Hold the Enlightenment (2 page)

On those rare occasions when I have actually tried to be funny, I’ve failed. Miserably. Witness the story “Panic,” which is about a hairy-chested adventure guy—me—with the worst case of stage fright in television history. Now, that is funny on the face of it, but the essay was not a knee-slapper and turned out to be about mortality, chaos, the organizing principle of story, and one tiny redemption. (I’m serious: The story was recently anthologized in
A Man’s Guide to Simple Abundance
, which is full of enlightening and redemptive essays. My presence there has a sort of a sore-thumb resonance.)

Longtime readers may recognize an adventure or two from previous books. The climbing aspect of “Panic” is a prime example. As the years close in on me—I’m in my mid-fifties as I write this—it occurs to me that I ought at least to
try
to figure out what it all means. I doubt that I will, but my thoughts on enlightenment altogether can be found in the first story in this book.

“Stutter,” a small piece from
Modern Maturity
about the guide Grant Thompson, is partially about a bad fall I took climbing in the Queen Charlotte Islands, as is “Fully Unprepared,” which is also about the death of a loved one. I’ve written about that trip, but never about the full extent of the injuries I suffered, the fact that I literally couldn’t walk for months, and the operation that got me back on my feet. The story is a contemplation of mortality.

Of course, this collection does have some basic episodes of adventure—diving with great white sharks in South Africa, for instance—but many of the dangerous obstacles here are human. This is new. Part of my job, as I see it, is to get to the most remote and inaccessible places on earth. It used to be easy to find such places, but now adventure-travel tour packages take people all over the earth, even to the summit of Everest. What the guides can’t do is take folks to areas that are politically unstable and they can’t do this because they can’t get insurance.

These days, “remote” is defined as far away plus armaments, and factions, and ancient enmities. To truly get “Out There,” as the column I write is called, I often feel I’m being funneled into places where people point guns at you. The Cold War is over, and there are places in the former Soviet Union—and elsewhere—that have been pretty much closed to this day. Tribal enmities flare, warlords rule, and if you want to get farther than the end of the road, you have to get by the line of guns. The weapons are most evident here in stories such as “The Search for the Caspian Tiger,” “The Caravan of White Gold,” and “The World’s Most Dangerous Friend.”

Attentive readers will note that certain of my friends, people I’ve written about in the past, make multiple appearances in the book: Matt Smith is here, along with my pals Joel Rogers, Atlatl Bob
Perkins, Linnea Larson, Nick Nichols, Michael Fay, Cynthia Moses, and Grant Thompson.

Occasionally, a reader more anal than I writes to ask why I don’t organize my collections in some fashion—all deserts in this section, for instance, and forests in that, arctic ice here, animal stories there. And what about some sinew of connection between the pieces? Once again, I’ve read those letters, and contemplated them, and in this collection, I played around with the order of the stories, such as it is. It seemed entirely artificial to me. The stories are not arranged chronologically, but they are a fairly representative sampling of my life. Looking at them, I feel as if time has folded in on itself, and that my various travels have the chaotic logic of a pinball in urgent play. What can I say? I have a low threshold of boredom and this is the way I live my life.

If there is any organizing principle at work here, it is emotional, though, Lord knows, the stories can be read one at a time and in any order without damage to the intended construct. But let me be among the many to warn you: not all the stories are funny. I want to make you laugh, sure, but I also want to make you cry. I used to tell my students in writing seminars that if you can do that—make ’em laugh and make ’em cry in the same work—then you’ve created the “illusion of depth.” I’ve been thinking about that lately and am willing to amend my thought: I now believe the profundity is genuine and not illusory.

Not that there’s a lot of deep thinking in, say, the opening piece, “Hold the Enlightenment,” an account of a yoga retreat I endured (and enjoyed) in Jamaica. In fact, as I reread the story, it seems to be a wholesale rejection of wisdom, insight, and understanding altogether. Enlightenment, as I try to explain, is a poor career path for a writer.

The last essay here, “Trusty and Grace,” is a personal piece that echoes biblical psalms, involves canine flatulence right up there in the first paragraph, and, in the end, made me, the author, cry. I had no idea that it would do that. I first read the story aloud, live, on National Public Radio. When I got toward the end, I choked up, stumbled on the words “brave little girl,” swallowed, and then
faltered again on “brave woman.” My eyes smarted, my voice broke. My carefully cultivated reputation as your typically insensitive guy went up in flames. You’ll see me trying to retrieve that status throughout this book.

In any case, whatever the emotional weight of any of these essays, the prose in each has been honed to the best of my ability and is meant to be attractive to members of all sexes. I suppose psychologists would call that overcompensation.

Tim Cahill
Montana
December 2001

I
am not a yoga kinda guy. Yoga people are sensitive, aware, largely sober, slender, double-jointed, humorless vegans who are concerned with their own spiritual welfare and don’t hesitate to tell you about it. They are spiritually intense and consequently enormously boring in the manner of folks who, in their own self-absorption, feel you ought be alerted as to the quantity and texture of their last bowel movement.

Or so I used to think.

But there I was, taking my first yoga class, in an open-sided bar/restaurant while, a few hundred feet below, the Caribbean Sea exploded off the high coral cliffs of Negril, Jamaica. I was doing some position, an asana, that was something like what I’d call a wrestler’s bridge: it required balancing on my head and hands up top, and the soles of my feet below. Hotel employees had removed tables and chairs from the restaurant for this class, and, because I was apprehensive, I’d positioned myself in the area where I felt most comfortable, which is to say, next to the bar. In the field of my vision, I could see an upside-down line of several bottles of rum, and, above them, a black-and-white picture of Bob Marley, the patron saint of Jamaican reggae. There is a picture of Bob Marley in every single bar in Jamaica. I know: I’ve done the research. One of Marley’s best songs has a line that goes “Every little thing, is going to be all right.” That, I decided, was my mantra.

I’m a writer, of sorts. My job, such as it is, requires me to travel
to remote countries, where I have, in the past few decades, covered the drug/guerrilla war in Colombia, investigated the murder of an American in the jungles of Peru, dived with great white sharks off the coast of South Africa, and sat negotiating my fate with Tuareg warlords in the southern Sahara. Pretty hairy-chested stuff, but the truth is, I was a little scared about meeting all the yoga folks in Jamaica. There’s a lot of testosterone involved in what I do. I assumed that yoga people would perceive me as some sort of throwback: a Neolithic macho, and an abyss of awareness.

Well, everybody wants to be liked, and I deeply feared the scorn of the assembled yogis and yoginis. The books I read before coming to Jamaica had calmed me somewhat: yoga, I learned, is not a religion, and you can take from it what you will. Go only for the physical benefits: fine, yoga doesn’t have a problem with that. Use it for stress relief and meditation: sure, okay. Or a person might opt for a total yoga lifestyle, which includes diet, meditation, and the search for enlightenment. Take from it what you will: yoga, according to the books, doesn’t give a rat’s ass.

But I assumed that people who would choose to spend their vacations doing four hours of yoga a day would be lifestyle folks, the kind of weenies who might sneer at my own rather soiled lifestyle. I feared my classmates would be holier than thou, or, in any case, holier than I, which is pretty much a slam dunk.

In fact, my classmates—a couple of dozen of them—did not appear at all the way I thought yoga people were supposed to look. The men were not little weenie guys, for one thing, and there were several of them there—I only say this out of journalistic integrity—who probably could have taken me at arm wrestling. The women—whose ages spanned a couple of generations—were not hippie burnouts and acid crawlbacks. None wore patchouli oil, and an extraordinary number of them were highly attractive. The rest were just conventionally good-looking. Don’t misunderstand: I was with my wife, and I am not single and looking. But if I were, I’d take yoga classes, if only to meet chicks.

Our instructors were John Schumacher, founder and director of Unity Woods, a studio with locations throughout the East, and Barbara
Benagh of Boston’s Yoga Studio. We had started the class by introducing ourselves and talking about our experience with yoga. Several of the students had studied for twenty years or more. My wife and I were the only total beginners, but, when my turn came, I told the assembled yogis, “I haven’t done any yoga physically, but I’ve read three entire books and figure I know everything there is to know about it.”

There was a brief moment of silence, and I thought, yep, humorless. And then the class burst into laughter. Not a lot of it. It wasn’t that good a joke. I looked up at Bob Marley and thought: Every little thing, is going to be all right.

The books in question had been sent to me by Todd Jones of
Yoga Journal
, who had asked me to write a story about my first yoga class. Todd said he was looking for “a view of our little subculture from the outside.” That seemed fair enough, and I asked him if he could mail me some introductory texts.

He sent yoga books appropriately addressed to dummies and idiots, along with Erich Schiffmann’s
Yoga: The Spirit and Practice of Moving into Stillness
, which I found well written but a bit on the ethereal side, at least for me. I figured yoga kinda guys might get a lot out of it.

What I was able to glean from all this material was that the poses, or asanas, were developed thousands of years ago to give people control over their bodies. Such control is essentially for yogic meditation. The purpose and goal of meditation is the bliss of eventual enlightenment. That stopped me cold. Enlightenment? No sir, whoa Nellie. None of that whoop-de-do for me, thank you very much.

The Enlightened Masters I have read are invariably incomprehensible and the Masters themselves are entirely incapable of constructing a single coherent English sentence. I’m not discussing someone like Eric Schiffmann, who is actually very good. What I’m talking about here is Flat Out Enlightenment, which is mostly unintelligible gibberish and reads to me like someone swimming through a thick custard of delirium. And don’t think I don’t know my Enlightened Masters. I’ve been to ashrams in India, power spots,
and convergence points and “vortices” in California and Colorado and New Mexico. I have spent time chatting to a woman with many, many followers who lives near my home in Montana and who channels Enlightened Masters all day long as if making calls on a cellular phone.

The link between them all—the convergence people, the gurus, the Enlightened—is that, in their written materials anyway, they don’t make any sense at all. For that reason they all are self-published, which is to say, they themselves pay someone else to publish the work in question. As a professional writer, I prefer the opposite strategy, in which the publisher pays you. Enlightenment, my reading suggested, is an exceedingly poor career path for a writer.

Oh, I knew bliss and enlightenment aren’t often achieved. It said as much in each of the books I read. One strives toward the light. Okay, I’d buy that, sure, but what if I turned out to be one of those guys who just happens to “get it” straight away? What if I was an anomaly? I’d crank out a few asanas, sit cross-legged, thinking-but-not-thinking, and all of a sudden, flash-bang, I’d see it all: the meaning of life, my own connection to the cosmos, and the blinding curve of energy that is the pulsing soul of universal consciousness itself, and I’d know, beyond the shadow of a doubt, that at that moment, I was completely and irrevocably screwed.

Enlightened people are dead meat in the publishing industry. I’d lose my jobs, such as they are. My mortgage would go unpaid, my wife would leave me, and I’d wander the earth in ragged clothes, informing the less spiritually fortunate of a consciousness above and beyond. Perhaps those people might give me a few coins with which I could buy a scrap of bread. This is to say that, in my mind, enlightenment and homelessness are synonymous situations.

I called Todd Jones back at
Yoga Journal
and said I’d take the course, but I intended to resist enlightenment. And if, through some cruel trick of fate, I did become enlightened, I was going to go out there to Berkeley, California, and kick his ass.

So, there I was, three days into the yoga vacation, with twelve big hours of yoga under my belt. I had feared, on the whole, that
yoga might be too light a workout for me: a bunch of sissy stuff about standing on one leg for a couple of breaths. I typically run (or plod) two miles a day, occasionally lift weights, and stretch assiduously. I had called Todd Jones before I left and asked if he couldn’t get me into one of the more sweaty disciplines, some kind of power yoga.

“If I put you, as an absolute beginner, in an ashtanga class for a week,” Todd said mildly, “you really would kick my ass.”

He was right about that. I was able to do many of the asanas, but it had never occurred to me that once you attained the position, it was necessary to keep working through it. It never got any easier. If you did it right, you were always working at the very edge of what you could do. In a typical four-hour day, I felt I’d gotten a pretty good physical workout, and each would have been a lot more effective if I could have done some of the more advanced work we typically did late in the session. Todd Jones was right about ahstanga.