This is Getting Old (18 page)

Then I took refuge in Buddha, dharma, and sangha, saying the words out loud, whether I felt anything or not.

That I had shaped this practice for myself gave me confidence. And the early morning incense smoke, though it was thin and drifting, provided a hint of continuity for my days. They seemed, after all, to be days in the same life. One person's life—mine.

Now I can say this: there are times in life when nothing helps, when you just have to feel terrible for a while. All you can do is go through the agony and come out the other end of it. It's a gift, in a way, to hit the bottom, though it didn't feel like a gift at the time. If you lie on the grass, you can't fall down.

There's a saying in Zen that “inquiry and response come up together.” Perhaps that's what prayer is. To make an inquiry is already to get a response, because asking implies that there's something else there. And there's not even a time lag. The moment you're asking for help, you're already getting it, though it may not be the help you thought you wanted.

Once, when I called Zen teacher Reb Anderson in despair, he came to Berkeley to see me. We sat on a park bench in a
children's playground, and he told me, “The universe is already taking care of you.” I said this mantra to myself over and over: “The universe is already taking care of me.”

A turning moment came at the end of a hard summer while I was visiting friends on Cape Cod. One late afternoon I walked barefoot and alone down the beach and into the salty water. There were no people about, so I took off my bathing suit in the water and flung it up on the sand. I swam and swam and felt the water touching every part of me. I was
in
it—no dry place left. I wasn't afraid to be alone with my skin because I wasn't alone; there was nothing, not the width of a cell, between me and the rest of the universe. I did a somersault under the water and looked up at the shiny membrane above me. My head hatched into the light, and I breathed the air and knew that I would be all right. No, not
would be
, but
was already
. I was back in my life.

Now, many years out of the desolation, I still don't know why I suffered so much, or why I stopped. I can neither blame myself for the suffering nor take credit for its cessation.

I sit again—I mean in meditation—but not as much as I used to. I also bow and chant and pray. I stopped taking the antidepressant, though I'd return to it without shame if I thought it would be useful.

I practice curiosity. Curiosity doesn't sound like a very spiritual quality, but I mean it so. What is it to be born a human being? What does it mean to be embodied in your separate skin? There are many paths out of the delusion of separation besides having a boyfriend—things like writing and swimming, for example. And there's studying this human life. You could call it Buddhadharma, or you could call it something else—it doesn't matter.

I'm now willing to admit that I sit zazen for a reason: I want to understand who, if anybody, I am and how I'm connected to the rest of it. And yes, I want to stop suffering and I want to help others stop suffering.

I've gained some confidence from surviving those terrible years, and the older I get the easier it becomes to follow the good advice of the bumper sticker: “Don't believe everything you think.” There's steadiness in age.

You Can't Take It with You

A
ND WHAT YOU LEAVE
behind should be sorted into boxes and neatly labeled.

The old house I've lived in for over thirty-five years has an attic, right under the roof. I can stand up easily under the peak, but the roof slopes down on the sides and I have to be careful not to puncture my scalp on the sharp ends of the shingle nails that come right through from the other side, as I'm foraging for a pair of mittens in a box of snow clothes.

To get to the mittens I might have to push aside boxes of books and papers, my grown sons' childhood collections of bottle caps and souvenir spoons, the pinhole camera I made in a weekend workshop, a box of vinyl record albums, or my rusty bookbinding tools. When I'm downstairs in the relatively uncluttered living room, I can feel these possessions pressing on me from the other side of the ceiling. They are heavy and growing heavier; I fear they are making baby boxes at night when I'm not looking.

Every few years I make a stab at it. This time I've hired my niece to help me. We pull the boxes one by one from the shadows, and we sit on milk crates and examine the contents. Some of the boxes are chewed at the corners and one has a nest made of a shredded high school yearbook. The rats were persuaded to
depart years ago by an exterminator, at no small expense to me, but we find a few unsprung traps, still baited with dried-up peanut butter, in the corners of the eaves.

From a box full of unsorted letters I pull one out at random; it's from a homesick child at camp. I lose my bearings, the past tugs at me. Do I owe it to my children to keep these things? Do I owe it to my children to throw them away? Feeling weak and demoralized, I label the box:
LETTERS TO SORT
, and my niece pushes it back under the eaves and pulls out the next one.

When I was a child, I played in my grandmother's attic, dressing up from the costume trunk and playing with the old doll's house. When my grandmother was a child, she played in that very same attic—it was
her
grandmother's attic. After my mother died, my siblings and I had to deal with the contents of the attic—boxes of letters that went back five generations and a trunk of antique dresses. We gave the letters to a historical library, and the dresses we brought to a family reunion, where we had a fashion show. We older ones watched while the young women of the family—nieces, daughter-in-law, nephew's girlfriend—walked out one at a time onto our makeshift runway in the middle of the living room and modeled the dresses: Cousin Lizzie Wentworth's taffeta traveling dress, Grandma's flapper dress, Aunt Bessie's purple lace ball gown. They sashayed, they paused, they held up their trains, they lifted their chins coquettishly, and they brought the old dresses to life. When they returned to their various homes they took with them the dresses they wanted.

I watch the various ways my contemporaries cope with objects as they get older. One friend, each year at her birthday party, requires of her guests that they choose one of her books to take home. A negative example is provided by the friend who can't stop acquiring things. He loves tools of every kind, and whenever he drives past a broken toaster oven, he stops to put it in his trunk. “But you already have a broken toaster oven!” I exclaim.

“I can fix it. Someone might need one.” His friends now give him their broken bicycles and old lamps, saving themselves the trouble of carting them to the dump. There's only a narrow path through his living room, between piles of things he's scavenged from the curbside trash. Sometimes, it's true, he fixes an old weedcutter and gives it away, but he himself admits that the situation has become unmanageable and he's almost given up trying to gain control.

My sister sold her house in Berkeley a year ago. She put all her possessions in storage except for what she could fit into her car, and she drove with her dog to New Mexico and rented a tiny house in the desert. She likes the simplicity of her life there. She has pointed out to me that I could put my belongings in storage, too, if I want a simpler life. I wouldn't even have to go to the trouble of moving—I could just stay on in my nice bare house. But there's the cost of storage to consider.

I have posted a sign on the wall over my desk: “Don't think for a minute you're not going to die.” Believe it or not, this sign makes me happy every time I notice it. It invigorates me, like a slap on the back from an old friend, reminding me that I'm not dead yet.

A couple of years ago, I joined a group called a “Year-to-Live” group. Ten of us and our skillful leader met once a month for a year, pretending we only had a year to live, in order to practice being fully alive, not sweating the small stuff, letting go of extras.

One of our last assignments, to help us practice letting go, was to give away something that was precious to us. After all, we'll have to give away every last thing in the end. We each drew our secret Santa name out of a hat. I liked Michael, the young man whose name I drew, and I walked around my house with him in mind, looking at the special objects on shelves and windowsills, and I finally settled on a Japanese tea bowl. My grandmother had gotten it long ago in Japan, and it always sat with pride of
place on the mantelpiece in her living room. When she died, I asked for that cup. My mother was at first reluctant, feeling the cup should stay in its spot on the mantel, but my sister persuaded her, saying, “Give it to her! She's a Zen Buddhist—she needs a Japanese tea bowl.”

Before I wrapped the tea bowl up for Michael, I felt the cool round clay in my hands and admired the mottled brown glaze one last time. It was a stretch to let go of it, but that was the point, wasn't it? Generosity surged in my breast; I was proud of myself.

At our final meeting, we went around the circle opening our gifts, and each giver told the story of the object. Michael loved the bowl—he said he looked forward to drinking tea out of it. I was the last person to open my gift, and it turned out that Michael, by coincidence, had drawn my name. My gift from him was a smooth stone about two inches wide with the word
gratitude
and a daisy painted on it. While Michael told the story of how he had bought the stone one special weekend when he and his girlfriend were on a yoga retreat in the desert, how that was the very day they decided to marry, how he always kept it on his altar, I was thinking, “
Gratitude
indeed! So this is what I get in exchange for an ancient Japanese tea bowl!”

Deeply shocked by this upwelling of mean-spiritedness, I placed the gratitude stone on my own altar at home, thinking to keep it there as a training device until I could look at it and actually feel gratitude. I reminded myself that the stone was probably just as precious to Michael as the tea bowl was to me. But it wasn't working—the more I looked at it the less grateful I felt, and it was a relief, finally, to give it to the Goodwill store along with some old sweaters. I'm OK about the tea bowl though.

The Zen poet Ryokan lived in a simple hut in the mountains of Japan. The story goes that a thief came to his hut one evening and found nothing to steal. Ryokan came home and caught him. “You have come a long way,” he said to the thief, “and you shouldn't leave empty-handed. Please take my clothes as a gift.”
The bewildered thief took the clothes and slunk away. Ryokan sat naked, watching the moon, and wrote the following poem:

The thief left it behind:

the moon

at my window

When he was an old man, Ryokan and a young nun named Teishin fell in love, and they exchanged letters and poems. In Ryokan's very last years she moved to a hut nearby and took care of him. After Ryokan's death, their correspondence was published along with his collected poems. Luckily for us, Ryokan must have kept all Teishin's letters in a shoebox in the corner of his hut.

My niece and I have looked inside all of the boxes in the attic. Some we got rid of entirely. Some we condensed. All are labeled, even if only with the words
PAPERS TO SORT
. I may have another crack at them one of these days, but in the meantime, I'm letting go of letting go. And inside each box of papers I've put a note that says, “Feel free to throw this away.”

The Secret Place

W
HEN
I
WAS A CHILD
, I found a secret place in the bayberry bushes. It was summer, when my family floated free from the known world, the world that was measured by carpools and sidewalks, and went to the seashore. I was lonely there, alone in my separate self, in my dungaree shorts, with dirty knees and poison ivy between my toes.

I would put my jackknife in my pocket and wind my way through a scratchy gap in the bushes into a clearing the size of a small room, an almost flat place on the flank of a hill, overlooking Menemsha Pond. The bayberry bushes were taller than I was, and my parents couldn't see me from the house. They didn't even know the secret place existed. But I could see far across the water to the shimmering dunes of Lobsterville.