The Fruitful Darkness
One of the four places I’m exploring as the site of the rest of my life is Upaya Zen Center, in Santa Fe, NM, where Joan Halifax is the abbot. I wanted to know more about her, her beliefs, her values–so I ordered a copy of her book, The Fruitful Darkness: A Journey through Buddhist Practice and Tribal Wisdom. She’s an anthropologist, she worked with Joseph Campbell for a time, and she’s the ex-wife of Stan Grof, the breath-man, with whom she wrote a book. She spent years studying shamanism; at a point fairly early on, she stopped being an anthropologist and became a student: in west Africa, in Mexico, in the southwestern USA, in Asia. Then her charmed life took her to some of the great Buddhist teachers: Thay Nhat Hanh, His Holiness the Dalai Lama himself, and some powerful Korean and Japanese teachers. She’s an eclectic learner, like me, and reading her book makes me feel better about my own wanderings, my own thinly-spread and widely-encompassing quest. She’s also a skilled writer whose prose reads like poetry.
The Fruitful Darkness is a little like an extended poem, describing her journey. She speaks of Initiation, Separation, Sacrifice, The Threshold, The Return, all in Capital Letters, in mythic terms. (Maybe Joseph Campbell helped her see life that way, or maybe he just validated the way she already saw her life.) Take this example of rain in the California desert:
“I have always loved the smell of rain in the desert, with the bitter-fresh smell of ozone impregnating the atmosphere. The old, dry sage plants resurrect with rain. The rocks seem to give off a perfume as they show their true colors.”
“Our suffering is a sacrifice, but often what we suffer from can be a gift of strength, like the shaman’s wound that becomes th surce of his or her compassion.”
I’m glad she doesn’t say that sacrifice IS a gift; she only makes it clear that once we are faced with the necessity of sacrifice, we can choose to receive it, honor it, as a gift. We can make something of what comes to us. Yes. And then she says this: “In the way of shamans and Buddhists, we are encouraged to face fully whatever form our suffering takes, to confirm it, and finally to let it ignite our compassion and wisdom.” Yes. She observes that part of the sickness of our western culture is this: “. . . ill and disgruntled, alienated from the view that all of life is sacred, we are sitting around our workplaces, in doctors’ offices, in our churches and temples feeling out of sorts.” Yes.
She speaks often of pilgrimage, which has been my theme for this lifetime. “Everybody has a geography that can be used for change. That is why we travel to far-off places. Whether we know it or not, we need to renew ourselves in territories that are fresh and wild. We need to come home through the body of alien lands. . . the path is the temple. . . pilgrimage is a remembering in the passing through of sacred time and sacred space.”
I think of the fundamentalist Buddhist Vietnamese nun I studied with for a year, who taught that we cannot give service to anyone until we become enlightened, until we know the root of our suffering, until we can say who we are. I sickened and became depressed with that teaching, as it dammed up my energy and gave me nowhere to put it. Halifax writes, as if in counterpoint: “Although I can say little to nothing about my own true nature, I can say that Mt. Kailas took me down and into its depths even as I crossed over its pass. Little was left of me psychically or physicaly after circling it. Leaving Kailas, the way back to Nepal along the Brahmaputra River across the southern deserts of Tibet was no easier. Whatever I had lost on Kailas, I lost the rest on the journey home.
The birds have vanished into the sky,
and now the last cloud drains away.
We sit together, the mountain and me,
until only the mountain remains.”
Yes. And this:
“The Buddhist realizes that the blue mountain is walking. The Native American hears the blue mountain talking. I have heard mountains sing and mountains shake with the power of thunder. Mountains whistle with the power of wind and whisper with pine. Mountains crackle, groan, and roar with glacial energies. And mountains hold their silence in stillness, like great meditators abiding at the edge of the horizon. Mountains also mark the boundaries of the known world.”
I have applied to visit and experience what it’s like to live in the community at Upaya, where Joan Halifax is abbot, and at centers in North Carolina, Washington State, and California this summer. All but Upaya have said yes to me. The “teachers” in each place may or may not be there when I arrive, which is fine with me. The teachers are not what it’s about. It’s the life of the place, the spirit of the community, that matters most to me. Upaya has a committee that must meet to consider applications from people who want to come explore living with them, and I’m waiting for their decision. The more I read Joan Halifax, the more I hope her center says yes to me, because she and I have traveled so many of the same paths. But I’m also cautious.
Years ago, I was entranced by Guru Chidvilasananda, and I went to her community in upstate New York. I signed on for a week, and I experienced “shaktipat” during an intensive with Guru Maya, but after three days I fled the community and happily forfeited the money for the week I had paid for. The community and the teacher can express very different energies. I learned right then that it is crucial to take my body and spirit into a community in order to know it. It’s impossible to know a community “on paper.” Then I learned with the Vietnamese nun that it’s necessary to be very careful in choosing a teacher. Some teachers who may be wise and good for some students may clash completely with the spirit and direction that are all I know of myself. I have read Bo Lozoff’s work and have met him and felt a brotherhood and a sisterhood between us. I have read some of Thubten Chodron’s books and have shouted YES to her values. I am now chanting aloud to myself the poetry of Joan Halifax, knowing that my own work with southern African traditional doctors and Buddhist teachers echoes importantly some of her wisdom. Interestingly, I don’t even know who the “teachers” are, at Green Gulch Farm near San Francisco. It is the land itself I’m drawn to–the hills, the valley, the garden, the ocean. The pilgrimage continues.
Tags: Books and Movies, Buddhism, Where to plant myself
Kendall
Leave a Reply