Insight

Years and years before, back in Kentucky, when I received a flier for a week-long residential Buddhist meditation retreat, I tried to talk my friend Wendy into going with me during our spring break.

"But Wendy, you drive right by there." There being the Insight Meditation Retreat Center, five miles from her family's house where her daughter was going to spend the week.

"Doesn't mean I have to come in. I drive right by the penitentiary, too."

"Come on. We can drop off Leslie, spend the week at the retreat center, pick her up again on Sunday. It'll be great. You can do some meditation, hike the trails around there. Leave if you don't like it."

"Except that I don't want to. A Saturday workshop is one thing, but a whole week? My only real vacation? I get to completely relax. Sleep in. No schedule. Talk only to grownups all week. Heaven."

"Come on, let's try it. You saw the flier, it's that Vipassana retreat."

"Vipa-what?"

"Vipassana. Insight. Practice of the Theravaden Buddhism of Southeastern Asia. Let me read you what the brochure says. 'Insight meditation focuses on creating mindfulness. . .' "

"No, please."

"Okay, okay. Whatever. But listen, can you drop me off? I'll get a ride back with someone else."
"No problem."

I didn't know for sure that Wendy had signed up for the retreat until we actually got there, but I suspected something was up by the way she kept smiling to herself through the trip. She'd make a lousy spy.

Wendy and I weren't competitive so much as we'd always sort of egged each other on. If Wendy got into yoga, it wouldn't be long before I would be stretched out on a mat in the fish pose. That sort of thing. I had talked Wendy into coming to some of the early workshops I'd been attending, but she didn't seem interested in meditation or Buddhism, even though I thought she should be. For her own good.

At dinner—which they called "tea" and I found surprisingly light—I noticed Wendy glancing around the dining room. Everyone else—mainly women—seemed to be looking down at their plates, not talking. Uh oh, I thought, what have I gotten us into?

In the main hall right after dinner, the head teacher, a woman named Leila, told us the schedule: the day would be broken up into 45 minutes periods of sitting and walking meditation, interspersed with talks on dharma--the teachings of the Buddha. "And, of course," she added, "it goes without saying"—smile—"no talking for the seven days of this silent retreat."

I was afraid to turn my head to look at Wendy.

"Now please," Leila continued, "don't go further than the flags set up around the center. We're having a problem with rattlesnakes this year. And the woods are just full of poison oak. Also, now that the retreat boundaries are closed, you can't, of course, leave the property. If you have any questions, you can write a note to me or Donnie. All right? Now, time for lights out. 5:30 comes pretty early in the morning, so we'll want to get lots of rest tonight."

On the way out, Wendy jabbed me in the ribs, hard. Then stamped on my toe as I shoved past. I didn't blame her, not really.

"Being ever vigilant about stopping your thoughts during sitting only develops the mind of a sniper." Donnie was giving the morning dharma talk. "Meet these thoughts with loving kindness for yourself. The brain is just doing it's job, always looking out for you. Probably one reason we think about sex so much is that the survival instinct is strong in us. When our brain churns up thoughts of status, of getting ahead, it's just a modern version of finding an advantage in the hunt. We're the product of evolution, after all."

I felt like Donnie had been watching my sniper brain all morning. I'd been amazed at the constant stream of thoughts that I couldn't control, couldn't stop.

Wendy didn't show up all that morning, but sat slumped over her salad when I came in to the dining room at lunch. As I sat down beside her, she turned aside and hunched over her bowl as if I had planned to steal it. For a minute or two, I tried to send her feelings of loving kindness, but could almost hear them fizzle and pop as they reached her taut surfaces.

She did come to the afternoon session and out of the corner of my eye I could see her stare in horrified disbelief as Leila demonstrated walking meditation for anyone who had missed the instruction that morning.

"The idea is to become mindful of your body, your sensations, so you let your attention rest on your feet and legs, on how they move. Lift right foot, place it on the ground, shift weight onto the heel, then the toe, lift left foot, place, shift weight onto the left foot. Lift right foot. . . "

The area marked off by the flags didn't extend much farther than the parking lot so there was something of a traffic jam during the walking meditation period. That morning I had found a nice shady spot behind the last cabin, but when I got there, Wendy was already stalking back and forth with her arms spread like Frankenstein's monster, making lock-kneed lurches. The minute she saw me, she rushed over. "You lied to me," she began, apparently having decided that the rule of quiet didn't extend to the two of us. "Up at 5:30. No men under 60 and you can't even talk to them. And this walking meditation shit. We look like we're straight out of the Night of the Living Dead!"

"I didn't know it was going to be silent, Wendy. Truly I didn't. Just give it a chance. The first three days of a retreat are always hell, really. For everybody." Donnie had told us so that morning. Somehow I couldn't stop playing the expert with Wendy.

Wendy fumed. I started walking. Lift, place, move.

"Self-righteous bitch," she muttered to my back.

"Metta or loving kindness is accepting everything that happens as part of dharma. Accepting is not the same as approval. If we accept everything that comes our way with loving kindness—and don't forget that attention itself is a kind of metta—then we can maintain a calm, still center in the midst of whatever arises." This time Leila is speaking. She has a beautiful voice which unlocks something deep inside my heart.

"In the same spirit, I hear people say, 'Pain is a given, suffering an option.' Once we get outside of our stories, once we take them less seriously, we suffer less and less."

It's then that I notice that Wendy is leaning forward, listening intently. I am too, I suddenly realize.

Leila talks on about how we create these stories for ourselves, bit by bit, until we've constructed sort of a personalized theme-park. We might have a display for Accomplishments, maybe a monument to Marriage. Most of us add a ride fueled by anger which loops over and over the same territory, repeatedly producing the same emotions. Maybe we have side-shows with selected videos of What Happened To Me As A Child. But, Leila concludes, the past is gone, it's over. We don't have to keep rewriting history. Visiting this theme park or redoing the exhibits keeps us from being aware in the present moment.

The same with ideas of the future. She asks how many find that their minds spin forward during sitting meditation. My own hand goes up, then almost everyone else's. This is normal, she explains. We have to plan, to think about the future, but in a reasonable way.

"Many times I find myself writing out this script of a possible future for myself and for others. But usually it's a screenplay that's never going to be optioned. Certainly not without rewriting.
"We often have a sense of a gigantic past behind us, with the future as a great mass in front that needs to be muscled and pummeled into shape. And the present as this tiny crack between. But this little sliver we think of as the present is the whole thing, it's all we have. That's why we try to slow down and become mindful.

"While you're here on retreat, simply watch how many times your mind goes away from the present. Don't berate yourself for thinking of the past or the future, simply name it. Say to yourself, 'Remembering' or 'Planning.' Or even just label it 'Thinking,' then go back to the breathing. Just follow your breath. That's all you have to do here on retreat. Sit. Breathe."

In addition to labeling my own stream of thoughts as 'remembering' and 'planning', I added a new category, 'Wendy'. This included a whole range of reactions: watching, worrying, responding with regret, irritation, disappointment, love, hope, attachment, control.

Late in the week, I headed off into the woods after lunch, walking right past all of the little red flags. I needed to get away from the group to clear my head, settle my mind. Everything looked crisp, startlingly beautiful.

I was just thinking that retreat and silence were things I want more of in my life when suddenly I came upon Wendy sitting under a tree, smoking a joint. She looked relaxed, even blissful.
I rustled the leaves until Wendy's gaze drifted around to my direction.

"You were right to drag me here." She smiled in such an open-hearted way that it made me want to cry. I realized how much I'd missed being Wendy's friend all week. "I'm just beginning to understand how my stories hem me in, make me unable to take in information about other people. Especially Leslie. She's just trying to grow up." Wendy talked on about the various insights she'd experienced over the week, the deepening of understanding. "I'm so glad I came."

When she held out the joint, I shook my head. We'd both taken the five basic precepts for the duration of the retreat, vowing not to kill, lie, steal, indulge in sexual misconduct, use alcohol or other substances.

"Oh, they didn't mean this," Wendy scoffed. "Or they don't mean us."

"I don't know. Could be some sort of karma involved here."

"Do you think?"

"Maybe there's more to all of this stuff than we can see from the Western perspective. I really don't know."

"What do you mean?"

"Well, for one thing, Wendy, right now you're sitting in a big patch of poison oak."

The narrator here is a chef in a Buddhist retreat center called Dorje Ling. She has taken a vow of silence some weeks before the chapter opens. For more on the book as well as more on the "real" Leo, see www.snowlight.com

A Cup of Tea

The Chens from Hong Kong are my morning helpers in the kitchen. Both have pale teal tee-shirts, black cotton pants, golden skin. I watch them load the dishwasher, gliding to and from the prep table with quicksilver movements. Working together, their bodies move in a constant dance of communication, not touching, not plastered together the way couples in love tend to be, but something lighter, finer, more subtle. The teachings are about to begin, so they disappear into the shrine room, skimming the floor.

My third new helper stays on in the kitchen to prepare lunch. Today's talk about relationships and the spiritual path comes crackling over the speakers in the kitchen, sounding as if from a distant planet.

This new helper is Leo Stein, a poet from New York. Big, bear-like, lots of face. His headful of wild curly black hair gives him a woolly look, as if he'd just come in off the steppes. His dark thick eyebrows and bushy salt and pepper beard complete the effect. Liquid brown eyes wild and gleaming, soulful and sad, intelligent and dumb. I like the way Leo manages to look lost and found at the same time.

I’m a little in love with Leo, in fact, but only from afar. For the first time in my life I don’t go hurtling after someone but simply enjoy him silently from a distance. It will be all right with me if Leo is around only for another week, that we share this space together and he returns to his wife or girlfriend or whoever waits for him back East. Leo, I know, is not the sort of person to be without a woman for very long, no question about that. Not that he chases women at the Center, but he tends to bend toward any female standing nearby the way a cold man leans toward a fire.
Relationship, says Lama S. over the speakers, can be a spiritual path, just as celibacy is a path. I notice Leo has stopped washing dishes at this point so as not to miss a word. Not everyone chooses to be celibate, the lama continues, some of the lineages of Tibet are householders, people who pursue spiritual goals within the context of marriage and a family. Her own teacher had told her that she could spend years in solitary retreat or she could do it the quick way by practicing while living with her husband and child. My teacher never gave me the option of going away and becoming holy, she says, life itself had to become my retreat.

Most of the relationships in our country are based on a sort of ledger model, says Lama S. I make you a cup of tea but, on some level, some where, I'm expecting you to make me one in exchange. If a week or so goes by and I haven't gotten my cup of tea, then I start this angry little dialogue within myself about how "you" aren't fulfilling "my" needs. But any relationship that is founded on the idea that another person will make you happy is doomed from the very start. The only ones that will ever succeed are those that begin with the question "What can I do to make the other person happy?"

And this motivation needs to be the ground of the relationship, not just a temporary attitude that you adopt to make yourself seem like a good person. You really can't be waiting for that cup of tea to come back to you, but learn to give freely. A cup of tea, a smile, a little kindness, there is always something that we can offer. Only through our unimpeded generosity do we become happy.

When you go into a room, she continues, look around and see what you can do to help. If you make that your stance toward life, then you'll never need anything else. You'll not be thinking about your needs, your wants, your desires. The center of the universe has shifted a little from you to the outside. This can be done within a relationship, within the family, with the world at large. Give. Love. Help. But without wanting something back to balance the ledger. You'll find that this makes you deeply happy all the time.

When that teaching ended, I prepared Leo a cup of tea by the stove. The talk had made me want to be good. Not goody-goody or pretend nice in any way. Just helpful.

When I turn to give the tea to Leo, I find him holding out a cup toward me at the very same instant. We look at each other, then burst out laughing, swept together into a free and clear sharing of joy.

Leo will stop washing dishes or prepping vegetables to go and write something down. He covers paper towels, backs of labels, bits of masking tape with words. His writing is curly and unruly, just like his hair. I find a written-over napkin in the pantry with this scrap of a poem:

To gaze into an empty room
is not becoming Buddha.
To feed a starving lion, Buddha
gave up one of his precious lives.
As a rabbit, as food,
he leapt in the fire.
We're paired to help,
like hands, like feet.
To gaze into an empty room
is not becoming Buddha.

I read the poem over several times, fold it up and put it in my apron pocket. The next time I see Leo, I return it, making a little bow. He bows back, gesturing for me to keep the napkin. Just as when we gave each other the cups of tea, I had a sense that we are truly present with each other in some sort of unexplored dimension that has neither center nor circumference.
The next time I come into the kitchen, Leo has left another poem for me:

WHAT BREATHES US

Regards to the day, the great long day
that can't be hoarded, good or ill.
What breathes us likely means us well.
 
We rise up from an earthly root
to seek the blossom of the heart.
What breathes us likely means us well.

We are a voice impelled to tell
where the joining of sound and silence is.
We are the tides, and their witnesses.
What breathes us likely means us well.

That afternoon, the group at Dorje Ling received a teaching on attachment. According to the Buddhists, there are three root things that poison the mind: attachment, aversion and ignorance. We see something, we want it, we attach ourselves to it. Or we see it, don't want it, push it away. In addition, we make judgments about it. It's good, it's bad.

And ignorance? It's the basis of both of the above. Ignorance is indulging in attachment and aversion, in not knowing any better, in thinking the duality we create in our own minds is real, solid, firm. Which it isn't. What we think of as our self isn't real either. Not that it isn't there. Something's there, but it's changing, coming into being, going out of being, each instant.
And what does this mean in terms of relationship? Well, several things, obviously. First of all, we tend to see the other person in terms of our attachment (I love you, stay with me always) as the object of our affections rather than a subject in his or her own right. We can be attached to objects, but can love only subjects.

Furthermore, the self —myself, yourself, himself—is like the weather. Not real or solid, but happening. Sometimes the rain and hail dominate everything. Other times, the clouds are light and fluffy, lots of sky showing through. But it’s always impermanent, always changing, never the same from minute to minute. In terms of relationships, if we pin our happiness to one particular weather system, we're in trouble. And vice versa. As objects, we're not allowed to change, to be changeable. We won't allow the other as an object to do so either.

What a miserable situation, Lama S. says. Of course so many relationships fail. Their destruction is built right into the ground rules. But if you change the way you think about the other person, then there is a chance not only to give happiness, but to experience it as well. Mind changes: everything changes.

It feels good to be in love again even though I know that Leo is only a catalyst for some larger process that has been working within me. I know now that being in love is not the point.
Leo is leaving today. He's been hanging around the kitchen wanting to talk to me, maybe to hug me goodbye. Perhaps to invite me to run away with him forever. I'll never know because I'm standing here at the counter and not going to look up until the very last minute. It is not for Leo that I'll break my vow of silence. I learned that in a dream last night.

In my dream Leo and I soak in a hot tub on a deck in the Berkeley Hills. It feels like we have been together for a long, long time. One of us barely has to finish a sentence for the other to know what is meant, felt.

His arm moves in slow motion towards the bowl of dark skinned, ripe fruit set on Dutch blue tiles. Toward the house, the blue tiles are interspersed with white ones, an occasional red hexagonal thrown in. Near the edge of the deck, where it falls down what seemed hundreds of feet, a deep red tile plant shelf holds a gigantic jade plant.

We soak. Nothing needed.

"It's like this," Leo leans back in the dream tub, "there are all of these women. I'm in love with all of them. With you, too. Mainly with you right now. But there have been all of these wives, girlfriends, daughters, sisters. My poems are all about women, did you know? My head is crowded with these female people. I dream about them. I surf the Internet and get involved with cyber-women, virtual girls. I wish I had a lifetime to spend with each, but I don't."

"Maybe you have parallel lives with all of them, all of us. In dreams. On different planets, whatever."

"Anything seems possible in a hot tub."

"Or in a dream."

He lets out a huge sigh and gets up on the blue tile steps. "Want another pear?"
He passes me the bowl of fruit.

"Thing is, Leo," I set the bowl aside, "been lots of men in my life, so I understand all that. I truly do. I'm gone on you, too. But I don't think being in love is the point. Loving, maybe. Union."
"Union, as in. . . ?"

But I didn't answer him.

Leo has been night-dreaming about me, too. I can tell. For several days he's stood only inches from me as I work at the stove. These teachings on relationships wrap around us, but also keep us apart. At least they stop me (and I suspect, him) from jumping into a remake of the same old romantic movie.

I've heard people from the office talk about the letters and phone calls and e-mails that Leo receives every day. All from someone named Laura. Each morning, Lynn delivers blue envelopes to him that smell like the perfume they stick in the fashion magazine these days. He goes outside to read them, then walks round and round the statue as if he was running from someone or something.

That's a situation I'm not about to jump into. Not this time. There is more at stake here than a passing fancy.

But we keep having these moments, clear and free little moments, spaces where we meet, touch, separate. This may be all we will ever have, but at least we're really present, not lost in some drama of self, some fantasy of the other. We show up right there together in the kitchen.
And there he is. Leo, next to me. His arms around me, hugging me goodbye. He wants me to say goodbye to him, to say his name. I look him in the eye instead, then wiggle my fingers in a final wave.

What is important is loving, without the 'in' part. Love. In a vast sort of way. Not that nose-to-nose, toes-to-toes business, but an ever expanding connection to the universe and all that it contains.

When Leo returns home, he sends such a beautiful love poem that I cry all the way through puja. Somehow I don't think I've seen the last of Leo Stein.

WITHIN ANOTHER LIFE

Those whose days were grudging or confused
may come back trapped within another life
as a boulder, or a pane of glass,
or a door that suffers every time it's slammed.
If I return a boulder, love, some summer day
come sit by me and contemplate these horses and these hills.
And if a windowpane, gaze through to see
the meadow on our walks where brown geese strut.
And if I am a door, come home through me,
be sure I'll keep you safe.
And if a knotted, twisted rope,
from long self-clenching and complexity,
oh love, unbind, unbraid me then
until I flow again like windswept hair.

www.snowlight.com