Читать книгу Autumn Light - Edwina Norton - Страница 11

Now I was in fact a single parent, responsible for supporting Alec and Dan financially and emotionally while dealing somehow with the shock of Dave’s suicide. I continued as Kobun’s student. This provided stability and support, but my primary focuses became being sure Alec and Dan were okay and finding a job with enough income to support us. I didn’t have time to grieve, let alone to deal with the guilt I felt over not saving Dave. In hindsight, I was overwhelmed by his suicide. I couldn’t process it. It would take many years to work through the grief and anger generated by our divorce and his death.

The impacts on Alec and Dan were also complex, though different. As Dave’s alcoholism worsened over the years, Alec oriented his life more outside the home. Dave had not been unkind to Alec, but to my distress, he had not been a nurturing stepfather and never legally adopted him as I had hoped. Dave’s final abdication of filial responsibility must have underscored the disappointment I feared Alec experienced as he was growing up. His year of attending Alateen gave him some perspective about how little family members can do about alcoholism, so from high school onward he focused on his studies and his life outside the family. As a freshman in college 400 miles away, he devoted himself to his education. I supported him from afar as best I could, seeing that he had what he needed materially and encouraging him in his schoolwork and friendships. Summers he lived at home and worked as a lifeguard, and I could then support him more directly then. I worried that I didn’t do more to help him deal with Dave’s suicide, but he seemed to manage his life pretty well. In four years he graduated first in his college class and received a fellowship to study at Oxford University in England. For him, too, it would take years to work through the conflicting emotions our family experience created for each of us.

The first summer after Dave’s death, I did arrange for both Alec and Dan to see a child psychologist so they could process their emotions. After a few sessions (which I was not allowed to attend), the therapist reported that she felt they had worked through their initial emotions and could discontinue therapy. Perhaps because I did not want to interfere with their process, I never initiated any discussion about concerns they had about my responsibility in Dave’s death. That might have helped all three of us. I was dimly aware that I wasn’t doing as much as was needed, but I didn’t know how to address our grieving as a family directly.

Dan, fourteen and the “only child” now that Alec had returned to college, suffered more deeply. He was attached to his father and being still quite young was strongly impacted emotionally. Not only did he have to absorb the bewildering tragedy of the suicide, but also because now I had to work full time, I was no longer at home after school to nurture him. However, I had a brainstorm. I contacted the Big Brothers and Sisters organization and engaged a volunteer, Bob, a systems engineer, who became Dan’s Big Brother for three years. He took Dan on frequent camping trips to California’s national and regional parks, teaching him many outdoor skills. They also rebuilt our old VW Bug’s engine. This project gave Dan the initial skills to become a talented mechanic during high school and college and later to own and manage a car repair and tire business in Colorado. Dan benefited greatly from Bob’s guidance and big-hearted moral support. He eased Dan’s way through his teenage years and thereby greatly helped me in parenting.

During these years when the boys were in high school and college, I worked full time, moving strategically from job to job to develop a satisfying and well-paid career as a management and organization development specialist. All three of us were intently pursuing our interests, so there seemed little time to review or integrate the emotional calamity of Dave’s death. I regret that I didn’t help the boys more to process their feelings. Instead I supported each of them in pursuing their interests. In this way, I acted more as a father, the parent who bridges the child to the world, than a mother, who provides a loving refuge.

During this time at Haiku Zendo I joined the sangha board of directors and worked on the capital campaign Kobun had initiated to acquire a larger center. Over two years we raised almost three hundred thousand dollars but fell short of the amount needed to buy the Japanese-style mountain house we wanted. Eventually we used the money to purchase both a retreat center in the Santa Cruz Mountains (Jikoji) and a city center in Mountain View (Kannon-do). In the midst of this expansion, Kobun suddenly announced he no longer wanted to lead our sangha. Instead, he would become a traveling teacher. We were shocked. He assured us we were quite capable of practicing on our own. I remember puzzling over what that might mean for me. I knew only the traditions of sangha life and following the teacher. I was just learning how to develop a new career and be a single parent. How could I, who had come to depend on Kobun, take full charge of my Zen practice as well?

There was much consternation and discussion among Kobun’s students. A few refused to let him go and followed him to his new locations, first in Santa Cruz and later in Taos, New Mexico. I owed Kobun a profound debt of gratitude for his kindness to me. I knew the Buddhist tradition was to do as the teacher asks. After weighing the sorrow I felt at losing him against all he had done for me, I decided I must do as he asked. I must let him go. Now I was more on my own than ever. The next years were ones of intense personal, spiritual, and professional development for me as well as for my children. As it turned out, Zen practice and the opportunities it offered to understand my life supported me well as I went forth in the world.

When Kobun was still at Haiku Zendo and I was sitting zazen daily at home, my life had gradually stabilized. I began to feel stronger and calmer. I had found refuge. Daily zazen instilled in me the determination, discipline, and courage needed to face life’s challenges. Among them was the legacy of negative emotions from my adolescence onward—guilt, fear, shame, anger, resentment, loneliness. Zen practice would slowly heal me.

Six or seven years into practicing Zen, however, I still doubted that I was doing zazen correctly. This uncertainty probably expressed the deep lack of self-confidence I had learned in adolescence. Also, though I read voraciously in Zen and Buddhism, I began to realize I did not clearly understand the teachings. They were so different from Western culture’s logical, dualistic perspective. At the zendo I memorized and chanted the Heart Sutra, the mainstay of Zen practice, but I didn’t understand much of it: “Form is emptiness, Emptiness form.” What does emptiness mean? How could form and emptiness be interchangeable?

I sat zazen in half lotus for forty-minute periods, but I couldn’t tell if my disorganized mental activity meant I was letting go of thoughts or I was just agitated. I deeply loved zazen and bowing and being silent with others, but I couldn’t articulate what I experienced in zazen or why. It seemed dreamlike—the quiet zendo, the incense and bells, the bowing. Even as I was devoted to zazen, I still doubted myself. I did not understand it at the time, but I had begun to enter the unconscious mind of broader awareness that zazen offers. Zazen had begun to guide me.

One evening sitting zazen, I had the powerful insight that my spiritual understanding would be slow to develop. Observing how quickly a sangha friend was progressing along the path toward priest ordination, I recognized my practice was halting and hesitant, despite my devotion to it. I visualized myself sitting zazen on a pile of rocks—stolid, enduring, but slow to advance. This insight called to mind an image that had struck me a few years earlier. In a Zen study group we learned about “skillful means,” the ability of the Buddha to teach even the most deluded person. Kobun told us such people were called icchantika, a Sanskrit term from which the English word enchanted was derived. Icchantikas were beings who greatly desired enlightenment but were considered incapable of it. They were enchanted or benighted (though the Buddha could teach them). The word icchantika reverberated through me. Yes, that was my condition. For an assignment to write an autobiographical poem in a class I was taking then, I wrote about this condition. I described myself as a “blind being, enchanted stone, unwilling to be saved.” I felt I had been enchanted by my early conditioning and later my traumatic marriage. My path to awakening would be long.

I sorely missed Kobun, but his absence did not lessen my commitment to Zen. I joined Keido Les Kaye to practice at Kannon-do. Les was a good teacher, ordained by Suzuki Roshi; Haiku Zendo had been in his garage. At Kannon-do I began more deliberately to study the basics of Zen practice—How to work more subtly with the body and mind in zazen; what the correct forms were for kinhin, bowing, chanting, and moving in the zendo. I favored teachings about the simplicity of Zen practice. Just sitting, Nothing special, and Non-gaining were Zen watchwords that steadied me. During this period of recovery from family trauma, I also benefited from the many resources of the 1980s Human Potential movement in bloom in California. I read voraciously and attended workshops on how to recover from emotional co-dependence, on assertiveness training for women, and on adult development. All good medicine. I was healing.

At home I sat every morning at six a.m., facing the brick fireplace in the living room. A simple clay Buddha statue from a friend in Sri Lanka presided from a nearby bookcase. On Friday mornings a neighbor joined me in zazen. Royce was a college psychologist, a lanky, exuberant, and kind fellow a few years older than I. He didn’t want to belong to a Zen group but was delighted to sit zazen once a week together. He rode his rusty bike to my house, arriving just before six a.m. I left the front door unlocked so he, and occasionally one or two other friends, could enter quietly to join zazen.

Hosting weekly zazen in my home stretched me emotionally. I was still very much a beginner at Zen but powerfully drawn to share the wonders of zazen. I relished the generosity that welled up in me when others quietly entered my living room to sit. Initially, a frisson of fear also rushed up my spine when I couldn’t see who was entering because I was facing away from the door. Yet sitting together silently seemed to protect the space. The Buddha statue that I bowed to, the candle and incense that I lit before morning zazen made the room seem inviolable—even sacred. In fact, non-Zen friends often commented about my home’s calm atmosphere. Integrating Zen practice into daily life helped my healing. Royce and I sat together on Fridays for nearly twenty years.

During these years I also began to study the foundational teachings of Buddhism, the Prohibitory Precepts and the Eight-Fold Path. Somehow, perhaps because when I started practicing, American Zen was still developing, I hadn’t been guided to study these basic teachings in any depth. Kobun and Les had strongly emphasized just sitting and non-thinking. Devotional practices had not yet been encouraged, except perhaps at the major Zen centers.

I loved the teachings on ethics and beliefs because of their usefulness for living in the world. Perhaps my Presbyterian minister’s sermons years before had established ethics as my spiritual bent. In my career in the corporate world as an organization consultant and trainer, I advised and taught company managers about communications with employees. Daily I had the need to apply the teachings on ethical behavior. Especially pertinent to both work and personal life were the Buddhist Precepts of not lying, not slandering, not being possessive, and not harboring ill will. Every day, organizational life brought opportunities to test myself in one or more of these prohibitions. Working with them as spiritual practice was fortifying. Likewise, the Eightfold Path steps of Right Speech, Right Action, and Right Livelihood were beacons. Right Livelihood ultimately guided my decision to leave the defense contract firm where I worked. I could no longer in good conscience support managers responsible for manufacturing instruments of war. I was slowly awakening. Buddhist teachings guided my life.

I began to penetrate the meaning of the Buddha’s initial teaching, the profound and original Four Noble Truths. The first Truth is that suffering (dissatisfaction) is a fact of our human life. Life isn’t all or only suffering, but we repeatedly experience some form of suffering. The second Truth is that suffering has an identifiable origin, the human habit of having preferences for the way we want things to be. The third Truth is when we know what causes suffering, we can end or at least reduce it. And the fourth Truth is that the Eightfold Path shows us how to accomplish this.

The Four Noble Truths percolated in my interactions with work colleagues, friends and family members. When I had a conflict with someone, I began to notice that my mind seized on explanations for a behavior of theirs I didn’t like or understand. I saw I was skilled at analyzing their possible motives, and I used my “story” about them to feel safely in control. As I continued to practice Zen, though, I saw that these deft analyses of other people left me feeling separate—safe, but alone, even alienated. Plus I spent a lot of time justifying why I should avoid or manipulate these “foes.” Eventually, I saw that this was the work of the second Noble Truth—the origin of suffering, which is, simply, that we suffer because of the way we think about our experience: We grasp and cling to experiences and phenomena we desire, and we push away those we don’t want. Whichever reaction, cling or reject, we perpetuate our unhappiness.

To work deeply with this second Truth, I had to delve into the foundational Buddhist concept of No Self. Because all phenomena, including ourselves, are always changing, nothing has any permanent or abiding characteristics or nature. Psychologically, this teaching is difficult to accept. Our minds behave as if we are permanent. We have memories, histories. It feels like we are the same person we’ve always been. Early in my study of Zen I had acknowledged the deeply non-Western concept of No Self, but I did not understand it. Now I began to see how it was the assumption, itself, that was the cause of my suffering: Especially when circumstances made it necessary for me to change my ideas or actions, I suffered from not being able to stay as I was. So the belief that I was one “thing” was what caused me to suffer.

If I was always changing, what or who was it that demanded that things be the way “I” wanted them to be? If I gave up believing “I” existed in any way other than transitorily, I saw my desires and aversions were absurd. They should drop away as I naturally focused on responding to what actually was happening in the present. Learning this teaching and developing the habit of applying it has taken many years, but finally I can understand the Buddhist saying of Seng-Ts’an, Zen Patriarch (Sixth C.): “The Great Way is not difficult for those who have no preferences.” (Seng-Ts’an).

Still, I stumbled over self-centeredness and its many cravings and aversions. Perhaps because I understood that change was the nature of life, now I began feeling restless in my job. I considered a change of livelihood. I investigated returning to teaching; I took some night classes on the Rudolph Steiner educational system. I explored other parts of California where I might live and work. Eventually, I gave up on making a big change and simply resigned from my corporate job to go into business as an independent organization consultant. During the five years that I worked for myself, I gained personal agency, new professional experience, and skills for living life more creatively and contentedly.

I continued my daily home practice of zazen, sat weekly at Kannon-do, and took part in sesshins. Over these years I gradually gained access to my suppressed, early conditioning. I recognized my strong tendency to rescue people, the co-dependent habit I had perfected when married. I realized I gravitated toward people who needed support but could not offer support in return (I married two of them). I realized that avoiding intimacy may have been a hedge against being rejected by others—no doubt a habit I had established in adolescence.