The Great Work of Your Life: A Guide for the Journey to Your True Calling (38 page)

These questions are very personal for me, as one might imagine. Alzheimer’s can be a family disease. My grandmother had it. Then my father. Then my father’s only brother. It is probable that one or more of my siblings or I will get it, or some version of it. Will it be me? Maybe it’s already lurking there, tangling my innocent brain in knots. Will I be able to adopt Marion’s strategy? Should I begin to prepare for it now? Indeed, maybe I
am
preparing for it. Maybe that’s what this book is all about. Maybe my concern about living fully—the concern that I laid out at the outset of this book—is driven precisely by this. By death.

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Marion survived her initiation through cancer. And I have taught with her many times at Kripalu in the subsequent years. She wrote at the end of
Bone
that she had “
died into life.” And I believe it. Our workshops together are so much fun. They are full of dancing and singing. They have included poetry readings with Robert Bly—digging deep into the
dream world of participants and dancing with them to the music of Frédéric Chopin and Richard Strauss. Marion does it up grand: She usually emerges on the Saturday evenings of our workshops in a long gold lamé dress, and reads Emily Dickinson and John Keats and Shakespeare to the hundreds of participants. In our individual work during these workshops, Marion has participants digging around in the muck and the earth of their inner worlds. I have been transformed by the process of working with her. And my relationship to the dream world has never been the same.

Marion looks older now. Months of radiation therapy have left damage throughout her body. One winter after leaving Kripalu she fell on the way home and fractured both legs—bones already weakened by therapy for cancer. She endured months of rehabilitation. Yet when she next appeared at Kripalu to teach with me, she was still dancing.

“An aged man is but a paltry thing,” wrote
William Butler Yeats, one of Marion’s favorite poets.

Unless Soul clap its hands and sing
! There is a way to live beyond the pairs of opposites—beyond gain and loss, hope and fear, praise and blame, fame and ill-repute. And the Soul already knows the way. We must follow. The sage who lives like this, says Krishna—the sage who lives beyond the pairs of opposites—“
awakens to the light in the night of all creatures.”

Initiation by cancer became for Marion a new birth canal. “
Cancer has made me sadder and wiser,” she wrote, “and therefore richer. Because death is an essential part of life, to be fully alive is to be prepared for it. The gift of cancer is the gift of NOW.…
Through failures, symptoms, problems, we are prodded to renounce attachments, redundant now. With the breakdown of what has gone before, the possibility of rebirth comes.”

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Toward the end of her initiation through cancer, Marion and Ross were at a friend’s fiftieth birthday party. Everyone was dancing. Marion was glued to the couch. Doctor’s orders: fragile bones! Finally, she said to Ross, “Come on, Ross, let’s dance.”

“
Oh, Marion,” he says, “you know you can’t dance. You could break your back.”

“I sit out the polka,” she writes in her journal, describing the exasperating moment, “can’t keep my feet still.”

“A voice comes up from my perineum,” she writes with increasing fervor, “ ‘Marion, you can sit on this couch until you rot, but I am going to dance. I don’t care what Ross thinks … I don’t care what anybody thinks. I don’t care if you break your back. I don’t care if you drop down dead. I am going to dance! I am going to live!’ I feel the archetypal energy lifting me off the couch, propelling me across the room—I feel it pushing through my benumbed feet, legs, thighs, torso, arms, hands, through every cell into my head. It is TOTAL. I feel myself Gypsy—a twenty-four-year-old glowing woman. I am being danced. People are gazing at me aghast, probably thinking, ‘This old lady sat on the couch all evening; suddenly she’s transformed into a hands-in-the-air Gypsy. What’s she up to?’ Do I care?

“Then a stranger—a Dutchman who has just arrived—catches my vision, jumps into my circle, and we dance a dance as fierce as I have ever danced before. If my back breaks, if I drop dead, it doesn’t matter. I am twenty-four. I am healthy. I am whole.”

TEN

My piano teacher, Douglas, noticed it right away: “You seem to have a special relationship with that piece of music,” he mused one evening during my weekly lesson.

Douglas was referring to one of Ludwig van Beethoven’s masterful final three piano sonatas—the Sonata in A-flat, op. 110—which I was manifestly butchering in front of him at our lesson every Tuesday night. Who knows why he had given me this complex piece to study? I wasn’t technically ready for it. (Douglas told me later that he “just had a hunch.”) But I fell in love with this sonata almost immediately, and I soon determined—perversely, I guess—to master it. I never did.

The first movement was easy going. The sonata starts with a tender theme and variations in A-flat—calm and bright, like a sunny day on a sparkling pond. Things soon get darker, however. After the sweetest of introductions comes an “Arioso Dolente”—a sorrowful song. It is inexpressibly sad. This song is followed by a complex fugue in which Beethoven seems to be struggling to come to terms with his sorrow—to master it. The fugue is wild, long, and fierce, and learning it just about drove me out of my mind. Beethoven works back and forth between the beautiful song and the groaning fugal structure, all the while becoming more and more impassioned. The theme of the fugue works against itself, at times coming a hairsbreadth from flying apart. There is no question: Beethoven is bringing everything he has to this effort. This is a
life-and-death struggle of some kind. The fugue, insanely complex at its zenith, finally finds an ecstatic and harmonious conclusion. The performer collapses, exhausted.

OK, I thought. This was crazy, wonderful stuff. I could feel Beethoven working away at something here—turning the theme upside down and inside out, breaking it apart in strange ways—fracturing it. This music was really getting under my skin, and I could feel my resolve to master it rise. I practiced this sonata intensively for months. I broke it down measure by measure; I studied its structure; I spent hours working out my own ham-handed fingerings for complex passages; I played it over and over again to Douglas’s withering critique.

The more I got to know this piece, the more passionate I became about it, and the more I fell in love with Beethoven. Any time I dipped into this sonata, I felt Beethoven’s presence. There he was. When I was a kid, I had learned to play the piano by placing my small hands on top of my grandfather’s as he played his beautiful ballads. Now my hands were on Beethoven’s. Through Beethoven’s music, I
knew
him—in the Keatsean sense. This was not just music. It was transmission.

Douglas’s hunch had been right: There was something important for me in this music. It took me on a journey into some untamed part of myself. It reminded me a little of Thoreau’s description of his discovery of “the Wild” after he climbed Mount Katahdin in Maine. This contact with “the Wild” changed Thoreau and his view of nature forever. He discovered nature to be rough, untamed, dangerous, relentlessly itself, and shockingly disdainful of human laws. Thoreau declared that human beings could not be fully human without “the Wild.” Beethoven, it seemed, was a Mount Katahdin experience for me.

As a young poet, Emily Dickinson wrote to her soon-to-be mentor, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, and sent him several poems to examine. At the end of the letter, she queried: “
Are you too deeply occupied to say if my Verse is alive?” Higginson was thunderstruck by her poems. “Your poetry lives!” he wrote back immediately. “It lives.” Just so with Beethoven’s music. It lives. W
ork performed in the thrall of dharma has a life of its own
. It has an existence strangely independent of its author.

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