St. Paul was a small city with a big heart. If I was still enough, I could feel it all—the empty lots, the Mississippi driving itself under bridges, the Schmidt brewery emitting a smell that I thought meant the town was toasting a lot of bread but found out later was the focal point of an irate neighborhood protest.
In early fall when the weather was warm, I sat on the wood and wrought-iron bench in front of the café under a black locust. I even sat out there in slow drizzles and fog, when the streets were slick and deserted. After fifteen years in New Mexico, the gray and mist were a great balm.
Sometimes, if I was across the river in Minneapolis, I sat at Dunn Brothers Coffee on Hennepin or the one in Linden Hills. Hadn’t this always been my writing life? To fill spiral notebooks, write whole manuscripts in local luncheonettes and restaurants? But now here was my Zen life too, happening in a café at the same square tables, only without a notebook. Hadn’t I already declared that Zen and writing were one? In and out I’d breathe. My belly would fill, my belly would contract. I lifted the hot paper cup to my lips, my eyes unfocused.
My world of meditation was getting large. By leaving the old structure, I was loosening my tight grip on my old Zen teacher. I was bringing my zazen out into the street. But who wants to let go of something they love?
In a city of large oaks, magnificent elms and maples, I managed to return to practice Zen at a zendo surrounded by concrete, where one spindly young line of a tree gallantly fought by a metal gate to survive. I’d renamed the practice center “The Lone Tree Zendo.” And, yes, I did actually go there early mornings and Saturdays and Sundays, for weekend and week-long retreats.
I was working on koans. I had to present my understanding to the residing teacher, and it never came from logic or the thinking brain. I had to step out of my normal existence and come face-to-face with a buffalo passing through a window, a dead snake or an oak tree in the courtyard. The northern cold penetrated me as deeply as these koans. No fly, no bare finger could survive—even sound cracked. I was gouged by impermanence.
By the last days of February, even the most fastidious homeowners—and believe me, St. Paul was full of them—had given up shoveling their walks. In early March I looked out my apartment window to the corner of Dale and Lincoln, near posh Crocus Hill, and watched the man across the street blaze out of his old many-floored, pale-blue clapboard house, jacket flying open and unzipped, with a long ax in his hand. Bellowing, he hacked away at the ice built up by the curb. Behind him stood a massive crabapple, its branches frozen and curled in a death cry.
I doubted that my scheduled mid-April, day-long public walking and writing retreat would take place. Where would we walk? In circles around the hallway? My plan had been to meet at the zendo, write for two rounds, then venture out on a slow stroll, feeling the clear placement of heel, the roll of toes, the lifting of foot, the bend of knee, the lowering of hip. We’d make our way through the dank, dark streets of industrial St. Paul, across railroad tracks and under a bridge, to be surprised by a long spiral stone tunnel opening into Swede Hollow along a winding creek and yellow grass, then climb up to an old-fashioned, pressed-tin, high-ceilinged café with good soup and delicious desserts, where we could write again at small tables. I would not tell the students where we were going. I would just lead them out the zendo door, past the Black Dog Café and the smokers hunched on the outside stoop, near the square for the Lowertown farmers’ market.
When the first miserable weekend in April came, I looked at the roster of twenty-four faithful souls who had registered for the writing retreat. Two women from Lincoln, Nebraska, were flying in. A woman from Milwaukee—a six-hour drive away—was leaving at 3:30 A.M. to make the 9:30 beginning. Such determination. Only in the Midwest, I thought. I noted with delight that Tall Suzy and her friend from Fargo were coming. She’d studied with me back in New Mexico. Mike, the Vietnam vet from Austin, Minnesota, was driving up too. I nervously fingered the page with the list of names.
The workshop date was the Saturday before Easter. The day came and, miraculously, the temperature was in the low sixties. I hustled over early to Bread and Chocolate to grab a cookie and touch the recent center of my universe. I arrived a few minutes later for class. Everyone was there and silently meditating in a circle. I swirled into my place.
“We are going out for most of the day. You’ll have to trust me. Remember: no good or bad. Just one step after another. We’ll see different things. This is a walk of faith.”
After brief writing sessions we bounded outside, eager to be in the weak yet warming sun. But the deserted weekend desolation of industrial St. Paul sobered us. One step after another. This was a silent walk, so no one could complain—not that a midwesterner would do such a thing. But I, an old New Yorker, had to shut up too. I couldn’t encourage, explain, apologize. We just walked bare-faced on this one early-April day, slow enough to feel this life.
Over the still-frozen ground to the tracks, crushing thin pools of ice with our boots. A left foot lifted and placed, then a right. The tunnel was ahead. Through the yellow limestone spiral, built in 1856, a miracle of construction that seemed to turn your mind. Eventually we all made it through to the other side, to sudden country, the hollow, and the sweetness of open land. Long pale grasses, just straightening up after the melting weight of snow, and thin, unleafed trees gathered along the lively winding stream.
We had walked an hour and a half at the pace of a spider. I’d forgotten what this kind of walking does to you. You enter the raw edge of your mind; the naked line between you and your surroundings drops away. Whoever you are or think you are cracks off. We were soul bare together in the hollow, the place poor Swedish immigrants inhabited a hundred years ago in cardboard shacks.
Some people went down to the stream, put their hands in the cold water. I sat on a stone with my face in the sun. Then we continued on.
We didn’t get to the café until almost two o’clock. The place was empty. We filled the tables and burst into writing. I remember looking up for a moment into the stunned faces of two people behind the counter. Where did all of these people suddenly come from? And none of them are talking?
I’d forgotten how strenuous it was to walk so slow for so long. I was tired.
When it was time to leave, I had planned to follow the same route back. The students shook their heads and took the lead, almost at a trot. A shortcut across a bypass over noisy Interstate 94 to the zendo. We arrived breathless in twenty minutes.
Back in the circle, I inquired, “How was it?”
I looked at them. My face fell. I’d been naive. They had run back here for safety. That walk had rubbed them raw. One woman began: “When we reached the tunnel, I was terrified to go through. It felt like the birth canal.”
Another: “I didn’t know where it would lead. I looked at all of us walking like zombies and began to cry. I thought of the Jews going to the chambers.”
I remembered two kids in the hollow stopping their pedaling and straddling their bikes, mouths agape, staring at us. “What happened to you?” they asked.
I checked in with my own body right then. I felt the way I do after a five- or seven-day retreat, kind of shattered, new, and tremulous. They were feeling the same.
One woman said, “I physically felt spring entering the hollow. It was right there when I slowed up enough to feel it. I opened my hand and spring filled it. I swear I also saw winter leaving. Not a metaphor. The real thing.”
They were describing experiences I’d had in the zendo after long hours of sitting. But I’d thought only within the confines of those walls, and with that cross-legged position I loved, could certain kinds of openings occur.
I wanted to cling to the old structure I had learned with my beloved teacher, the timeworn way handed down from temples and monasteries in Japan that he painstakingly brought to us in America. Yes, I loved everything he taught me, but didn’t the Buddha walk around a lot?
What I saw now, with these students as witnes
ses, was that it was I who had confined my mind, grasped a practice I learned in my thirties, feeling that nothing else was authentic.
I told the world that writing was a true way, but even I didn’t truly believe it. I only wanted to be with my old teacher again when I came back to Minnesota a year ago. I’d returned to St. Paul, it turns out, not to let go but to find him. Like a child, I never really believed he’d died.
Zen was suddenly everywhere—in the notebook, on the corner, in the moon and lamppost. What was Zen anyway? There was you and me, living and dying, eating cake. There was the sky, there were mountains, rivers, prairies, horses, mosquitoes, justice, injustice, integrity, cucumbers. The structure was bigger than any structure I could conceive. I had fallen off the zafu, that old round cushion, into the vast unknown.
I looked at these students in a circle. This day we were here and we experienced that we were here.
I could feel Roshi’s presence. I thought he had died. No one had died. And in a blink of an eye none of us were here. Spring would move to summer, and if we were very lucky, no one would blow up the world. Maybe there were other summers and other winters out there in other universes.
If we can sit in a café breathing, we can breathe through hearing our father’s last breath, the slow crack of pain as we realize he’s crossing over forever. Good-bye, we say. Good-bye. Good-bye. Toenails and skin. Memory halted in our lungs: his foot, ankle, wrist. When a bomb is dropped, it falls through history. No one act, no single life. No disconnected occurrence. I am sipping a root beer in another café and the world spins and you pick up a pen, speak, and save another life: this time your own.
Early the next morning at 3:00 A.M., one of those mighty midwestern thunderstorms broke the dark early sky into an electric yellow. I gazed out the cold glass pane. Either in my head or outside of it—where do thoughts come from?—three words resounded: The Great Spring. The Great Spring. Together my students and I had witnessed the tip of the moment that green longed for itself again.
6
Wrong Way
The Stone Lions are an ancient ruin six miles from the headquarters of Bandelier National Monument. You go up a cliff to a mesa; you go down and up to another mesa; and again you do this through scrub oak leaves turning in the October light and piñon and juniper that grow slowly and never turn color. Then you repeat the up and down of gaining four hundred feet and dropping down again three times on the way back. It’s a twelve-mile hike. You have to leave early to go round-trip before the sun sets at six.
The Stone Lions are rarely talked about. It’s a hike you have to build up your resolve—and reserve—to do.
A poet I met in Taos fifteen years ago told me about it. Just the name Stone Lions drew me in. I imagined two actual stone animals standing alone against the empty sky. I knew this was not true, but it fed my imagination and it built my desire to go there.
But it was always summer, too hot, or winter, too cold and not enough daylight, when I thought of it. When you live in a place, you seem to think you have endless time to see the sites—and you never go. New Yorkers don’t go to the Empire State Building, but Kansas tourists can tell you all about it.
I have just returned from three weeks in New York and my head is filled with art exhibits, subway stops, the Frank Gehry building in Chelsea, a Horton Foote play, corned beef sandwiches, sidewalks, the Hudson River. Then Robin Becker, the poet, calls. She is visiting Taos from her small town in Pennsylvania. “Hey, do you want to meet Tuesday and hike to the Stone Lions?” I say yes without considering my weary, out-of-shape body. We will meet at nine, when the park opens. It’s a two-hour drive from Taos and fifty minutes from Santa Fe, where I now live.
I pack egg salad and turkey sandwiches, a bag of cashews and raisins, a brownie, dried mango slices, a banana-strawberry smoothie and two quarts of water. I dress in light layers. When we connect in the parking lot, we slather sunscreen on our face and hands. We deposit ten dollars at the visitor center to get a rare map of the area. The ranger cautions us that the trail is not marked well and that we’d better get another quart of water at the food concession to bring along.
I am jazzed. Consequently, I don’t pay close attention as we begin to ascend the switchbacks of the first mesa. I’m exhilarated by the land and look at the sky. So big. Home again after being in New York.
We have just passed through the main visiting area of Bandelier, a narrow, long canyon with a stream running darkly through it. The stream is the key. Water in the Southwest is a precious commodity. It’s why ancient Anasazi cliff dwellings are found in the canyon walls, and the ruins of a whole pueblo are at the base. At the end of the thirteenth century, the Anasazi abandoned the area, and no one knows why. Speculation is that the stream dried up, but now it’s here, feeding the roots of tall ponderosas, which give off a sweet vanilla smell.
I’d gone to New York to reclaim my own homeland. I had fled at eighteen from an unhappy childhood and never returned, except for occasional short trips to visit family—now gone—or to teach a weekend workshop, see an editor, wolf down a pastrami sandwich like a refugee on the run—always antsy to get out of there. This time, at almost sixty, I traveled there to honor the New York in me—and if I was honest, to check out the possibility of moving back. I was lonesome for old roots.
I listened to my Brooklyn friends’ accents and asked myself, uncomfortably, I sound like that? I’d been gone forty years and still dropped letters on words and added them where they didn’t belong. “Bra” seemed ridiculous if not pronounced with an extra r: “brar.” We sound retarded, I thought. And there was this nasal quality, like we always had a cold. And why did we have to talk so loud?
The corker was when I entered a barbecue joint with a friend. We stood in line to order, and someone would come to our table with the food. “Susie, I have to run to the bathroom. Order for me.” I tell her what I want.
I am on the toilet seat with my pants around my ankles when there is a loud knock. “Natli, do you want wet or dry brisket?” she screams through the door. I decide to ignore it.
That method does not work. “Which one?” she yells again.
I succumb. “What’s the difference?”
“Wet has fat; dry is lean.”
“I don’t know. Wet.” She goes away.
Immediately another hard knocking. “Anyone in here?” a young boy calls.
“Yes,” I say.
“Hurry up. I have to go,” he calls back. He turns. “Mom, why doesn’t she come out? When is she going to be done?” The mother does not hush him. He bangs and calls out till I explode out the door and they scurry in.
This lack of privacy is part of what I ran from. I wanted space. But I have made a vow to claim it all once again.
And the truth is I find a sweetness here under the gruffness. An old man walks me to the subway stop. He’s concerned I will not find my way. A middle-aged woman repeats directions to Spring Street slowly. Sweetness may not be the word—a concern, a care. The sweetness is mine. I do not have to fight this place anymore.
We reach the top of the first climb. There are two trails. Without thinking, we take the left one. We are too busy talking. Robin’s mother has died recently. “For the last twenty years I spoke to her on the phone every day.”
“You’re kidding.” When my mother was alive, we spoke about four times a year.
“Twenty years ago my sister committed suicide. We became very close after that. They stopped thinking I was mentally ill for being a lesbian. I was all they had left.”
“Robin, I think we went the wrong way.” We’d been walking parallel to the edge of the mesa. “We need to be walking west—across this.”
We turn around. We can’t find another trail and begin to bushwhack. “I’m sure we’ll find it,” Robin says.
“Can you remember? We can’t lollygag. We have to get back by sunset.”
“I know we have to head for the next canyon.”
We weave in and out of endless piñon
and juniper, pass big ant mounds of tiny quartz pebbles.
“You head that way.” I point. “I’ll go this, and for sure, we’ll cross the path.” I go two hundred yards. “I found it. I found it!”
Robin scurries over. “This must be it.” There are no other paths anywhere.
I am relieved. When you have a path, you don’t have to think. You’re secure in your direction.
After twenty minutes she says, “We should hit the edge soon.”
“I don’t see any edge.” But we keep going.
It is eleven now. The sun is climbing. I take off my wool sweater, wrap it around my waist and glug half a quart of water. We keep walking faster to get to that edge.
“I think we’re on the wrong trail,” I say after another ten minutes. “Give me the map.” It’s the first time we’ve looked at it since we started.
“Do you want to go back and find the right trail?” Robin feels responsible. After all, she has hiked this twice—many years ago.
“It’s too late now to make it there and back.” I run my finger along a line. “I think we’re headed on this one.” I try to drain disappointment from my voice. “We can hike here and maybe see the Rio Grande.”