The Great Spring

  A week into the cramped living arrangements, I took a slow walk one early morning, still sick, thinking maybe we could find a junky fixer-upper nearby. Surely, for the rent we were paying we could own a little house. And behold! Down the block I spied a yellow stucco with a FOR SALE sign. With its twisted wires jutting out of sockets over the sidewalk and its torn-down awnings, this sad, modest fellow must be aching for love. I jotted down the realtor’s phone number.

  “I’m asking about that rat’s nest on Cowper,” I said, breathing thickly into the phone, my nose still bountifully stuffed.

  “Yes, that property is three million.”

  The receiver dangled from my hand. I could hear the snap of her cell phone closing. She isn’t ashamed to tell me that? I knew I was in strange territory.

  Standing in our narrow bedroom, staring blankly ahead, I was jarred by a whirring sound on the street. I tried to ignore it—and when finally I couldn’t, I went out to look. A young man was holding the handle to a vibrating motor connected to an extended nozzle pointed at the sidewalk, the nose of which was chasing a single red leaf.

  I marched over and motioned vigorously for the man to switch it off. I bent down, grabbed the leaf with my right hand, ceremoniously walked it to the curb and dropped it in the street.

  “Use a rake. It’s a fine tool.” I motioned how to use one. “You’re wasting precious oil reserves.”

  The man was confused. He didn’t understand.

  “No más,” I declared, and crossed my arms. Then, wanting to make sure the point was made, I did the arrogant thing unilingual Americans do. I repeated myself, slowly, enunciating my words about the rake.

  He turned his back on me, blasted his machine again, and chased another solitary leaf.

  I whipped around and stomped back into my scrawny apartment. I heard blowers starting up all down the block. What happened to the monk in a mist raking the monastery garden?

  At night, when my partner returned, I asked her how it was going. Did the engineers come up with a salable product?

  She shrugged her shoulders. “Who knows? I barely see them. They arrive at three in the afternoon and eat doughnuts, preferably with pink icing. They work till the early-morning hours, lost in cyberspace.”

  I thought of Max, whom I’d met in Cambridge three years earlier. I had seen him intently writing in a notebook at the next table in a restaurant. “Journaling?” I asked.

  He looked over. “In a sense. I keep a math notebook. I think mathematically.”

  “You mean like I might write, ‘Today I am grouchy,’ but you would write, ‘Two plus two is equivalent to eight’?”

  “Sort of.”

  I couldn’t leave this alone. I bent over and whispered across his table, “Eight minus three is five.”

  He gave me a short snort. I threw out everything I could recall from algebra and geometry. I even mentioned Euclid.

  He rescued me just as I was about to recite the multiplication tables. “I went to MIT and have a PhD in math.”

  “May I treat you to a croissant?” Anyone hovering over the slimness of numbers must need sustenance.

  He told me about his dissertation, which was almost all equations, though it had jokes on pages 45 and 67.

  “So there’s personality in math?”

  “Sure. My adviser had a Nobel Prize. When he’d pull out his file cabinet drawer, the papers he’d written would swing, balanced in their folders. All of his work condensed on a few pages. Only three people in the world could read his last theorems. Extreme elegance.”

  I couldn’t contain myself. I raised a single finger. “Everything in this, huh?”

  He snorted again, but this time he smiled.

  My Zen life had been simple. One ring of a bell, one breath, a single candle on the altar, a moment of still peace inside.

  But I’d thrown that all out. In another single moment in the zendo in St. Paul, I had seen through all of my cranky desire. Dharma transmission was another way for me to try to secure myself, make myself solid in this transitory world. Nope. I decided to dump myself out into the vast unknown with only a pen, a notebook, and thirty years of sitting practice under my ever-widening belt.

  As my father would say, that and a dime will buy you a cup of coffee.

  Now here I was with young programmers who ate pink icing, and my future was dependent on them. Would we ever leave this expensive hovel?

  Slowly I regained my health and walked the dense streets. March in California—no one tells you this—is the most gorgeous of all months. Everything is blooming and opulent. After living so many years in arid New Mexico, how would I take it in? Just one branch of one bush—and there were often hundreds in one yard—held eighteen perfect flowers. The pinks, the reds, the yellows. What could root me in this abundance? What had happened to my America, to the small, empty towns I loved?

  I wanted to liberate my little yellow stucco house and its patch of bare yard, the only place in town where weeds were allowed to grow. Mornings I’d sit on its cracked asphalt patio; I was certain no one would buy this house under the cool shade of a hawthorn.

  Eventually I found another refuge, the huge live oaks and white oaks, some of them three hundred years old, looming in yards and bursting out of the concrete sidewalks. All of them alive before this town was here. I became friends with eight of them and visited daily, begging for answers. What am I doing in this sanitary white place?

  My deepest connection was with an oak that dwarfed a two-story Tudor house on Coleridge. How I loved that the street had the name of a writer. The oak’s roots were so big it dominated the lawn. No human could own this wild animal of a tree—or plant flowers around it. Flowers needed surface water, but this white oak, reaching the height of at least a five-story Manhattan building, was drinking from sources deep and unknown, forgotten aquifers way below the earth’s surface. Trees of this nature that were watered were known to burst, exploding rooftops and building structures.

  One day I knocked on the door of the house. A blond woman with a young child hiding in her skirts opened it.

  “I wonder if it’s okay that I hang out here a bit sometimes? I’ve fallen in love with your tree.”

  “Tree?” she asked with an accent. I could see past the door front. They’d just moved in.

  “That one,” I pointed. I wanted her, too, to love it. Why else could she have bought the house? The mighty branches extended over the entire yard and out into the street.

  She glanced at it. “Oh, yes, it cost a lot when we had it pruned. Sure, it’s fine,” she said, and shut the door.

  Untold money was made during the nineties. Couples in their twenties were suddenly millionaires many times over. The category of billionaire came into being. I knew this owner was part of the phenomenon. Stunned by the sudden wealth, she had no time left to notice the tree. I worried for these people, but I was in my fifties, old enough to worship the great oak. I would do it for all of them.

  Before I became a full-time writer, I was a teacher. My last teaching job was with twenty-five fifth- and sixth-graders in a private school. I’d never taught a whole group of white, well-to-do kids before. My specialty was ragtag, sometimes hungry, inner-city kids. I developed writing practice with these young students. Rudely honest and still connected to community and families, however broken, these Chippewa and African American students gave me fresh insights into the writing mind.

  But the ten-, eleven-, and twelve-year-olds in this private setting were a phenomenon I’d never encountered before. They came to school well dressed, with too many snacks, but as soon as they were dropped off, all hell broke loose. I was afraid they’d kill each other—or at least break a few arms, legs, and pelvic bones.

  “Quick, without thinking, write what your mother was wearing this morning,” I said to them in early September.

  Most kids don’t notice their mothers that much, but their responses gave me some insight.

  My mother is in Switzerland. She left two weeks
ago, wrote one thin boy. I haven’t seen her in a long time.

  My stepmother was making me breakfast. I hate her. She’s a lousy cook. I poured Coke on my cereal, penned a redheaded fifth grader.

  I understood that, in these families, material goods replaced human attention, guidance, and touch. Each day I watched these kids take out their frustration and isolation on each other. The wealth served to create loneliness.

  I sensed this same vacancy in the quaint, expensive streets that I walked in Palo Alto. Soul was missing; only commerce was left.

  Yet when I attended a luncheon celebrating a big investment in my partner’s company by a venture capitalist, I was surprised to meet the software engineers, who turned out to be fresh, idealistic, and enthusiastic. They said things we used to say as hippies, only they substituted the word technology for the word love. “This technology program will change the world, will make it a better place,” intoned one young man.

  I tried to find some common ground for sharing. Zen? Literature? Writing? These topics got me nowhere. I dropped them and finally just listened. The short-haired blond in a striped polo on my right told me about his love of waves and how he had followed the surf all over the world. The one across the table in a yellow T-shirt and thick glasses spoke of the traditional Korean wedding he would have in six months. He had met his fiancée five weeks earlier in LA. The others teased him, but they were all going to attend the ceremonies.

  I tried to ask what they were developing for the company, but no one could tell me. It wasn’t a secret, they said. It was just that they hadn’t gotten far enough.

  I was no computer genius, but I didn’t quite believe them, even though I knew they weren’t lying. I feared a rootlessness at the core of all of this research.

  In truth, I was disappointed that all of this technology was discovered in my lifetime. It seemed to make time busier, more complicated, as if the functions of the mind, the beat of thought I’d come to depend on for my years of sitting and writing practice, no longer applied. I understood how the brain made poetic leaps, how it could juxtapose seemingly dissimilar objects, people, rivers, fruit, how you could reach into the center of the source and discover a vast emptiness that was full and abundant. But the rhythm of the minds partaking of this Caribbean meal felt jagged, even severed in some places, as though natural mind waves had been broken. Some neuron had gone astray from staring for so long at computer screens. All over this heart of Silicon Valley, I sensed some human channel burned out.

  In the afternoons I took long walks along a creek that wound between Palo Alto and Menlo Park. I sat on a stone bench to meditate as whole families biked by and couples jogged. From a house across the way I could hear someone practicing the cello. The person was a good musician. These were not beginning chords. I wanted to knock on the door. Take me in, I’d demand.

  Eventually I found an old Chinese restaurant that had let time pass by. The food was good and not fancy. Its gray walls became my refuge. The waiter recognized me each time I came and knew what I would order: shrimp fried rice. Two dollars more for extra shrimp. I sat in the booth at the back. I felt transported out of sunlit, jazzy California to an old place on Cedar Avenue in Minneapolis. Something ordinary and comforting.

  My partner and I were growing distant from each other. Where had she brought me? More important, where had I brought myself?

  My source of inspiration had been grounded in a solid, rather unquestioning connection to Zen practice. But back in St. Paul the lineage had crumbled for me. I was in the midst of writing a book about betrayal and failure, about the indiscretions of my teacher. A lot of people I knew didn’t want me to write this book. I was on my own. How could I tell anyone what was happening? I was falling backward off the diving board.

  One noon I found myself on my knees under the tall eucalyptuses on the Stanford campus.

  I wanted to hear an epiphany, some grand realization to give meaning and relief. But no understanding shot through my cells to rectify my birth, my family of origin, the life I was living.

  I continued to write my book, to have sleepless nights, to feel biologically out of sync with this new cutting-edge world.

  In June, six months after I arrived, I left, driving out through the Sierras, across Utah, dropping down to New Mexico. I remember staying overnight in a barren motel on the California border, sobbing late into the early morning. Nothing was the way I thought. Not a single thing was the way I wanted it.

  As I descended into the northwest corner of New Mexico, a single lane of traffic piled up for miles. On all sides was open sage flatland. Nothing broke the horizon. My car inched along. A deep gray began to enfold us. The sky was no longer sky—the smoke from fires hundreds of miles away, burning up thousands of acres of Arizona forest, was coming our way. The air was unbreathable, filled with a suffocating fog. I could almost hear the high-pitched crack of ponderosas exploding in the extreme heat.

  All that summer, that dismal cloud hung over Taos. Hands, faces, tables, chairs were gritty from ash. It was also the second year of a severe drought. I put out pans of water for the jackrabbits that usually shot across the mesa, but now even they were drooping. Several times a day I applied lip balm.

  I spoke to my partner long distance. The bombing of the Twin Towers wasn’t even a year old. Her company was merging with an older company. It was happening because the venture capitalists were skittish after the terrorist attack. It felt like the beginning of worlds being shattered.

  . . .

  So why, six years later, leaning over the sink, brushing my teeth in a winter month, do those strange streets in another state call me? Why do they feel so strong that I ache to be back? I can see the library down the block with the English ivy at the entranceway; the low, white concrete benches; the librarian who allowed me only fifteen minutes at the public computers. I can feel the air conditioner blowing, much too cold.

  In Palo Alto I began learning to say good-bye. Layer by layer I was pulling off the old protections. Nowhere could I find a foothold to drag myself away to some safe cave. Everywhere I turned was confusion and suffering, inside me and outside me. No difference. I was saying good-bye to all of my old recourses—I could name a dozen right off the top—from just feeling the pain, from settling down into its scratchy nest. Finally there was nowhere to go, no more hiding place, not even Zen.

  This was groundlessness, no abiding. Supposedly a good thing in Zen practice, where you finally unhinge, admit you know nothing, surrender to the vast unknown.

  So many years ago when I heard my teacher talk about it, it sounded good and true. But actually to experience it was something different. I felt frightened, hopeless, on the edge of depression, but not even able to sink into that hole.

  Then one day, in the middle of my muddled mind, back in the dry and barren air of New Mexico, I realized something. That story about Siddhartha sitting under the Bodhi Tree—how he made a vow not to budge until he saw clearly into the nature of things. His determination was always touted. But, really, what was happening—all at once it seemed obvious—wasn’t determination, a steeling of will that brought him home. It was a total breakdown, a collapse of everything he knew. He’d tried devout training and austerity; nothing worked. It was in his giving up—drained, exhausted, under the big, branched tree—that with the appearance of the morning star insight exploded inside him.

  For the first time I felt akin to Buddha, that skinny man in his thirties who had left his wife and child to seek the unknown. I could stop searching for some answer, some way out, some imaginary free land. Because I was so driven to find happiness, I was in the center of suffering.

  But now Buddha gave me a hint of a direction. Smack in the middle of being uncomfortable, confused, restless, I could accept this groundlessness, this not knowing, as a new place, as my own country.

  23

  Zen at the High Chaparral

  A cold, wet rain is falling; the fields are divided by barbed wire; and the slow Winnebago
Creek is moving through the valley. I walk to dinner and see eight wild turkeys on the hill across from the kitchen. In 1983 we are beginning to establish a monastery on these 240 acres in the southeast corner of Minnesota, one mile from Iowa.

  On weekends we go to the High Chaparral in New Albin. The owners, Herb and Ellie Mae, live in a trailer out back. Ellie Mae makes clear apple jelly, full of sugar, and as much fried chicken as you can eat on Saturday nights—with white buttered bread, coleslaw, and cottage fries. All for three dollars, and the beer is thirty-five cents. We can sit there all night if we want, slowly losing our names or where we came from, who we loved and why.

  When we first went to the High Chap on Friday nights for Ellie Mae’s fried cod, Greg—the head carpenter on the Zen land, whose father owned a place similar to the High Chap in Indiana and who knows everyone here—asked me if I was ready to meet some real Iowa farmers. When he introduced me, they pulled him aside to ask where my people came from—Germany? Sweden? He told them I was a Jew.

  They were stunned and crinkled their noses. Then, in a magnanimous gesture, they said, “Well, everyone has to come from someplace, I guess.”

  Bob Stringer often sits at a corner table. Yesterday he showed me ten dead rattlers in his car trunk. He’d smashed in their heads near the Gibbons farm, where he found them sunning on flat hot rocks. He pulled the biggest out of a brown paper sack. Its fine spotted skin hung limp in his hand. He said he can collect bounty money for them.

  One noon Larry Donahue came up to the Zen land to visit us and to give Greg some building advice. Greg was eating lunch.

  Larry screwed up his face and pointed. “What the hell is that?”

  “Sprouts.”

  “What does it taste like?”