I am armed with a can of coffee (the vending machine variety—expecting it to be horrible, I am surprised to find that it’s rather good) and an apple at one of the café’s tables. I have sat in the back in the hopes that they will not notice my outside food and drink. I have a little over three hours. The check-in counter isn’t even open yet.
It’s funny how when you’re going through a life-changing experience, you don’t realize it. It takes a little while for the magnitude of our experiences to sink in—our classic human inability, or delay, in recognizing the good stuff.
My time in the meditation hall was much needed. It was by far the hardest thing I’ve ever done. I don’t think words can really encapsulate what happened, and I’m still not sure how far-reaching the changes in my life are going to be. Maybe some time soon I’ll be able to actually put it in words, but for now it’s something that I’m still processing.
The cultural tour, too, is sort of beyond words—I think in this case I’ll leave it up to the photographs to speak for me.
As the van pulled away from the monastery, I realized that I’d left a little piece of me there. That place saw me through a lot. The Chan hall, in particular, knows me quite well. And I know that I will always feel some-kind-of-at-home if I ever go back.
But even when you leave pieces of heart everywhere you go, you have to realize that it’s not so simple as you losing bits of yourself. When I moved a lot as a kid, I used to think that way. But now I’ve come to realize that when you leave a piece of your heart behind, you also take something back from that place. We may feel that when we have to say goodbye, we are emptying our cups—which may be true. But we forget that, when we open our hearts to the places we go, we in turn we take something new with us, a little piece of that place, faint memories that float like ghosts behind us, a few drops of fresh tea.
It’s an odd little exchange, but when you realize it, things are actually pretty fair. And in return for that sudden ache, that being wrenched away from something, you gradually build a wall of safety around that place in your heart—it provides a sanctuary, it opens your eyes, it keeps you warm on a cold day.
When you think about it that way, goodbye isn’t really so bad.
And if you’re really, really lucky, it may just be a “see you soon.”
A large part of the problem (some day I may say blessing, for now I say problem) with meditation is that it is very confrontational.
You wouldn’t think so, what with all the silence and relaxation that goes into it and everything. But the simple act of sitting, focusing, and emptying your mind actually allows it to unearth a lot of thoughts, memories, and truths that you may not want to see.
Because when you relax your mind, clear it, all of the things you may have been suppressing, been too busy to process, been too busy to think about, been trying to forget, been trying to control—they come flooding to the surface.
You can’t run. You can’t hide. It’s just you and your mind. Your darkest thoughts and secrets are illuminated in almost a harsh light.
For people who, like me, sometimes insist on being in control—perhaps at the expense of the health of their general state of being—and who are currently quite troubled, meditation is at first difficult. The past few days have been something of an emotional rollercoaster. The more we practice meditation, the more I am confronted with the big issues in my life, my darkest corners, my flaws.
Not that it is necessarily a bad thing. In fact, it’s very good for me, and until now I don’t think I fully realized how badly I needed this. But these first few days have made me realize that seven days without talking, with nothing but eating, sleeping, and my thoughts—it’s going to change and challenge me more than I can imagine. Even now, I am reeling with hurt and emotion that I had suppressed and hidden for so long that I had forgotten it was even there. All the things that I have buried are going to surface.
I’m scared. Never before in my life have I felt this vulnerable.
But perhaps in weakness, we are strong. And the night is darkest before the dawn. Things have to get bad before they can get better. I have to hope that after these seven days, I will have been to hell and back, will have questioned who I am, will have shattered all of my misconceptions and illusions and will have found some answers. Or, if not, at least begin to patch up some of the cracks. Hopefully I won’t lose my mind.
My tea has steeped too long. It’s bitter and cold.
It seems I am finally over my jetlag, which has put me in a much better mood than I was in yesterday. Even in spite of the laundry mishap this morning—I took someone else’s uniform from the laundry room and had to rush back up and quickly strip and change, almost making me late for lineup—I have escaped this morning relatively unscathed. I think the adjustment is approaching its end, thank goodness. My body’s shock at the heat and humidity is subsiding, and my skin is still in panic mode but seems to be slowly calming down. My hair is loving the moisture and the break from the hot clutches of my straightener.
The dining hall experience at breakfast gets funnier every day. Two days ago, out first breakfast in the dining hall as opposed to the small separate room we’d had it in before, we were served faux cheeseburgers. The serving staff have made an exception for us and we are eating a “western style” menu. It is cute, and rather hilarious, to see what their interpretation of American food is.
Yesterday, we had breaded rings that tasted something like calamari and hot chocolate (in which they put cheerios that we had to fish out with our chopsticks, much to our amusement). And today, we had miniature faux hot dogs and French fries. I said nothing and ate diligently—I have no problem with French fries at 6:30 in the morning, though the very picky, selfish, bratty girl who I have come to hate sitting on my left did and gave me an incredulous look when I asked for more. Perhaps I shouldn’t speak ill of my breakfast buddy, but I think in this case it’s deserved. I caught her shocked look and shrugged.
Whatever, snotty Yale girl. You are no friend of mine if you turn down French fries.
I still can’t get over how much I love the rain here. It’s rain like I have never seen rain before. I think my positive association with it comes from the fact that it drives away the heat in a way that nothing else can. The noise is so calming, relaxing.
I think I take so much solace in the noise, whether ambient or melodic, because I haven’t listened to music since I’ve been here. I think of it the way Emma does in Bride Wars. (Yes, I am quoting it. Get over it. It’s a great movie.) “Running with iPods is for people who can’t stand running with their own thoughts.” As someone who can safely say that music is my life, I am surprised to find that I can so easily detach myself from it. My ears now, however, are drawn to other things. The breakfast chant, probably the most beautiful and melodic of the chants that we do, frequently gets stuck in my head.
Being here makes me desperately want to learn Chinese. It’s such an immensely complex language, more than I had ever imagined or appreciated before. For me, languages are like puzzles, and I crave to unlock the meaning of each word, each sound, each piece. Putting them together paints such a beautiful picture, and it is only accessible to those who possess that key to understanding them. Chinese intrigues me even more than most. The slight differences of stroke, the tiny inflections of pronunciation that can completely change the meaning of a word. It is a mysterious language, and even the monastics we meet here who translate sutras and consider themselves experts in Chinese often come to find that even their knowledge falls short.
The more you learn, the more you realize you don't really know anything at all.
Venerable Yifa is the hawk of the Fo Guang Shan animal kingdom. She founded the Woodenfish program, and, before we met her, was something of a whispered-about legend. My friend who participated in the program last year didn’t tell me much about it, in the hopes that I would keep my mind clear of preconceptions and expectations—but she did tell me one thing. Watch out for Yifa.
She has the ferocity of either a woman who has spent her entire life standing up for herself—or a lawyer. She happens to be both. The first time we met her was during a “talk session”—one of our evening post-dinner classes, so to speak. Expecting a very tall, powerful figure, I almost laughed out loud when she walked in. She is tiny, about 4 feet three inches tall, but stout, like a resilient tree stump (her brown robes didn’t help this image) that refuses to be uprooted by the wild winds around her when the rest of the forest has fallen.
She invited the staff to sit with her at the front, and spent the first hour of her talk asking each one of us where we were from, why we were here, and where we expected to go. Within moments she had us laughing with her wicked and inappropriate humor.
“So many of you say you are lost, you don’t know what to do with your life. You have no job. But you are smart. Do what I did. Create your own job!” She grins toothily at us. “I didn’t have a job. I saw an opportunity. Woodenfish is my job now. And it pays nice. Easy!”
She looked around at all of us. “A lot of you came here with expectations. You already had ideas about what you will be doing here. Let me tell you a story.”
We all exchange glances with knowing smiles. We’ve already come to look forward to and love the venerables’ stories.
“One day a scholar visited a Zen master. The scholar was knowledgeable , no doubt, but he thought his knowledge enough. He lacked humility. His mind was not open.
The Zen master offered him some tea. The scholar accepted, though his cup was already mostly full. The master tipped the teapot and poured the tea, and did not stop, even when the cup was full. It overflowed onto the table. Still, he kept pouring. The scholar gave a shout. ‘Why did you do that?!?’
The master smiled. ‘You came to me with your head full of thoughts, ideas, assumptions, yet you want to learn from me. My tea is very good, but how can I share my tea with you when your cup is already full?’”
Yifa smiled at us. “Empty your cup. Open your minds. If you do those things, the time you spend here will not have been wasted. I promise you that.”
***
In one of our lectures with Yifa, we managed to touch on the subject of love. I tipped my head up from my mindless doodles, suddenly interested. I had been having a discussion earlier with my roommate about how Yifa was decidedly un-nun-like. We’d had a good laugh trying to picture her with normal hair, with normal clothes on, walking around in the city.
All of the monastics had such fascinating stories, and I still wish we’d had more time with each of them to hear their personal accounts and stories about why they joined the order. The one I was most interested in was Yifa, probably because I identified the most with her. How could such a firecracker find the minimalist (and unsuitably quiet) life of a monastic appealing?
She looked around. “People always ask, ‘Yifa, what about love? You say there is joy in monastic life. But there is so much joy in love too. Can you really deny that?’
But I am much too lazy for that. Having to decide what to wear, how to do your hair. Relationships are a lot of work. ‘There is joy in love,’ they say.
I say, 'you think I don’t know that?'”
As she gives us a wry smile, and we chuckle, I finally see a bit of emotion on her usually stoic face.
***
“So now I have a serious question. Master Huei-feng has been inundating you with rules. How does this feel? Restrictive? Liberating?” We all look at her with nervous smiles. “Let me tell you something. Some people don’t like New York. Okay, maybe only old people like me. Young people, like you, like it. But I don’t. Too much noise. Too much crime.”
Her beady eyes twinkled.
“But when I fly above, in an airplane, it is beautiful. So many pretty lights. I like New York from the sky.
So you see, I think about life like this. Some things you may not like. But everything has a purpose. Everything and every life is beautiful. Sometimes you just need to have the right perspective to see it.”
I smiled to myself. Not only because of what this word, perspective, means to me—or because of the truth and wisdom in her words. I smiled because I quite agree with Yifa.
There really is nothing quite like the view from an airplane.
