Long Quiet Highway

  “Come home. Your father’s having a nervous breakdown and you’re up there in a commune with Charles Manson.”

  “Mom, I’m not with Charles Manson. As a matter of fact, a rabbi is up here right now. What’s the matter with Daddy?”

  My father’s older brother had died six months earlier and hadn’t mentioned my father in the will. Though my father didn’t care about being left money, he wanted to be recognized. My mother told me he would stand at the bar, wiping the countertop with a white cloth and talk to his brother in his mind. “Jacob, I loved you so much. You didn’t mention me in the will, like I never existed for you. I didn’t care about the money, but at least to say, ‘And Buddy, remember I loved you.’ Nothing. All that love wasted.” And right there in the bar, in the middle of the day, in front of his customers, my father would break down crying.

  “Why doesn’t he take some time off?” I asked. As I stood by the road, the mountain air grew chilly. I buttoned up my sweater.

  “He can’t. He has to work. Why don’t you come home?” she insisted.

  “I don’t know. I’ll let you know. Send him my love.” I hung up. I felt confused. I was happy where I was. I didn’t know what I could do for my father.

  I pulled out of the parking lot and didn’t see a young motorcyclist coming toward me. He curved wide in order to avoid my car and ran into the sage. I stopped. He was okay, but he was screaming at me. “You dumb fuck, look where you’re going.”

  I burst out crying and drove up the mountain sobbing for my father, his brother, for the distance between us. I parked at Lama. The moon was near full. The forest was silver with dark shadows. Just as I got out of my car, Rabbi Zalman walked by.

  “Rabbi,” I called out. He came over, he could see I had been crying.

  “What is it, mamala?” he asked, putting his hand to my face.

  “My father’s having a nervous breakdown. They want me to come home. I think I want to stay here,” I blurted out.

  “You are doing a beautiful thing being here. You stay here. I will pray for him. Tell me, what is his name, your father?”

  “Benjamin.”

  “And his mother’s name?”

  “Rose.”

  “I will pray for Benjamin, the son of Rose. He will be all right. You be happy here.”

  I smiled. I was happy. I did not want to go.

  The next day I wrote a long letter to my parents and stayed at Lama. A month later, without my help, my father was back to normal.

  All through that summer, I met different religious teachers. An American Indian came to work with us, a Sufi, a Catholic monk. All these teachers were different from the ones I had met in public school and college. They did not make a weekly salary, keep regular daily school work hours, wear suits, teach from books, have us sit at desks. What they taught was their way of life. It did not end at the end of a work day. Their work was integrated with everything they did. And what we learned most from them was who they were as people, and that each one had a path—Judaism, Christianity, Hinduism—to refine who they were.

  In algebra class, it didn’t matter so much what Mr. Johnson was like as a person. In fact, he was rude and mean, he humiliated Milly Polson for not having a clean cover on her textbook and a sharpened pencil, but we could still learn from him the area of Q divided by the square root of A. Mr. Johnson disseminated information; his job was not to transmit his being.

  The teachers up at Lama transmitted who they were, how they saw the world, how they struggled with their own human lives, and how they understood what it meant to be human in relation to plants, animals, inanimate objects, the earth, and the heavens. They ate with us; they took walks with us; they prayed and sang with us.

  This was what I had been dying for through all those empty classroom hours. When Mr. DiFrancisco, my ninth-grade American history teacher, paused from writing dates on the blackboard to tell us he wouldn’t be in the next day because he was getting married, the entire class rippled with life. We were thrilled. The man up there writing 1892 on the board was a human being, he must have kissed a girl, and after tomorrow night, he was going to “do it,” our reference to intercourse. I couldn’t wait for the following Monday to see the ring on his finger—his left hand: I knew that much.

  The Lama teachers also gave us a practice, something to do on our own after they left, a way to begin to teach ourselves. Hari Dass taught us yoga and pranayama, breath exercises; Rabbi Zalman shared Sabbath and prayer; a Sufi teacher showed us dancing and swirling and singing. In public school, I generally forgot everything about world history as soon as the school year was over. These teachers taught us something central to the rest of our lives and a way, a practice, to continue it.

  Many of these religious teachers still had old ideas about women, but most were also deep enough not to be frozen by their ideas. No female teachers came to Lama while I was there. By that time, I was a staunch feminist, but I was willing to put it aside, or to try to keep quiet about it, because there was something there I wanted badly, and I didn’t want to get caught in feminist arguments. I wanted to get as much as I could of what these teachers had. Later I would make it mine, make it woman-centered.

  I liked all the teachers—my heart was open—but I discovered that my real interest was meditation. None of the teachers I met at Lama spoke directly about it, but some of the Lama staff sat in meditation regularly and I sat with them every morning and every evening in the small adobe kiva that was built next to the dome. It was the first thing I did when I woke up in the morning and the last thing I did before I went to sleep. The Lama staff taught me different techniques: to count the breath, to visualize a full lotus on my forehead, to name different sensations in my body. I tried them all a time or two, but in truth, all I wanted to do was sit down, finally, with my own mind, and watch it.

  The landscape of the writer is the mind and I was fascinated with it. I saw that I kept thinking, that I couldn’t stop. Every time I tried to pull my attention back to my breath, another thought came. Suddenly, it felt obvious: This is what I had wanted to do for a long time, to sit in the raw nakedness of myself, with nothing else but myself. No parents, no culture, no New York background, no workshop, teacher, school. Just who was I? Where did I come from? How was I becoming a writer, given my family? What part of us is born apart from family? How was I heading in a whole different direction from my upbringing, from anyone I knew in Farmingdale, and how was I so alone and different in school? These questions were all unconscious. Mostly, I wanted quiet, for things around me to shut up, so I could finally hear my own mind, settle into it.

  I was drawn to essences. And I was a practical person. Meditation was simple; you needed nothing but yourself. You could sit down anywhere and do it. You didn’t even need a pen and paper, as you did for writing. It was economical. I watched how thoughts changed: I remembered my apartment in Albuquerque, then a gardenia my friend had on her chest of drawers. I let my breath out and I thought of a river I knew in Sandusky County, Ohio; of how I had recurring thoughts: I was planning meal after meal in my head—pot roast dinners—then deciding on vegetarian cuisine; and of how some thoughts I clung to hard and fed with my anger or sadness or hope: I worried about my grandmother. By the time I was at Lama, she was in a nursing home in Long Beach. I thought of her often and longed to have her near. I was being introduced to my own mind, but now without even the activity of writing. It was austere, rugged, huge.

  Just recently, when I asked a writing friend of mine why he’s taking so long to write his novel—it’s been seven years and there’s no end in sight—he said, “I’m afraid of the quiet when you sit down alone. It’s easier for me to keep busy. I’m stunned by how quiet it is when I sit down at the desk.”

  That was a very honest answer, direct, genuine. I understood what he was saying. In a sense, meditation and writing go hand in hand. The more deeply we can allow ourselves to sink into the darkness of our own selves, the more we can settle into the mind of being a
writer.

  We’re all fascinated by writers. I remember hearing that Tennessee Williams and Carson McCullers were friends. They rented a house in southern France one summer and each morning they both sat at the kitchen table and wrote. Wow! I thought, those two. I imagined them digging into their own imaginations, and though their bodies were across from each other—I easily imagined the white cups of steaming half-drunk black coffee, the only-nibbled-at golden croissants, heavy cream, strawberries, hunk of Gruyère cheese, long baguette on the table between them—they were both deep into the separate countries of their vast minds. I think the power I felt from them, from any writer whom I imagined, was that they had access to their own inner worlds. They could sit still in one place, concentrate, and words would pour forth. I think this is why so many people in America want to write. It is not because Americans are gaga about literature—oh, if only we were!—it is because we are so disconnected and isolated as individuals and as a country that one way to reconnect is to begin with a connection to ourselves. Writing is a way to connect with our own minds, to discover what we really think, see, and feel, rather than what we think we should think, see, and feel. When we write we begin to taste the texture of our own mind. This can often be frightening. We look around. There’s no one else there. We come face to face with our own aloneness, sit in our own loneliness. It is hard, painful, but it is real. Americans long for this realness and often don’t know how to get to it.

  I was up at Lama with all these things in my arms: loneliness, my vast human mind, writing, breath, the Garden of Eden in my heart. A classroom teacher could no longer help me, nor any textbook. In the fall, when it grew too cold to live in my tipi, I moved into the town of Taos, among the tall cottonwoods turning yellow and the smell of juniper and piñon wood smoke. One evening, walking past the Taos Inn, I smelled the smoke clearly in the chilly air and I thought, I would leave everything for that smell and the way it filled the huge space below Taos Mountain. I had a boyfriend then and together we sat meditation and wrote. We lived in a thirty-dollar-a-month adobe with no running water, an outhouse, wood stoves, and dirt floors. In winter, I watched snow fall among the piñons that dotted the hills and I watched how Taos grew silent and deep and I walked often by the Rio Chiquita and down by the Rio Grande. We were among the hippies; we looked like hippies, we were poor like them, but we had entered a path—the path of writing and meditation.

  In those years, I had no aim for my writing; I just did it, as I did meditation. The two became coincident for me. I would sit under a tree, lean against a rock near a stream, or be at my kitchen table and keep my hand writing and let my mind churn up whatever it had to. In a sense I was my mind’s record keeper. I was examining the texture of my thoughts—how they moved and how they came up.

  The hippie years served me well. I had a culture to support my aimlessness, my pennilessness. If the culture you live in has no money and does not value it, it gives you the freedom not to have it, too. I never worried about earning a living or making money. I made enough for food and rent teaching; writing part-time at a hippie school. I surmised the worth of practicing the hippie values of aimlessness, being here now, no future, no past, nothing to do, nowhere to go, but I saw how hard it was to really live or achieve that kind of undirected openness: to write for the sake of writing, not for publication, not even to write something good, just to write; to sit and watch my breath, not to become peaceful or enlightened, just to sit, just to breathe, to receive my life. Very simple, very hard. I remember often saying in those years, “I want to learn to do nothing.” Perhaps it was a rebellion against our “do something” society, but the nothing, no-thing emptiness I groped for was also something much deeper than rebellion, and I was not sure what it was. The womb of hippie life protected me for my serious exploration of this nothing.

  I had no writing teacher. I had no meditation teacher. I stopped reading books, except for an occasional Salinger, Franny and Zooey, Nine Stories, Ken Kesev’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, and oddly enough, one night I coaxed some friends into reading aloud with me the play Our Town, by Thornton Wilder. I stopped reading books because I wanted to stop referring to an external authority. I read something only if it grew naturally out of what I was doing. For the first time in my life, I wasn’t involved with school and books. This was important to me. I was meeting myself without any outside reference. I noticed the wild plums along the ditch, the magpies, the rose hips in fall. The moon had a size and its size changed in the sky and I noticed those changes. It was as though I had a chance at a second childhood. I felt wonder: I looked into the face of a sheep, a horse, a cat. I went camping and backpacking alone. I’d never been in the woods alone before. I made friends with trees, a stream, a chipmunk.

  I stepped forward naked to meet the world around me by noticing, looking, feeling, digesting it and I was also meeting the world inside me through meditation. Every moment and everything became my teacher. This was so different from what I had been taught education was. I was hungry, delighted, happy.

  A woman named Maggie Kress moved to Taos from California, and bought a beautiful pink adobe near where we lived. I heard she’d been a Zen student, that she had been close to Suzuki Roshi, the Zen master of the San Francisco Zen Center, author of Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind, who had died of cancer a few years before. I was curious about her. I went over to visit. My friend Sassafras—lots of people had hippie names then; there were Rainbow, Cement, Snowflake, Running River—was doing some carpentry work for her. I can’t remember anything we talked about, but I felt awe. She had been with Suzuki Roshi. I had read his book. It was so clear. I loved it and I hardly understood a word of it, but I felt peaceful when I read it and I felt his presence. He was dead. I’d never get to meet him, but here was Maggie Kress, who had known him. Whether we know it or not, we transmit the presence of everyone we have ever known, as though by being in each other’s presence we exchange our cells, pass on some of our life force, and then we go on carrying that other person in our body, not unlike springtime when certain plants in fields we walk through attach their seeds in the form of small burrs to our socks, our pants, our caps, as if to say, “Go on, take us with you, carry us to root in another place.” This is how we survive long after we are dead. This is why it is important who we become, because we pass it on.

  I asked Maggie about Suzuki. She didn’t say much. I realized then that when I’d asked anyone who’d known Suzuki about him, they hadn’t said much. They smiled; they seemed to dream themselves to a place I couldn’t see. What I had deciphered so far: He spoke English well, “for a Japanese person”; he liked to build rock gardens; he was funny.

  I told her I sat meditation. She was generous. She offered me her guest cottage to do an all-day sit. Sassafras joined me on a Sunday. We made up a schedule of sitting and walking meditation, pledged to stay with it all day, and began. There were only the two of us the first time. That alone taught me a lot: You don’t wait for a crowd to join you. You just do it and you feel thankful for the one person who does join you. The two of you together can turn the world around.

  I don’t know if I can tell what it is like to sit still all day—or even for one minute, for that matter—to have it broken only by the same tedious stillness of very slow walking meditation, and then back to sitting. Time goes so slowly that finally you surrender. You can’t push the hours. Your mind creates ten thousand scenarios: wars with your mother, the bank, your best friend. Then love affairs with a chair, Hawaii, someone you met last week. And then for moments all that mental drama falls away and you’re just sitting there, which is the scariest of all. There’s just you and the person opposite you and your knees, your aching shoulders, the occasional eye blink and the breath that suddenly seems like a current of air rushing through you, filling your lungs like great sails. For one moment, my mind stopped. I was just present and a shuddering gratitude ran through me. Then Sassafras rang the bell—the bell! waves of sound—and there was a break for lunch.
We sliced white cheese and spread mayonnaise and mustard on whole-wheat bread, sliced tomatoes, and ate these sandwiches, leaning back on cushions against the wall, our legs straight out in front of us.

  We had made the rule that we were allowed to talk during lunch. Sass and I chatted. I noticed an old Xerox of a newspaper article on a shelf nearby. It was an interview with Allen Ginsberg. The title of the interview was “Polishing the Mind.” I reached for it and began to read. Ginsberg talked about writing and the mind. It was the first time I’d heard someone talk about meditation and writing together. I decided right then to check out the possibility of studying with him. When I lived up at Lama, I’d heard he taught at Naropa Institute at the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics. I loved that name for a school and repeated it often in my mind. The name sounded so ridiculous, like nothing I’d ever heard a school called before. It made me happy.

  And then I did an extraordinary thing: I stole the article. There is no other way I can say it. I took it, put it in my purse, and knew I would keep it forever, that I would never give it back, that it was mine, it belonged to me. This is a terrible confession. Here was Maggie, who was a friend, who lent us her house to meditate in, and here I was stealing right in the middle of a meditation break. I could easily have asked her for it; I felt intuitively that she didn’t care about it: It was old and in a pile of papers. I could have borrowed it, photocopied it and given it back to her. I could have done any number of appropriate things and I wish I had, but at the time the feeling of possession was so immediate, I never questioned its ethics. I didn’t even think of it as stealing, there wasn’t a moment of guilt. I feel awe as I write this, at how strong my direction and overwhelming my feeling was: I wanted to know, to have something I had just gotten a glimpse of. Under my sweet façade, I was ruthless.