Paradise Park (18 page)

Around evening of that day I took a walk around the neighborhood. I could smell all our neighbors cooking dinner, but I didn’t have my appetite back at all. I tried to think back over the past few months, and I tried to think way back to my rebirth and that joyous feeling I’d experienced. Then, I had to admit it to myself, on drugs, joy felt better—and so did peace and love and hope—at least to me. And I could see by that—anyone could see—I hadn’t been saved in Church at all. Because a saved person would never feel that way—closer to her God on acid. When you got down to it, a saved person would never have given up on Christianity’s teachings after only a few lessons either. So the truth was, I’d let Jesus down, not to mention letting myself down with my behavior. Essentially, I’d been offered eternal life, and I’d decided to go on roller-coaster rides and see movies continuously and eat Sugar Babies all day instead. So what did that say about me? I was not exactly the worthiest person in the world. Still, it did not once occur to me that God in his wrath would strike me down, or that Jesus would wreak vengeance on me. I just knew they wouldn’t. Despite Pastor’s teachings I felt, somehow, God and His Son weren’t those types of guys. It was true I’d been unfaithful to Jesus, and essentially run out on Him just after we were wed, but jealousy was not Him, not Him at all.

So I was decided about two things. One, I was not saved. Two, that was okay, because that was just not where I was at right now. I was going to find God again, I knew it. Plenty of other options were still out there. If one didn’t work, I’d switch. Visions, Bible study, hallucinatory trips. I had a fickle soul, but I couldn’t see it that way. The only thing I can compare it to is that time in your life when you’ll sleep with anyone, but you think you’re doing it because you so believe in love.

Speechless

I
dedicated myself to cleaning, to the point that our shack of a house was the prettiest it could possibly look without repainting and ripping out the carpeting and furniture, and evicting my housemates. I took wet rags and filled the plastic wastebasket with water for a bucket, and I washed the glass louvers in all the windows. All the gray, linty dust washed away. The water in the wastebasket turned black with dirt. I washed the mirror in the bathroom and then dried it clean and sparkly with pieces of ripped newspapers. I even cleaned out the oven and the stove in the kitchenette, and it turned out they both worked, which was good to know.

Heading back to work at Paradise Jeweler was on the agenda, too, but after a while, cleaning house, I thought, You know what? Better give it a rest, and the theology too. I just didn’t want to disappoint any more people, doing all that Bible study and then not going the extra mile. So I got a new job at The Good Earth, which was where I tended to buy my food anyway, and where people knew me, and thought I was a responsible person—I mean, on the day-to-day, if not the religious, level.

The Good Earth smelled like sawdust and wheat germ, and had every kind of vegetable grown organically on the island, and also bins of
ancient grains, and refrigerator cases where you could get big blocks of rennetless cheese. There were vitamins, and powders, and protein mixes, and loose teas, and at the register for impulse buys we had honey straws for sucking, and garlic tablets, and carob-coated peanuts, and copies of
The Herbalist
, and
Vegetarian Times
, and
Boycott Quarterly.
I started working there full time at the checkout counter.

My manager, who was a semiprofessional surfer chick named Kim, actually lent me a yogurt maker and I bought yogurt starter and started culturing my own at home, because it occurred to me, maybe I should start working on my diet again. Since it’s practically a truism that whenever you clear up your diet you also tend to clear up your mind. And God knows I needed that.

I was still so fogged I didn’t know what I believed anymore. I hardly saw any of my friends—and didn’t even want to see them really—except I missed them in a hopeless sort of way. I barely had a chance to see Brian, what with his teaching and his marriage and all. I’d trudge to work, and then trudge back home again. On weekends my housemates would be partying away, but I didn’t join in. Music and drinking and getting high. None of it mattered to me anymore. In fact, the noise bothered me. At the age of twenty-six I was growing crotchety. Like how dare you party all night when I’m trying to sleep? How dare you trash this place yet again? Instead of a fun little haven, the house seemed to me like a druggy little dump. I felt so world weary. No, that wasn’t it. Actually I was afraid the world was weary of me. Could that happen? The world getting so tired of a human that one day it blows her away like a caraway seed? I wouldn’t have been surprised. I had imagined that once you have a vision you were set for life. I had thought once you were saved, you were saved. And if you were born again, then you would be better organized than you were the first time. So naturally when it didn’t turn out that way I was a little bit disillusioned.

One day while I was at my Good Earth register, I started watching the monks who used to come and deliver lettuce to the store. There were four of them who came every week. They grew hydroponic butter lettuces, and they used to carry them into the store on cardboard flats. Soft green lettuces on pure white stems, their little brown tendril roots like pubic hair. The monks wore orange robes, and they had fuzzy
shaven heads. They were small spry men, although after a while I realized one was a woman. They had this beautiful sexlessness about them. They looked like local people, tan, and somewhat Oriental, and they always came on the city bus. But the thing I noticed most about them was that although they murmured to themselves, they did not speak to each other. They did not even glance at me.

After they left, I couldn’t get those monks out of my head. I stood there ringing up bulgur, and cashew butter, and weighing plantains, and I imagined the monastery where the monks must live. It would be way high up in the Ko’olau Mountains, right up there in the crags. And it was all tile roofs and secret courtyards, like the Hidden Fortress, cloaked with mist.

I began to wait for the monks to come every week. I’d watch for them, and when they came, I’d strain my ears, but I never understood what they were murmuring. I wanted to ask them a million questions. I wanted to ask them about their lives, and about their devotions, and if they ever taught people who were seeking God. But, of course, I couldn’t approach them, because they were so silent and looked so peaceful. I envied them that. Peacefulness. When in my life had I ever even come close? Monastic quietness. Man, I loved the thought of that.

“Kim,” I said to my manager, “I wish I could be a fly on the wall at the monastery, just for one day.”

Kim shrugged. “Why don’t you go on a retreat at the center, then?”

“What center?”

“Consciousness Meditation Center. That’s where they all live. It’s in Kailua. They have weekend retreats every couple of months.”

“You’re kidding me!” I was shocked. You just didn’t have weekend retreats at the Hidden Fortress.

“They’re not bad,” Kim said.

“You’ve been?!”

“Sure.”

“How many times?”

“Just once,” Kim said. “They’re two hundred bucks.”

“Two hundred bucks! For a weekend? No way.”

“Yup.” She got a kick out of my sticker shock. “But it clears your mind,” she said.

Well, yeah, maybe, I thought, but I’d already been washed white as the driven snow for free. Except then I couldn’t stay clean. “Do they have work-study or something?” I asked.

Grumble, grumble, but for two months I saved up. I wrote a check. I went.

I took the bus out to Kailua and got off and followed Kim’s directions, and I got to the center, which was surrounded by a high white wall. Some other people were arriving in cars. About ten of us waited at the gate, and the robed monks ushered us in.

The place was a spacious ranch house with add-ons. An enormous 1950s Buddhist ranch. The floors were white tile, and the walls in a lot of places were made out of those glass bricks that let light in, but you can’t see through. I remember it was raining, and the garden was full of orchid plants, whole hedges of orchids, which the monks grew, and there was a pond with goldfish and a tiny bridge, and no grass, but white gravel, and some larger black stones.

Instead of a living room there was a meditation room where we all sat with our instructor. He was a tall heavyset haole man, although a monk just like the others. He wore an orange robe and had peach fuzz on his head like them, but he was about six foot four, and he had blue eyes, and wire-rimmed glasses, and he actually talked to us. Each day in addition to our meditation, and our breathing exercises, Michael told us about himself—the path that he took in his life, and how he had come to that path, and how it was right for him. He said, “Ten years ago I used to be totally caught up in my desires. I had an addictive spirit, so even though I was a lawyer in New York, and I seemed like any other suit, inside the only thing driving me was alcohol. All my spirit knew was what it wanted,” he told us.

I just looked at him and shook my head. You couldn’t imagine this man wanting anything anymore. He seemed so at peace, in his robes and his shaved head, so stripped down, and, I don’t know, ergonomic. He had such a gentle voice, and such calm blue eyes that seemed out of place at the beginning, being so haole, but you got used to them. And really he was one of the most quietly inspiring teachers I’d ever seen, just sitting on the floor in front of us talking with such simplicity, and not only telling us, but being what he was telling, being in his speech and in all his tiniest movements so mindful and just so in the moment
with all of us. The way he spoke about Tibet, you could tell it was his true home country. The way he showed his understanding, you could tell he was a person who had found not so much his calling in life, but his listening. He was so open; his whole body and breath were so big. I thought, he is so at home in his skin. You couldn’t imagine he had once been in such a mundane state, with all those bourgeois appendages, an apartment, and a car, and dress shoes and cuff links, a marriage, and a divorce.

Yet, after a while when you got to know Michael, it turned out you really could imagine him as a lawyer wearing a suit. Despite him being essentially a cleric and, you know, a black belt in meditation, he was one of the most uptight people I’ve ever known. For example, if by some chance you were late for meditation, he got all tense, and he looked at you, and he glared this unmistakable glare, like all the neurotic New Yorker was coming out in him, and he was bringing it to bear on you. And if you happened to interrupt him in class because suddenly a question or a burning insight came to you, he’d blow his top! And he would say, “Sharon!” in this sharp tone of voice like the crack of a whip, like the tone my own dear dad would take when I was thirteen and reeling around in my pubescent fumes. “Sharon!” As in, How dare you. You couldn’t help but flinch. Yet I didn’t get to know Michael that well until later.

What we did with Michael was Dzogchen practice, which was this very basic no-nonsense silent meditation with your eyes wide open. And we did it in the morning and we did it in the afternoon, and in between we walked. We walked up and down the street, which was a quite lovely quiet suburban-type street. We walked like monks and we spoke gathas to ourselves, which were mindfulness prayers, like this: I feel my feet walking. I feel my legs moving. May I walk gently. May I tread lightly on this earth. We just followed Michael in our shorts and T-shirts, like we were these spiritual ducklings and he was our father bird. We all ate together and slept in one sleeping room and meditated together, but yet, I had no idea where anyone else came from or what they did for a living or any of that, because we didn’t have any discussions or conversations. We respected the silence. We listened to our own minds. We were busy remembering who we were.

And I sat, and you know what? I didn’t think about anything. I just
looked straight ahead, and I breathed, and I focused, and I thought about absolutely nothing. I just emptied my mind, foosh! of all the clutter. Just shut down my hyperimagination, until there I was, totally blank. Just white, like a big white unfurnished room. Just plain vanilla, without a cone, without a spoon. I sat and I breathed. I was so focused, the only distraction I had in the whole two days of meditation was every once in a while thinking, Whee! I’m good at this! Because it was true, I was a natural!

I was so good that by the end of the weekend I was an inch taller than when I’d started, just from all the tension melting off my shoulders, and from being mindful of my posture. And I was so good at it that my lungs grew, I’m sure, from getting a workout for once and giving up that shallow breathing that I’d been doing for years. All my perceptions were sharper. Everything about me was more expansive. And I saw that this was where I needed to be right now. This was what I needed to be doing. And the most amazing thing was that Michael and all the other monks saw it in me too. I started coming to the center every chance I got. I started coming just to breathe, just to get some oxygen, just to return to myself. I started practicing; I started seeing the way before me, and every day and every retreat, I grew more calm. And then one day, about three months after my first weekend, I brought all my money and valuable things, including even my silver watch, and I gave them to the center, and I attached myself to Michael as his student, or groupie, or what have you, and I stayed.