Doubting Everything
The woman who has taken Basho says he’s not eating, he growls at her cat, he’s terrified of her dog. If she sits on the couch in the room where he hides, he will come out and sit near her; but he doesn’t trust her, runs if she moves toward him. Perhaps he just needs time to adjust, but I feel horrible for thrusting this difficulty on a being who only ever gave me joy and who was perfectly happy with life as it was. And I miss him. There are horrors taking place in the world, and by comparison with the results of global warming and what’s going on in Darfur, Myanmar, or Iraq, this is trivial. But every loss calls up every other loss. I live again the losses of my children, friends, lovers, animals, oceans, and places I have left behind in the quest. I take this moment, and Dave’s wise comment, to call into question everything in my life.
Why am I pushing my last child, who will be twenty-one this summer, out into the world on her own? Why am I leaving my job, my steady but marginal income, and my health insurance? Why do I think I will find time to BE in a Zen center if I can’t find it in my daily life as a “householder”? Why can’t I just be satisfied with life in Houston? I have friends here. I have the workshop in the prison, which I love. I have time to sit on my cushion, to walk in the park, read, watch the occasional movie, listen to music, and write a little. It’s a good-enough life. Why don’t I go reclaim Basho and settle down where I am? What is this unrest that drives me to leave everything and move on to another unknown? What is it I think I will learn or find, living in a Zen center, that I haven’t found living my life these sixty-one and a half years?
The main and most convincing answer to all those questions is the job itself. The system in which I do this job is broken. Teaching five courses a semester in a community college in Texas means that every one of the 150 or so students I encounter each semester is grabbing drive-through, fast-food semester hours toward a college degree. They stay at this college a semester or two (an average of 21 semester hours, of the 120 they need to earn a B.A. degree), taking courses the Texas legislature requires them to take, hoping to get the best grades and the most credits possible for the least amount of effort and money. All of them have lives crammed with distraction (MP3s, cell phones, Internet, TV, something blaring at them every waking moment), and because they are in Texas at this moment, they have cars and consumer goods they spend most of their time paying for. Most have full-time jobs, many have children; most hate to read, regard writing as a punishment, and are here because they imagine that if they accumulate college credits they will eventually make more money. That assumption, of course, is wrong. College credits do not necessarily equal more money. I am proof of that. I do write notes on every one of their papers, and I see what I’m doing as en-couraging each student to grow and wonder, but that is a secret mission rather like the job of Sisyphus. In every class, two to four students are capable of (and hungry for) much more than I ask or provide, and I cringe to see their boredom and frustration as I drag, entice, or cajole the other twenty students in the class toward the final project or exam. There is something immoral in this enterprise. But that’s not the whole story.
My job, as I conceive it, is to generate as much excitement as I possibly can for what I teach, and that’s worthwhile. Some students fall in love with Sor Juana, or John Donne, or Gertrude Stein, or Gerard Manley Hopkins. Some discover a talent they didn’t know they had, for costume design or acting, for interpreting film editing choices, for creating something they couldn’t have done alone by working in a small group. Some, reading Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs for the first time, realize what slavery was. Some learn to look at the architecture, poetry, dance, and theatre around them with fresh eyes; they learn to say something more articulate than “I liked it,” or “I didn’t like it.” Many experience, if only for a flash of time, the joy of figuring out what something means, or of momentary communion with someone who created something beautiful.
All of that is good, though the “grades” they agonize over, grades I have arbitrarily to assign to their work, grow increasingly meaningless to me as time grinds on, and I find myself giving them versions of “A” or “B” or (if they failed to show up or to turn in the work) “F”. The gradations between B and F become more and more absurd to me. I hate grading. I hate judging their work. I have tried “peer review” portfolios, self-grading. None of it works.
And then there is what I want to go toward: this is the last third of my life. Whatever I’m going to make with this life, time is running out. I don’t want to keep going it alone. I want a community of people being peace, time to contemplate the fleeting beauty of the planet. I want to be 100% present in this moment. I can do it, and to some extent I do it now, where I am. And yet I want to be part of a community of people invested in something larger than ourselves, something more significant than what we consume and the individual homes we make for ourselves.
How to do that? That is the question. Don’t know. I used to think I would become a Buddhist nun when I retired. I came close to doing that and became disenchanted. Surrendering my autonomy to a teacher who was herself flawed and seeking didn’t make much sense to me when I tried it out.
Since I first learned about communes in the 60s I have believed in them. Why should each individual operate a household, a car, a washer and dryer, etc.? Doesn’t it make more sense to live in community, consume less, leave a smaller “footprint,” and join with that community in providing service of some kind? It makes sense. And yet–right now, on the brink of leaving my “individual” way of life–I feel the cost it exacts. I have lived (for short periods of time up to 4 months) in communities, and they can make a person crazy. I also long for solitude and silence. Sometimes a community makes solitude and silence less possible than living an “individual” life. And so I bring these questions to the blog, knowing that my friends who read this blog often share these doubts and questions with me. These questions are not just about my life and my ego-centric, ec-centric, solipsistic questions. We’re in this together, all of us.
I turn to one of my favorite Buddhist poems:
All the world is on fire,
All the world is burning,
All the world is ablaze,
All the world is quaking.
That which does not quake or blaze,
That to which worldlings do not resort,
Where there is no place for Mara:
That is where my mind delights.
By Upacala, ancient Bikkhuni
Translated from the Pali by Bhikkhu Bodhi
Where can we find that which does not quake or blaze? Mara (illusion) is everywhere. Even in a Zen center. We who go adventuring, we who join communities, we who seek solitude, we who live in movement, we who keep moving on: we take with us what we are, who we are, how we are. Why then should I leave where I am? I sit with these questions.
Addendum: by some great cosmic joke, I wrote this blog post early Monday morning. The assignment my World Lit I students had over the weekend was to read John Donne’s 17th sermon: “No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main…: any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.” Only two of them had done the homework. Well, OK, it was a holiday weekend. I broke the sermon into nine small pieces and assigned each piece to a pair of students who read it and interpreted it for the whole class. First they dealt with the absence of bells. We don’t have bells that toll when people die; we don’t have bells that call us to assemble. They suggested that the bells that toll for us now are sirens–ambulance sirens, police sirens. Every time a siren blares, we have a chance to wake up. It blares for us. Every siren reminds us of our impermanence. They groaned at “affliction is a treasure,” but agreed that it is up to us to turn our afflictions into treasure. One beamed, “That’s like, ‘What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger,’ isn’t it?” Another said it means “Everything happens for a reason.” I asked him to look at the text again. Does John Donne say that? Another student offered, tentatively, “Doesn’t he say it’s up to us to make reason out of what happens?” I love ending with a question.
Tags: Manko, What does it mean?, Where to plant myself
Kendall
I love the idea of community living. I wish we like-minded souls could establish our own community….a community of travelers, searchers…people who need to take off every now and then to keep the search alive. In such a community, I would water your plants and take care of your pets when you needed to leave. In the evenings we could meet and talk about our travels, our dreams, or we could just stay in our room and think. I think a community would make the search so much sweeter….there would be something wonderful to come home to. Maybe some of us would love the community so much we wouldn’t need to search anymore. We’d find that this is “it”, this is home, this is the place to just be.
I think you will find the place to be at one of the zen centers you have chosen. I am praying you will. I know you deserve it. Anyone who can write as lucidly and as inspirationally as you do, deserves it.
If I do find it at one of the zen centers, I hope you will come join me/us sometime. You write about it just as it is in my dreams. Watch this space and you will know what happens just as soon as I do. And let me hold the mirror up to you: anyone who can write as lucidly and as inspirationally as YOU do, deserves it. I’m so glad the blog has made us virtual traveling companions.