Part 11 (1/2)

What did it mean, ”artificial” light streaking in one direction, ”natural” light plying the opposite route? Airplane versus firefly, industry versus nature, Man versus G.o.d? Heavens no. I stood up from the hammock, walked down to No Name Creek, which cupped starlight in its eddies, and I knew that there really isn't any opposition at all. It was a mystical feeling, even deeper than the one I'd experienced that night with Leah, when I felt the house slip inside me. Looking into that sky, I wondered if all all of those lights were part of the same One Life, and the apparent duality an illusion. of those lights were part of the same One Life, and the apparent duality an illusion.

THE FOLLOWING WEEKEND, Leah and I danced at the Shakori Hills summer music festival. At one point we stopped, out of breath, to eat bowls of curry, and then jumped back up for a band from Mali playing kora harps, negoni lutes, and a balafon-style xylophone. The crowd swelled as the melodies did. Black, white, some Latinos, all kinds of colors, a spring gathering. It was Earth Day. The wordless music spoke of birth and death, light and dark in the same breath, and my body moved, the hips loosening, ankles and neck more rubbery, shoulders straightening and falling, torso, hands, fingers - each part of my body found a different piece of that layered rhythm.

”It's like the blues. Malian music,” Leah said. ”It's got this pulse of joy.”

”And sadness.”

Leah kept dancing, while I went to the side of the lawn and sat down for a moment. As the sun set in brilliant orange, present in that seamless moment, I felt what Jackie had years ago: I must go beyond shame and blame, not just with myself and my personal imperfections, but in relation to the impact my species is having on the planet. I have to let go of my n.a.z.i dreams, my guilt over ecocide, and all of the rest of the negativity that keeps me in a cramped, dim self. This means allowing myself, and the world, to be. When I see unworthiness, anywhere anywhere, I'm to trace it. To allow doesn't mean to condone. Jackie had found a more precious jewel still on the other side of allowing, which spoke clearly to me about the nature of resistance to injustice - transform the enemy, not by fighting head-on with blame and anger; this just makes the enemy more powerful. Instead, be so present in the reality that you manifest an entirely different reality. The question is how to transform our anger into the energy of compa.s.sion, so that we can see the true cause of suffering. Then we can see more clearly how to root out that suffering.

Allowing is the way to experience the other world inside of this one. It lets us accept all of life's complexities so that we can come from a place of love at all times, even in a chicken factory, at a nuclear test site, and even, as psychologist and former concentration camp prisoner Victor Frankl observes, in Auschwitz and Buchenwald. It's essential to peaceful, creative resistance and transformation.

On the drive back to the 12 12, Leah at the wheel, we pa.s.sed new subdivisions with enormous, energy-consuming houses in a s.p.a.ce that used to be forest. I watched my inner reaction. Neither of my ”normal” reactions was present anymore, no rage, no guilt. Still, I remarked aloud to Leah about the destruction.

”Are you sure?” Leah said.

”What do you mean?”

”Are you sure?”

”Of what what?” I'd forgotten that ARE YOU SURE ARE YOU SURE? was one of Jackie's cards - the one, in fact, I'd put out that very morning.

Leah stopped the car at the edge of a ridge, cut the engine, took my cheeks in her hands, and pointed my eyes forward, saying slowly, forcefully: ”Are you sure?” ”Are you sure?”

From our now slightly higher vantage point, I looked out over a green forest canopy, stretching to the horizon. Just beyond the development hugging the road were rolling hills, forested smack down to South Carolina. We looked at each other for a moment and then back over this natural scene, which still contained so much green. Couldn't this, at least possibly, emerge as the face of globalization? Our consciousness grows and wildcrafter farms and forests fill the old slave plantations?

I took Leah's hand loosely, feeling a little dizzy. Patterns of light streaked across my mind: airplanes and comets, satellites and fireflies, the message in the sky coming through more clearly. I had the questions wrong. My questions implied a good and bad, a right and wrong. I thought of Lao-tzu: ”Do you want to change the world? I do not think it can be done. The world is perfect and cannot be changed.”

I looked out over a suddenly perfect landscape, saw the Soft within the Flat within the Soft. My greatest teachers are my sufferings. Global warming, hyper-individualism, rainforest destruction, and racism, these things had led me to Jackie's place, forced me to struggle. The Buddhists put it eloquently: ”no illusion, no enlightenment.” I momentarily grasped nonduality, that at the deepest level everything is exactly as it should be at any given moment - including one's own gradual awakening through the force of apparent evils.

I've since found this is a difficult concept to convey. Atheist or agnostic friends and colleagues furrow their brows, exactly as I used to do before I experienced it directly. Words are mere connotations, pointers at something that must ultimately be lived, felt, breathed. It's helpful to think of persons who embody it - Gandhi, Mandela, Martin Luther King Jr. They come from a nondualistic perspective, from a sense of One Life, while still accepting the existence of oppression and racism on the level of form on the level of form. Instead of dualistically opposing these ”evils,” they trace them through compa.s.sion and act through love - in other words, the enlightened master's resistance.

Allowing is the foundation, not the house. As I would soon discover, it is the necessary basis to achieve an even more sublime insight.

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ABANDON ALL HOPE OF FRUITION.

23. G.o.d'S FEET AS HUMAN BEINGS, we are suspended between spirit and clay. Spirit is the stuff of allowing, of detachment, of transcending the world. This is Buddha ”overcoming the world” or Jesus ”transcending the world.” Through spirit, we discover the level at which the supposed dichotomy between the world and ourselves is smashed, giving a sense of fearlessness and joy.

But we are clay as well as spirit. We exist, earth bound, for some seventy or eighty years. The problem I have always had with any overly ”spiritual” path is that it sometimes denies life. We have an eternity to exist in the soup of universal energy, but just a few precious decades to savor rich coffee, whether it's bad for us or not. To plant zucchini; to people-watch in a subway car; to love jazz. To love others, even if it gets messy.

If we take ”allowing” to the extreme - detach from our creaturehood, and exalt only our spirit-hood - we may feel blissful for a while, as I did during mystical moments at the 12 12 - but we'll miss out on half of what makes life meaningful: the portion of us that is clay. To me, the tension between spirit and clay is exemplified in a Raphael painting I saw in the Uffizi gallery in Florence, Italy. The Renaissance artist shows Jesus rising out of this world - but with his feet still hanging down into this one. Why doesn't Christ rise completely, detaching from the suffering of the world to become pure blissful spirit?

The first time I saw it, I lingered in the Uffizi and gazed at Jesus' feet, about to leave this world. After a while his feet seemed to be wiggling in the painting's fresh air, then tapping to music. I listened. No, it wasn't celestial harps. Perhaps Jesus likes jazz. He doesn't ascend - not quite yet, those gorgeous earthly riffs not quite yet, those gorgeous earthly riffs.

I wonder if it was jazz Jackie heard as she walked across the vast Nevada desert to a nuclear test site to utter the word No No. A person has to love messy, soulful, heartbreaking life to march across a desert to oppose the weapons that could eliminate it. Not too tight, but neither too loose; clay and spirit like to dance. Loving-kindness is the goal, not a disembodied detachment. But we can't get to loving-kindness through ego-driven love. We can only authentically inhabit ourselves as clay after rising first into spirit.

One of Jackie's favorite writers and teachers, Thich Nhat Hahn, embraces loving-kindness in the way he names the source of the problem, which is different from blaming, which can be a way of displacing one's own anger and frustration onto another. Nor does Thich Nhat Hahn refrain from suggesting concrete action for personal and societal transformation. At Jackie's, I discovered his reinterpretation of the five precepts of Buddhism, in order to cultivate compa.s.sion in a way that keeps with the changes in society: ”Aware of the suffering caused by the destruction of life, I vow to cultivate compa.s.sion and learn ways to protect the lives of people, animals, plants, and minerals.”

I read this one morning at six A.M. A.M. in Jackie's loft, the silence gathering. I let my feet dangle down from the loft, toward the 12 12 cement floor below. My toes tapped to the improvisation of morning birds, and I was seized with an urge to descend. Down the ladder, mindfully, feeling my big toe touch bare cement. Walk out into the gardens, and into the woods barefoot, the soil now loamy with spring life. How good it is to be clay! To be alive, and to be free to choose a wildly ethical path. in Jackie's loft, the silence gathering. I let my feet dangle down from the loft, toward the 12 12 cement floor below. My toes tapped to the improvisation of morning birds, and I was seized with an urge to descend. Down the ladder, mindfully, feeling my big toe touch bare cement. Walk out into the gardens, and into the woods barefoot, the soil now loamy with spring life. How good it is to be clay! To be alive, and to be free to choose a wildly ethical path.

G.o.d's feet linger here because of the human heart. It's never fully born. Amaya Amaya, I think, and then feel something catch in my chest. As hot as the blood is the missing of her. G.o.d, how I want her little hand in mine. Only another parent can fully get this. It's completely different from separation from a parent or lover. The clay in me wants to touch that part of myself - my blood flowing through another heart - touch the memories of her birth. The first time I held her, she was the length of my forearm. Her mother's ecstatic smile over this perfect form that's come out of her, laced with the courage of giving birth to someone she knows will someday die. Kathleen Norris captured this: her water breaking, her crying out, the downward draw of blood and bone....Now the new mother, that leaky vessel, begins to nurse her child, beginning the long goodbye.

Not long after leaving the 12 12, I finally got to see Amaya, if only for five days. Her mother, Ingrid, came to Little Rock, Arkansas, to visit her high school exchange host family from years before. On a walk through the suburban neighborhood where her host family lived, Ingrid pointed at a nursery school, the Growing Tree, which stood directly adjacent to a funeral home.

”Next to the Dying Tree,” I said.

On my last night with Amaya I look into her light eyes, kiss her cheek, and say her name out loud. She says mine: ”Daddy.”

”Amaya,” I repeat.

”Daddy,” she says. The moon overhead waxes oblique, like a beach stone, and the trees blow in the wind, and I feel warm and s.h.i.+very at the same time. A plane crosses the moon, its tail of smoke gray on the moon's white.

”Amaya.”

”Daddy.”

”Amaya,” I repeat. ”Daddy,” she says. ”Amaya.” ”Daddy,” this time smiling big and leaning over to kiss me. ”Amaya,” I say, kissing her. ”Daddy,” more serious now. ”Amaya.” ”Daddy.” We're memorizing each other.

”Amaya.”

”Daddy.”

I rise above Little Rock, looking out over what really is a little rock, a tiny airport, those couple-of-skysc.r.a.pers enveloped by the big curve of the Arkansas River, and all the dead, soy-scarred land stretching north toward St. Louis, where I will connect to New York, and I think: I might never be in Little Rock again. Might never land in St. Louis, I think, later, as we hit turbulence and the plane sighs deeply, the woman next to me mumbling something. I'm aware of the irony - here I am, on a plane again - and consider for a moment how incredibly hard it is to live sustainably, particularly when I want to see my daughter.

The plane banks toward the St. Louis Arch, an upside-down smile, a piece of twisted tin against the treeless plain, and lands. With a long layover, I decide to leave the airport, walking out beyond all the asphalt to a patch of green, an empty lot filled with overgrown gra.s.s and wildflowers. The sun sets, painting itself in fiery crimson. I miss Amaya.

There are two types of problems we face in life: convergent and divergent. Convergent problems are like engineering problems or jigsaw puzzles, putting pieces together to arrive at a definite answer. Divergent problems are those of the heart and spirit, diverging into greater mystery the more we try to untangle them. Perhaps a lot of the modern dilemma is that we try to solve divergent problems with convergent logic - instead of disengaging the mind and getting to the subtler levels that guide people like Jackie. Here's this moment's dichotomy: I miss my daughter, and at the same I watch a softening world with joy. Instead of creating an inner drama out of paradox, I sit with it, allowing a b.u.t.terfly to land on my arm. It's black with flecks of ginger, and its wings beat slowly. In an instant, it's gone, lost to me in the sunset.

A moment later the b.u.t.terfly flutters back. Lands on a flower beside me, as the day ends, finding nourishment in what's right here.

IT WAS MY LAST DAY AT THE 12 X 12.

Leah came out to help me clean and pack. Jackie was coming back in a few days, and it was time for me to depart for New York. Just as we finished - the bare cement floor swept, my bags in her car - a train horn sounded, low and solemn to the south. It was one of the only times I heard a train pa.s.s on that lonely stretch of track across No Name Creek. Leah took my hand and said in a childlike voice: ”Let's try to catch it.”

We ran, side by side onto Old Highway 117 South, narrowing in on the train. It sounded again, and this time we were so close to the machine that it vibrated all the way through me. We ran harder. I looked over at Leah at one point and her face was pink and sweaty and serious, as if she were putting all of her soul into this one thing. We ran, the train right ahead, its bell still ringing, but alas, we arrived just as the caboose swept by.

But we kept on running, along the track now, laughing and slowing down, those familiar railroad ties under my feet, the heat of the train on our faces and chests, the widening gap between that old train and us.

Then, eventually, silence. We continued to walk, onto a path into the woods, along No Name Creek, and we began to talk about us. We felt love for each other but both knew at our cores that we weren't meant to form a couple. There are some people who touch your life for a month, others for a season, and still others for a lifetime. We had touched each other for that spring, grown together in the light of Jackie's lessons, and now we let go of each other.

It was not easy, or completely clear. We stopped by the creek and held hands and kissed, and talked about seeing each other again - when I came down to visit my parents, when she came up North for a visit. And we would see each other again, in the future, but it would be as friends. An hour pa.s.sed with Leah, in silence. We watched the creek's flow, and I knew that there's no greater gift to the world and to others than being true to your deepest self. So many times, out of fear of loneliness or other negative emotions, we form relations.h.i.+ps that are good enough, but untrue to our uniqueness. Doing so risks flattening ourselves.

That's when one of Jackie's most important secrets bubbled up to me from the creek. A revelation (re-velar: veil again) that came up in full clarity and then concealed itself. I understood what the 12 12 really is.

Its floor, the bare slab of white cement that Jackie steps down onto from the loft every morning. What's under it? According to physicists, our bodies and the earth itself are 99.99 percent empty s.p.a.ce, more a wave of energy than anything solid. That floor is Jackie's integrity: a 12 12 rock over nothing.

We are G.o.d's feet, and it is out of a place of total emptiness, a place beyond ”the world” that we must create our lives. We sculpt our characters out of wildness. Leah and I held hands for one last moment beside No Name Creek, and then we let each other go.