Читать книгу Falling Through the Ice - John D. Hiestand - Страница 8

When I awoke the next morning, the rain had stopped and it appeared I would be treated to one of Portland’s rare but beautiful condensation-free days. As I sleepily gazed out of the apartment window the sun, not yet visible as it rose to the east beyond the hills, nevertheless caused long streaks of indirect light to appear across the abundant foliage and colorful roses that grew everywhere and gave the city its nickname. When the sun is shining Portland can be one of the most beautiful cities in the world, but it averages only sixty-eight clear days a year, whereas Denver averages a hundred fifteen, a significant difference to someone raised in the California sunshine. And there are roses in Denver, too.

Alan, without benefit of an alarm clock, also appeared, looking natty in his pajamas. Since there was no food in the apartment, we washed up and dressed quickly, getting out the door by 7 a.m. as the sun poked up over the hills. Alan had three suitcases full of his travelling clothes and the last minute items that inevitably get forgotten during a move, and I tossed them into the back seat before returning my overnight bag to the trunk. Alan slipped on his signature aviator dark glasses, looking like a red headed Tom Cruise from Rain Man. Portland is a lot like Seattle with a Starbucks located on almost every corner, but out in the suburbs we had to settle for Peet’s for our morning lattes and muffins. The drive-through went quickly, and by 7:30 we were on the road.

I reversed my course from the previous evening, heading north on 217 then going east on 26. When you emerge from the tunnel going east, downtown Portland appears like an Arcadian oasis rising out of the forest, as does the sun shining brightly and directly into your eyes. In silence we proceeded over the Willamette River and finally merged onto Interstate-84—our asphalt and concrete conduit for the next two days until we hit Interstate-80 in Salt Lake City.

While driving through the city, Alan seemed satisfied with the quiet, sipping his latte and casually munching his poppy-seed muffin. But by the time we passed through Troutdale, with Mt. Hood towering off to our right and the vast Columbia River flowing to our left, Alan tossed his empty muffin wrapping towards the trash and abruptly picked up where we had left off last night.

“Alright, so tell me about this ordination crap.”

I bit my tongue, being all too aware that the trip would be filled with colorful and irreverent language. If I challenged him on it now, the rest of the trip would be filled either with manic shouting or sullen silence. I preferred something resembling a conversation, and so I ignored the tone.

“Well, a week from today, after writing innumerable papers, presenting myself at innumerable interviews, not to mention the acquisition of an expensive Master of Divinity degree, and serving for four years as a pastor of some form or another, the Bishop will lay her hands on me, pronounce the historic words, and I will be an Ordained Elder in the United Methodist Church.”

“You know,” Alan said, “I didn’t really understand a word of that. You made it clear that Methodism doesn’t exactly run in the family, except of course for the highly influential Uncle Sam the Bishop, so I am still puzzled where all of this came from. Wasn’t your mom a Zen Buddhist or something?”

“She practiced Zen for a while when I was a kid. I never did, but it’s astonishing how those early childhood experiences really shape how you view the world.”

“Still, that doesn’t really explain becoming a Methodist minister. I’ve known you for quite a while. You weren’t particularly interested in religion when we first met, be it Zen or anything else. In fact, you were as skeptical as I am. Did something happen that I don’t know about that has caused you to go all religious on me?”

“Yes, something did happen . . . or maybe, more accurately, some things happened. But it’s not perhaps what you’re thinking. I wasn’t ‘saved’ by some charismatic evangelical, and I wasn’t knocked off my donkey by Jesus like Paul was. Actually, it was a long process that began, I guess, before I was born. In order to understand, you kind of have to know the whole story.”

“You do realize that I am completely turned off by the church and conventional religion, right? But if I were to become anything, which I won’t, I’d be a Buddhist.”

“Don’t worry, I’m not going to try and convert you to Christianity, or to Buddhism for that matter! And I think the attraction to Buddhism may be more because it is exotic and appears deep, when in fact Christianity can be just as deep even if it doesn’t appear exotic. But I have been wondering myself what brought me to this pass, and how things that happened fifty or more years ago have recently become so important, including my mother’s dabbling in Zen Buddhism.”

“Well, my friend,” said Alan as he sipped the last of his Peet’s coffee, “I assume there’s still plenty of road and sunlight ahead of us. Explain to me how our beginnings precede us, or how we precede our beginnings, or something Zen like that.”

My mind’s eye turned backwards to those days so long ago, and the events and people who have since passed out of my life. Finally I said, mostly to myself, “God! I wonder what the neighbors were thinking!”

“What . . .?”

“Had our neighbors been paying attention, they might have noticed a non-descript automobile entering our driveway in the spring of 1966, when I was ten years old. After it entered the driveway it would have disappeared from their view into the plum and cedar trees growing wild to the left, and the chrysanthemum bushes lining the right side of the short driveway that gave our rural/suburban home a great deal of privacy. The neighbors would have had to walk to the head of driveway and peer down the asphalt lane to see where the automobile had parked. Hardly an unusual experience, but they might have been a bit more surprised when the driver emerged from the car. The diminutive oriental man had a shaved head and was wearing flowing maroon robes and traditional Japanese sandals. Such a sight might have startled our nosy neighbors, and even twenty years after the end of World War II the sight of a Japanese man in a California suburban neighborhood might have been alarming. They might have guessed from his attire that the man was a Buddhist monk, but what our neighbors would not have known is that a visit from Shunryu Suzuki to our home was somewhat unusual, but not surprising or alarming. Suzuki-roshi—roshi means teacher or master—was indeed a Zen Buddhist monk, and he had been invited for dinner in our home by my mother. His presence in California during the 1960s changed my mother’s life profoundly, and unknowingly laid the foundations of my own spiritual development.

“We lived northwest of San Jose, California, in the small community of Los Altos. In the mid-1950s Los Altos represented the ideal suburban community. Land and homes were inexpensive, lots were large, and my father, Norm Hiestand Jr., was able to purchase a home big enough for his growing family on a large lot near the golf course. He had married my mother, Barbara Johnston, in 1947, and in 1949 my oldest brother Norm was born, followed in 1951 by my sister Harriet, whom we called Hattie Lou in those days. A few years later Dad added an addition on to the home, a swimming pool, and two more kids: my other brother Charlie in 1955, and me in 1956. For the first nineteen years of my life, I never knew anything except the security and freedom of semi-rural suburban living. Surrounded by vacant lots, yet close to the Rancho Shopping center, which I remember fondly as having a world class bakery that created the best chocolate chip cookies a kid could possibly want. Life seemed to have a veneer of predictability, security and conventionality that was the hallmark of a white, middle class family in those times. It was not until I was older that I came to see the rips in that veneer, or that my definition of conventionality was not completely in sync with popular conceptions.

“All of these material privileges were made possible because my father had gotten in on the ground floor of the high-tech industry, which later came to be known as Silicon Valley. In the fifties, high tech pioneering companies like Hewlett Packard were gathered around Stanford University in Palo Alto. My father had received an Electrical Engineering degree from Stanford, and became employee number nine for a new start-up called Varian Associates. When Dad started with them, they were making klystron tubes, an obscure but necessary component of microwave communications equipment. Because this equipment was used by the government, Dad had to travel a lot, including internationally, which later became a problematic lifestyle for him. But in the beginning, it was exciting to be in a cutting edge industry, and Dad used his success to purchase the American dream for his family.

“Dad had started this American dream by wooing and marrying a beautiful and intelligent grad student named Barbara Johnston. My mom had acquired a Master’s Degree in Art from Claremont University in Pasadena and married Dad, who had done his undergraduate work in southern California, in 1947. However, my mom bought into, or fell into, the Ozzie and Harriet lifestyle expectations of the 1950s, which dictated that her primary role in society, her primary identity, was that of wife and mother, holding a supporting role for her professional husband. Her artwork could be no more than a hobby, which I think really grated on her rather Bohemian soul. She also inherited a complicated family history. She adored her father, but her mother was controlling and unhappy. After her father died she was obliged to care for her mother, all of which really wasn’t in the Ozzie and Harriet script. My grandmother was moved into a little apartment in Sunnyvale, where my parents had lived before moving to Los Altos, but Mom rarely let us kids see her, and when she passed away in 1961 we weren’t even allowed to attend the funeral.

“After her father’s death in 1954, Mom announced to Dad that she wanted to have more children (to which he prophetically replied, ‘Can I finish my drink first?’), and a year later my brother Charlie was born, followed by me the next year. The first hint I had as a child that the perfect suburban veneer might have rips in it came when I was about four or five years old. With four children, my mother was confronted with multiple loads of laundry every day, and I remember walking into our laundry room one day to find Mom sobbing her eyes out as she stuffed another load of laundry into the washing machine. She uncharacteristically yelled at me to ‘get out,’ and I ran to my room, sobbing my own eyes out. I was certain I had done something wrong to make Mom behave as she had, but I had no idea what. Mom never mentioned this incident, so I didn’t either, but oddly I remember it vividly over fifty years later. I guess it qualifies as the first entry on my guilt list, but that little incident exemplifies a vein of deep unhappiness that was starting to surface in the early 1960s.

“Dad chose a different route to escape from the growing unhappiness he felt with his job and family. Social drinking was a way of life in the fifties and sixties, so it only dawned on the rest of us gradually that Dad had a drinking problem. Ultimately, his inability to overcome his alcoholism would cost him his marriage, force him into early retirement and finally contribute to his death. But in the early sixties, Dad would just get ‘kinda weird’ every now and then. Emotionally distant by nature, he gradually widened the gap between himself and his wife and children, so that we kids could later say with some accuracy as adults, ‘I never knew my father.’ Sadly, Mom got to witness the transformation of this talented and intelligent man she loved and trusted into the emotional cul-de-sac we knew as children, with no idea how to stop it.

“As early as the mid-1950s, around the time of my birth, Mom must have had some sense that her trajectory through middle-class conventionality was not what she had dreamed of in life, including the growing recognition of a spiritual void. Raised a nominal Christian Scientist—something I discovered only much later in life—she had turned her back on this denomination in particular and religion in general at an early age. At first I think she accepted the notion that the materialism of middle-class living would fill her spiritual void. She perceived the church to be more of a social institution than anything else, which to her meant it didn’t really have any spiritual seriousness, a seriousness she craved more and more. When she finally realized that neither church nor materialism could fill this growing spiritual void, she had nowhere to turn in conventional society. Her artwork did provide her with some unspecific spiritual sustenance, and somewhere in the fifties she had discovered a Japanese art form called sumi-e which served to partially satisfy her bohemian soul and to fill the importunate spiritual void in her heart.

“Dad chose to fill his spiritual void with gin. Notwithstanding the numbing effects of alcohol, his pain was detectable even by someone as young as I was. Dad had been raised in a religion-less home and by a very domineering mother. Without even the habit of church instilled in him as a child, it never seemed to occur to him to seek God in any form or religion. I don’t really think he was an atheist; I think he was just very confused by anything spiritual, particularly when it tried to open up inner spiritual pathways that he had resolutely closed off. He accompanied my mother in some of the more intellectual avenues of exploring Zen Buddhism, but I don’t think his heart was really in it.

“Into this dysfunctional American dream stepped the most unlikely of all people: a Japanese Zen monk named Shunryu Suzuki. Suzuki-roshi had arrived in San Francisco in 1959 at the age of 55 in order to take over a Soto Zen temple, and to realize his lifelong dream of teaching Zen to westerners. At that time beatniks and intellectuals in San Francisco had a growing interest in Buddhism, which had sprung up out of San Francisco’s long and historic connection with the Orient, and popularized by local writers such as Alan Watts. The presence of a Zen monk in town caused quite a stir within this community. Suzuki-roshi gave a class on Buddhism at the American Academy on Asian Studies that was well attended. He began and ended the class by having the participants sit zazen for 20 minutes. He then invited participants to join him for morning zazen at his Sokoji temple, which they did in ever increasing numbers.

“At some point in 1964, Suzuki-roshi remarked that if a suitable meeting place could be found, he would be interested in starting a Zen meditation group down the peninsula. Eventually a meeting place was established in a home in Palo Alto, and the first meeting took place in November of 1964. Thursday mornings were chosen because they were convenient for the Stanford student who had organized the meetings. In 1965 the meetings were moved to a home in Los Altos, and it is there that my mother began sitting zazen every Thursday morning beginning at 5:45 a.m. For several years Suzuki-roshi led these sessions personally, as well as working tirelessly to establish the San Francisco Zen Center.”

Alan finally interrupted “Hold on. You were nine years, maybe ten years old. Were you really aware of all of these stories and histories?”

“No, not really. From my perspective Zen just sort of appeared in my family’s life. But later on my mom wrote down her experiences and how she got started with the Zen community .1 In 1965 she was at a party with some friends and one of them told her there was a Zen Master teaching the practice of zazen in Palo Alto one morning a week. Mom had become interested in the subject of Zen through her interest in sumi-e. And for a few years she had been attending an annual weekend seminar with Alan Watts on the subject of eastern thought and Zen practice, hosted by friends of ours at their home in Los Altos Hills. But Zen was only an intellectual pursuit up until then, which was kind of ironic considering that Zen is primarily about practice, not thought or belief. She was terrified of actually doing it, but a few months later she learned that the zazen group had moved to Los Altos, less than a mile from where we lived, and she began to run out of excuses. Finally in September of 1965 she showed up at the little homemade zendo at 5:45 on a Thursday morning for her first session of zazen. She met Suzuki-roshi in the foyer before the session began and they nodded politely at each other. After he went in, she removed her shoes and followed him in, and she later wrote these words: ‘The minute I stepped into the room, I knew I had come home.’”

I had to stop for a moment, catching my breath as I remembered Mom’s love of that little zendo and her adoration for Suzuki-roshi. Alan, unsure of what the silence meant, squirmed for a moment, then said, “Powerful stuff?”

“Yeah. Mom’s family history was full of heartbreaking brokenness, and in 1965 she was becoming aware that her own family was not an episode of Ozzie and Harriet. So finding a place that told her heart that she belonged was, yeah, powerful stuff indeed. And yes, she had trouble sitting properly, and never could achieve a full Lotus position, but these were not really hindrances for her in contemplative practice. On that first morning, after sitting a little uncomfortably, the session ended with Suzuki-roshi giving a brief talk, then the small group gathered for a light breakfast. Mom found herself sitting next to Suzuki-roshi and was completely tongue-tied. Suzuki-roshi was, as usual, completely at ease, and began telling her that he had come to America in order to buy a plot of land: a plot of land for his grave! Mom was shocked, Suzuki-roshi was amused, and as far as I can tell they got along perfectly from then on.

“My mother’s recounting of her first encounter with zazen was typical of the physical difficulties unpracticed Americans had with sitting zazen, and Suzuki-roshi was always willing to accommodate the student. The purpose of zazen was to cultivate a calm mind to assist in the seeking of enlightenment, not to perform an empty, contortionist ritual.

“As I said, Mom had attended some seminars at a home in Los Altos Hills that belonged to some friends of ours, Win and Helen Wagener. Win and Helen were like an aunt and uncle to us Hiestand kids, and they owned an expansive and architecturally unique home in Los Altos Hills, which they had custom built. The home had been specifically designed to comfortably host private seminars on topics that interested them, and it was here that I have my first memory of Suzuki-roshi. If a physical description of Roshi interests you there are plenty of pictures of him you can find online, but I would not be able to describe him based on my memory alone. What was striking to me as a 9 year old child was his presence. His appearance was highly exotic with his shaved head, oriental features and long robes, but even at a distance you could sense a great depth and calmness within him. His countenance was always friendly, and he paid attention to everything that he did. Unlike most adults, he never condescended to children. When encountering him you got the sense that his spiritual vision was extremely clear. His gaze was not intense like a laser beam, but rather all-encompassing like a large, warm and comfortable quilt. In a way that we would now call typical of a Zen master, he could be extremely practical without any particular concern for outcomes. While I have no doubt that I may have idealized these childhood memories to some extent, I cannot say that I ever saw him fall outside of this Zen calm, or lose the humorous twinkle in his eye. He would draw all eyes in a room towards him not because of his stature (which was diminutive) nor his cleverness (he was always straightforward, and often witty), but because of his presence. He had a habit of dropping unexpected words of wisdom that made you stop and think more deeply about whatever it was you were doing. These were often in the form of a koan, which is a puzzle that has no logical answer and is used to expand the mind, but at least in Suzuki-roshi’s case these koans were usually followed by a laugh and a twinkle in his eye.

“In 1966, Suzuki-roshi expressed an interest in having a typical American meal, so Mom invited him to our home for dinner. Suzuki-roshi had been involved with Buddhism since he was 13 years old, and was a strict vegetarian, a fact well known to my mother. Nevertheless, she served him a traditional American meal of pot roast, which Suzuki-roshi ate up heartily. My sister, who had recently joined in with the Haiku zendo, was horrified, but I recall Suzuki-roshi being charming and witty as he politely cleaned his plate. Later, Hattie Lou asked Mom how she could have violated his vegetarianism and served him pot roast, forcing him to eat meat! Mom calmly replied, ‘In his culture it would be extremely impolite for him to refuse the meal offered to him, particularly one he had specifically asked for.’ As prosaic as this story seems now, it was a classic example of Suzuki-roshi’s (and Zen’s) emphasis on substance over form, which made an indelible impression on me at an early age.

“The seminars at Win and Helen Wagener’s home also included an annual gathering with noted author Alan Watts. Watts was the flamboyant former Episcopalian priest who had taken an interest in Zen in the 1940s, moved to San Francisco in the 1950s to join the faculty of the American Academy of Asian Studies, and published several influential books in his quest to make eastern thought comprehensible to western people.2 Although I met Watts several times at social occasions and dinners hosted by the Wageners, my best memory of him comes from when I was about ten. In conjunction with a seminar he was doing at the Wagener’s home, he agreed to do a seminar for children that was hosted in my very own living room at our home in Los Altos. Watts was interested not only in Zen and eastern thought, but in psychology as well. He arrived at our home and set up a flip chart on an easel and began drawing the outline of a human head, and a stick figure of another human inside the head. I was there with my brothers and sister, as well as children from some of the other families attending the seminar at the Wagener’s, and we paid rapt attention as the famous man said, ‘Now imagine this is your mind, your brain, and inside your brain is a little man who talks to you.’ Before he could get out another word on the nature of the ego and the id, my eleven year old brother Charlie piped up, ‘But isn’t there a little man inside the little man’s brain? And isn’t there another little man inside that little man’s brain?’ In spite of his brilliance, Watts was completely flummoxed by Charlie’s recursive logic, and the seminar went downhill from there. I never attended one of his adult seminars, but I understand they went much better.

“Many years later I read that Watts did not consider himself an academic philosopher but instead called himself a philosophical entertainer, a description that fits my memories of him to a tee. I can remember seeing him on a rerun of shows he did for KQED TV in San Francisco, bopping himself in the head with something that looked like a nerf bat to demonstrate how a Zen roshi would discipline a student. Sadly, even at the age of nine I could perceive he was also a womanizer and a heavy drinker. D. T. Suzuki,3 the best-known author on Zen at that time, felt Watts’s contributions to the western understanding of Zen were dubious at best, but Shunryu Suzuki defended his friend, calling him a ‘bodhisattva.’”4

“What’s a bodhisattva?”

“In Buddhism, once an individual reaches enlightenment, they are released from the cycle of samsara, the eternal cycle of suffering in this world, as well as the cycle of reincarnation. This is nirvana, the eternal state of self-less-ness, where the self is annihilated and disappears into nothingness. A bodhisattva is one who has reached enlightenment but remains in the cycles of reincarnation and samsara for the benefit of all sentient beings. If you have ever encountered someone who appears especially wise, deep and compassionate, they might be a bodhisattva.”

“So, was Watts a bodhisattva?”

“Weeeell . . . who am I to say? Suzuki-roshi thought he was. For me, he ended up being an archetypical example of pathetic human weaknesses combined with an intense striving for the sacred.

“This exposure to eastern thought and vivid characters formed the pattern of religious influence in my home from 1965 to 1971, my sophomore year in high school and the year that Shunryu Suzuki died. Watts followed Suzuki-roshi in death two years later, dying in his sleep aboard his houseboat in Sausalito, passing, as Mom said, ‘just the way he wanted to. He couldn’t have borne a long illness.’ What’s important to note at this point is that these experiences were not only formative, they were also normative. Christianity was the peculiar and exotic religion in my home, and was in fact hardly ever mentioned. I was twelve years old before I first entered a Christian church. It was a wedding at a Catholic church, and the religious portions of the service were incomprehensible to me. When the priest mentioned fidelity, Charlie whispered to me, “Does he mean High-Fidelity?” Since stereo recordings were brand new in those days, Charlie and I almost burst trying to stifle our laughter. The church, its rituals and their meanings, were as foreign to us as downtown Ulan Bator. Although in retrospect my feelings were completely unfair to the priest and his church, the Christian rituals I was exposed to seemed empty and meaningless compared to the vibrant presence of Suzuki-roshi and his earnest and energetic students. This is even more ironic considering I never practiced zazen as a child, teenager or young adult. Nevertheless, my first introduction to religion was one in which the encounter with the Divine was mystical and attained through contemplative practice, rather than an encounter through catechism and scripture filtered by doctrine.”

1. The full text of my mother’s memories can be found online (Chadwick, “Haiku Zendo”) in an unpublished history of Haiku Zendo in Los Altos, compiled by David Chadwick and originally edited by my mother, Barbara Hiestand.

2. Probably Watts’s most famous book is The Way of Zen, originally published in 1957 and now available through Vintage Spiritual Classics.

3. David Chadwick recalls in his biography of Shunryu Suzuki: “When confused with D. T. Suzuki, Shunryu Suzuki would say, ‘No, he’s the big Suzuki, I’m the little Suzuki.’” (Chadwick, Crooked Cucumber, 2).

4. Chadwick, Crooked Cucumber, 397.