Banana Rose, drinking mint tea at the Garden Restaurant every morning, while I kept my hand moving across the page, parking my car at an angle through the snow slush on the Taos plaza, walking out into the open sunlight at one o’clock after I was done writing. It sounds simple now. It was hard. Writing that novel, staying with it, was one of the hardest things I’d ever done. Knowing that it was a practice, that a practice was something you continued under all circumstances—Roshi had trained me in this—was what kept me going. I was making the teachings mine.
I finished the second draft of Banana Rose in January 1989. For several months, Roshi had been back in Minnesota from his sabbatical, and I heard he wasn’t feeling well. He was in and out of the hospital. Pneumonia? Tuberculosis? There were many rumors. When I called Zen Center, everything was vague. This vagueness protected me.
Right before I flew to Baja in Mexico to hop a boat to follow the blue whales as a celebration for finishing my novel, I heard the word “cancer” on the long distance telephone wire that stretched from Minnesota to New Mexico. Cancer. My mind stopped. Cancer. It stunned me. The word echoed in my hollow skull. Cancer. Cancer. No mention of anything fatal. Chemotherapy. Radiation. “Roshi’s in good spirits,” the long-distance voice said. “He’ll be all right.” Cancer. I hung up the phone. Cancer. My whole bone structure dissolved and anything else that held me up on two feet. I don’t remember if I cried then or not. At that moment it was deeper than crying.
Several times we caught sight of the blue whales. Their tails, their enormous backs. I was the only one aboard who did not bring a camera, who viewed those animals with her naked eye. The rest of the passengers snapped picture after picture, never taking their face from the lens. I planned to buy a few postcards when we hit land. I was sure a professional photographer had snapped a good one.
At night, when everyone was asleep below, I climbed on the upper deck, squatted by the rail, looked out at the sea, the amazing star-studded night sky, and I cried. I repeated over and over, “Please don’t die. Please don’t die.”
At the same time I felt that this was the destiny of my teacher, the man who worked so hard to bring the dharma to America. He was only sixty-one years old. I had lived as though I had years left with this man. I’d never said it to myself before, but crying those nights on the deck I knew I loved this person more than anyone I had ever loved, and the love was full, clean, not broken by resentment, no holding back—this teacher had been able to pull that kind of love out of me. My heart poured forth with gratitude. If he was dying, I didn’t know what I would do without him. Though I hadn’t lived in Minnesota for four and a half years, Roshi was still my guiding light. I had no other model but him, though I think I never thought it possible to be like him.
In interviews and classes and among friends, people have asked me over the years, “So whom do you admire? Who are your models?” My response was singular, “Katagiri Roshi.” Katagiri Roshi? What about women—Rosa Luxemburg? Gloria Steinem? No, Katagiri Roshi. What about writers? Eudora Welty? Willa Cather? Colette? Yes, I like them; they’re fine, too, but for me everything paled next to Roshi, a small Japanese man who spoke broken English. I could go into dok
usan, speak to him straight, and be answered straight. And never for a moment did I have to be concerned about him crossing a sexual boundary. I did not have to close down or protect myself. This is no small feat given the sexual transgressions of many spiritual teachers today. I needed that freedom to find myself, a place to step out whole, to be treated whole. I was in the presence of someone who was paying attention. Paying large attention. As though you suddenly planted the sun into a seat in a busy café and it beamed there. Think of that power, to work like the sun. The café would get quiet; everyone would turn toward it. And this power is in all of us: to shine in our heavens.
But I wasn’t idealistic. My feelings were grounded in reality: I knew Roshi had trouble expressing his emotions; he clashed with some of the students; some thought he was too rigid, old-fashioned; the sangha was sometimes narrow, slow, did not reflect his magnanimity. Finally, he was disappointed in the midwestern students’ commitment and in their inability to raise the money to realize his dream of a permanent monastery near New Albin, Iowa:
I wish to build a place and an environment to promote the quiet sangha life in unity. We have some land, and I want to construct a building there to practice the Way revering the old ways. I think that the mode of old ways reveals the modern one from a different aspect. Modern life is artificially protected. When the artificial environment collapses, for instance in a natural disaster or an economic calamity, people suffer severely. Modern people, therefore, need to live in direct contact with nature and find a practice method in tune with nature’s rhythm. Old ways of life fit this purpose. Such a life will put the modern life in a different perspective and teach us how we should live. Therefore, I am convinced we must build such a practice place in America.
But he was patient, he continued.
And now he had cancer. Finally, in May, it dawned on me that I should visit. I think I wanted everything to get better long distance, for him to be healed, and then I could forget his mortality. I was in denial, scared. He was getting out of the hospital after a long series of chemotherapy treatments and complications. I called ahead of time to let him know I was coming. He asked Tomoe, his wife, to request that I give a poetry reading at Zen Center while I was there, to lift people’s spirits. I said, “Of course,” but all I really wanted to do was see him. I would be happy just to have tea with him for ten minutes. I knew he wasn’t well. I braced myself for seeing him. I knew he might look very different; old, thin, tired.
I brought his favorite shortbread cookies and small purple flowers—he loved any kind. We sat in his living room. We joked. He looked beautiful. It was hard to believe that he was so ill. I told him I loved him. He nodded. I told him, “When you were well, I didn’t miss you. It was okay that I was so far away, but now I miss you all the time.” He nodded.
That night, I read in the zendo. He didn’t come down; I didn’t expect him to, but a long time later Tomoe told me he lay down on a blanket on their living room floor, which was above the zendo, so he could hear me. He hoped I would sing a funny song I’d written many years earlier that he liked, about being on the Zen center’s land. It was called “Boodie Land.” I was surprised. I didn’t even remember the song anymore. I never knew it meant so much to him. I remember thinking at the time I wrote it that it might be a bit disrespectful or sacrilegious.
Two days after that reading, I returned to New Mexico, but now even my darling state couldn’t hold me. It was as though all my cells turned toward that one northern midwestern city that held my teacher. I sent presents each week: wooden birds from Mexico, a turquoise and gray Pendleton blanket, a Zuni amber coyote fetish with a turquoise arrow at its heart indicating healing. Still, when I called Zen Center, it was hard to figure out what was going on. He completed chemotherapy and radiation treatments. They were waiting to see if his cancer went into remission. Tomoe called me early one morning, ecstatic, “The tests show no more cancer.”
I went into a cautious relief. I dreamed that night that I was walking round and round Zen Center, that I was keeping guard. That morning, I decided that after I finished Wild Mind, the new book I was working on, I’d go up there for a few months and help out. If he was healing, I’d help him heal, and if he was dying—please, no—I’d help him do that. There was no place else I wanted to be, but near him.
Two or three weeks after Tomoe’s call, I received another one. “They found cancer again.” More chemotherapy, but the Zen students were optimistic. Roshi was on a pure diet; he was doing visualizations, receiving special acupuncture treatments.
At the end of September—I had one more month until I could move up there—the word “dying” was mentioned on the long distance wire. I hung up. The word I knew to be behind every thought but was not said, now was said. I sat down on the couch and I cried as though the earth poured out of me. That afternoon I was supposed to take a small Mesa Airlines plane to Albuquerque from the Taos airport seven miles from my home. Then I was to take a cab to the Pyramid Hotel and give a talk the next morning to a conference of English teachers. I had two hours until the plane left. I was crying so hard I left logic—I couldn’t calculate how long I needed to get to the plane and coordinate that with the hands on the clock over my refrigerator. I drove those seven miles as though my car were Jell-O and I was sliding across a vista of sage brush. I pulled into the Taos airport just as they were closing the door on the plane. I ran down the runway and they let me on. We flew over the Rio Grande gorge and over country I knew well, but I’d never seen it from this angle: There were Dixon, Velarde, the apple orchards. Roshi wasn’t dead yet, not yet, not yet. There was time.
I checked in at the Pyramid and went straight to my room. I was on the sixth floor, overlooking a golf course. It was early evening. I sat and stared out the big window that did not open and watched night descend over my sky. I did not leave the room. I did not sleep. I cried through most of the night. I didn’t prepare a talk. The next morning I wore sunglasses to the lectern—my eyes were swollen. I took a deep breath, removed the dark glasses and looked at three hundred teachers. I hoped something would come. To my surprise, I talked about pleasure, about teaching out of pleasure, of teaching what you love. The audience was pleased. I put the sunglasses back on and headed for the back of the room and out to a cab at the front of the hotel. I flew back to Taos and though I was driving up to Minnesota in a month for a long stay, I made plane reservations for the coming weekend. I wanted to go up there and I didn’t want to wait.
Unbeknownst to me, a group of twelve, the monks whom Roshi had ordained and Yvonne Rand, who had also studied with him, were called into Minneapolis that weekend. Plans for dharma transmission, the carrying on of the lineage, were being made. Roshi wasn’t strong enough to do the whole ten-day ceremony, so his close friend Tsugen Narasaki Roshi was going to come in from Japan in December to perform it. This weekend, before he might become too weak, Roshi was to perform the part of the ceremony—eye-to-eye with the teacher—that was essential to take place with him in order for the transmission to be legitimate.
Shoken and Nonin, two American monks, flew in from Japan. Someone flew in from Milwaukee; another person from St. Louis; Yvonne Rand, from California. Most of the monks I had known before their ordinations, when they were Floyd and Mike, Janet and Roberta, before they took on their dharma names, Shoken, Dosho, Joen, Teijo.
I don’t even remember getting to see Roshi that weekend—he was too sick, conserving his strength for the ceremony, but I was so happy to be there, near him, among my old friends. I felt like the thirteenth monk. I joined them for dinner; they invited me into the Buddha hall to chant with them. They thought Roshi would do the ceremony from his bed, but Roshi insisted on dressing in full regalia, in his special silk monk robes, and they told me he sat in full lotus as he performed the ceremony for each monk individually.
Some of the monks had drifted from Zen Center over the years, had gotten involved with family life and children. Suddenly everyone was called together, called out o
f their homes and jobs to receive this dharma transmission, probably too early, too young in their practice, but Roshi might be dying—still the word was hardly mentioned. Roshi said he did it this way so things would not become political, so the transmission would be spread out among several people. He said no one was ready; over time, someone might emerge as a teacher.
It was during that weekend that Nonin remembered he was the one carrying those big logs with me on the Zen land that weekend. He was Don Chowaney then. “I wondered why you were so scared.” He laughed. “Of course, look how much smaller you are than me.” It was that weekend that I began to regret not having been ordained as a monk, only so I, too, could have eye-to-eye with my dearest teacher.
On Monday, I flew back to New Mexico and worked hard to finish Wild Mind. Those few weeks were a blur for me. I was racing against time, against the heartbeat and breath of my teacher. I sent the manuscript to my editor, locked up my house, packed up my car and drove north through Colorado and Nebraska. I remember staying in a hotel in Nebraska, near Kearney, that had free videos. I watched Gone with the Wind late into the night, and the next morning sped on to Minnesota.
I settled into my friends’, Joni and Cary’s, house on York Avenue—they had an extra bedroom—and I made a vow to go to Zen Center each day, whether anyone else was there or not, and to make myself useful. I was assured I couldn’t see Roshi: he was too sick. I didn’t expect to see him; I wanted to help.