Dinner with Buddha (25 page)

Thirty-one

The ride from Lumberton south and west across the parched top of New Mexico had little to recommend it and would have been almost forgettable to me if, near Gobernador, Rinpoche hadn't seen a simple sign,
MONASTERY
, and told me to take a left. The turn brought us down a mile-long dirt road that ended in what looked very much like a motel, without the signs and without the numbers on its doors. For a few seconds I thought it might be the New Mexico State Tourism Office's idea of a cute attraction. The Monastery Motel, a place to spend the night in prayer. It would be the polar opposite of most motels, where praying was the last thing that went on.

But from the dusty parking lot we saw a woman in a nun's habit. She was standing on a stepladder, washing windows. “Why are we here?” I asked my companion.

“To pray.”

“You know these people?”

A shake of the head. He was already getting out of the car.

“It's a nunnery, Rinp. We could be disturbing them. Men might not even be allowed.”

But he was crossing the lot by then and so, naturally, I followed. The nun came down from the ladder and greeted him. As I approached I could hear him asking if there was a place we could use “to say the small prayers.”

The nun seemed strangely unsurprised. She smiled at me, shyly, without fuss, and led us to a door. She opened the door on a plain chapel, probably fifteen feet by thirty, with a crucifix on the front wall, a pulpit, and four rows of folding chairs, three per row. “Please,” she said, and she left us.

“Why?” I whispered to Rinpoche.

“Has a nice feeling.”

“It's Catholic.”

“Yes, wery nice.”

We each took a chair in the front row, an empty one between us. “Say the Catholic prayers now,” he said to me, with that glint in his eyes that sometimes appeared when he was playing a trick.

“I don't know any.”

“ ‘Hail Mary filled of grace,' ” he said in a stage whisper. “ ‘God goes with you.' Say it like that to yourself, quiet, bunch of times, okay?”

“Sure, fine.”

I folded my hands and closed my eyes and repeated those words to myself, just by rote at first, just so as not to make trouble, to indulge my friend and his bizarre notions. At one point I glanced over and saw him with his head bowed, mouthing his Skovorodian Hail Mary. At another point I found myself musing on the idea that the Catholic Church, notorious, at least in my circles, for its outdated attitudes toward women, had always kept a revered female figure at its center. She was a figure the Protestants basically ignored, and yet Protestant women in most denominations could serve as priests, were not obliged to forgo birth control, and were left to their own conscience when faced with the possibility of an abortion.

I said the words quietly to myself, over and over again, mantra style. After a while, the repetition did bring about a nice mental quiet, cousin to what I'd felt in my Buddhist-style meditations. After another little while the quiet was so refined and pleasurable that I didn't want it to end. We must have sat there for an hour. If the nuns wondered about us they didn't show it, didn't interrupt, didn't worry that we were two traveling marauders bent on rape and robbery.

At last, after our long mantra session, our mini-rosary in what still felt very much like a motel, Rinpoche stirred and exhaled once, so I could hear him. He sat there another minute, then stood and bowed with great reverence in the direction of the crucifix. I was, at this point, confused. When we stepped outside we were introduced to the Mother Superior, a woman of perhaps forty-five years, with a pleasant face and a manner so calm I felt like I was running at 350 RPMs and she was at 35. Since Rinpoche didn't volunteer to do so, I introduced us.

“It's very nice of you to stop in,” was all she said.

To fill an awkward moment, to quell my very odd desire to ask her for the rest of the words to the prayer, and infected, perhaps, by Rinpoche's generosity, I asked if she had any kind of gift shop where we might purchase something, or make a donation. She led us to another motel-like building sitting perpendicular to the first and showed us a small selection of icons and crucifixes. Rinpoche pulled more money out of his robe, pointed to a painting of Mary and Jesus and gave the good nun twice what she asked for it, which was next to nothing. I bought a set of beads, thinking—I don't know what I was thinking—that I might make a gift of them to Shelsa or Natasha. We stood there for a little bit, making small talk. The mother superior told us there were nine sisters in residence, that they had another monastery somewhere in rural Massachusetts, and that they didn't like to leave the doors open too long because of the snakes. “Sister Edwina takes care of them for us,” she said. “Bull snakes, mainly, but the occasional rattler. She grew up on a ranch and used to just reach down and pick up the bull snakes with her hands and bring them outside again, but she's eighty now, it's hard for her to stoop, so she has a tool that she hooks them with.”

“Do you stay out here . . .
forever
?” I couldn't keep myself from asking.

She laughed and put a hand gently on my arm. “Are you Catholic?”

I shook my head. “Raised Lutheran. My friend here, my brother-in-law, actually, is a famous Buddhist teacher.”

“And what made you stop in?” she asked Rinpoche kindly.

“I think the Catholics wery important in this world now,” he said. “One billion maybe, I think.”

“Yes, a bit more than that. And we have a new pope about whom we're very excited.”

“I have a dream about him last night,” Rinpoche told her. “I have a dream that he's wearing a robe like this one.” He pinched the material of his robe, held it out in her direction, and laughed.

“Well, it's very stylish. And we think he's going to do great things for the Church.”

“I say a prayer for that,” Rinpoche said.

“That's kind of you.”

“The Hail of Mary.”

“Hail Mary, yes, an important prayer for us. We all say it hundreds of times a day.”

“Good, good,” he said. “Now I start saying, too.”

I expected the nun to make some religiousy joke about converting him, but she just looked at him steadily, kindly, eyes not flickering, as if she had nothing better in the world to do than to listen to these strange visitors tell her about the Hail Mary.

For another thirty seconds or so we stood there in a little pool of awkwardness. Rinpoche was looking around the room, its bare walls adorned with a single wooden crucifix, shelves of icons, small plastic boxes of rosary beads. The nun watched him lovingly, patiently, in no rush at all.

“We should go,” I said finally. “Thank you for letting us pray. I hope we didn't disturb you.”

“Not at all. We don't get many visitors.”

I couldn't help myself, couldn't catch the words before they slipped off the edge of my tongue, “What made you do this? I mean, I'm sorry, I don't mean to be rude, but what made you choose this life, way out here?”

Again, I expected her to say,
I wanted to devote my life to Christ,
or something of that sort, the kind of syrupy platitude I would have dismissed out of hand. But she only raised her eyebrows and said, “My mother died when I was fifteen. It made the world stop making sense for me. I thought I'd come to a place like this and be quiet and wait until it made sense.”

“Has it?”

“No.”

“Why do you stay then? Forgive me, I—”

“It's fine. It's a good question. I ask it to myself every few weeks, in fact. I think the answer is that from time to time I have inklings. I have a sense of something beyond the rationale of this world, a peek into another room is the way I think of it. That keeps me going. I think the other sisters would say the very same thing. The longer I stay here the more glimpses I get.”

“Do you—I'm sorry, my wife died not long ago, and my daughter did something fairly similar to what you're doing; she went to live in a meditation center, run by Rinpoche here—do you feel you have some communication with your mother?”

“Very much so, yes. Not any kind of regular conversation, but a sense of her presence, a powerful sense of it. It heals a very deep wound in me. I feel it most often when I'm saying the Hail Mary, in fact. I think I'm in touch with some wonderful feminine spirit of which my mother is a part. And I'm sorry to hear about your wife; that must have been hard for you.”

“Very.”

“I'll keep her in my prayers. What was her name?”

“Jeannie,” I said, nearly choking on the syllables.

We bade good-bye to the friendly nun and took the dirt road back to the highway, and then the highway west in the direction of the city of Bloomfield. Just as we left—you can believe this or not—I looked up and saw a cross in the sky, two strips of white cloud forming the great Christian symbol. They didn't look like contrails; there were no other clouds anywhere to be seen. They formed a huge, slightly lopsided crucifix in the sky. That is the truth.

“Nice woman,” I said to Rinpoche.

“Yes, yes, wery nice. Catholic.”

“Right. What's with all the Catholic stuff lately? The rosary beads, the Hail Marys and sacred mysteries, this place? What's going on?”

“I'm having the feelings,” he said.

“You going to convert?”

“I don't understand these feelings. Maybe little bit later on I understand. Now I just feel.”

“What do they feel like?”

He paused a moment, looked away. “Feel like maybe a big woman spirit bringing someone into this world now, again. Special someone. I think she carry change into this world.”

Even with the cross floating in the sky above us, perhaps especially with the cross floating in the sky, this was not a conversation I chose to pursue.

Thirty-two

There are things you can deny, and things you can't. Even on this lost-in-space bluish melon of whirling atomic particles, even on this relative plane, even in an existence where undependability rules, there are certain feelings and states of mind that must be acknowledged as fact. It was a fact, for instance, that my wife no longer inhabited the body I had so loved. It was a fact that Rinpoche and I were driving through northern New Mexico in a blue Ford SUV that had been rented at the Fargo airport and that now, according to a dashboard warning light, was due for an oil change. It was a fact that I couldn't see my children, couldn't touch them, couldn't speak to them face to face on that day, and that their absence caused a small web of sadness to hang around a part of every hour. On the other hand, the idea that some sacred feminine spirit was giving birth on this planet, that the odd crucifix cloud above the Gobernador Monastery was anything but a momentary fluke of meteorology, that Rinpoche and I were supposed to make some grand discovery on this trip, a discovery that would go some ways toward causing the world to be a more loving and peaceful place—these things were, of course, debatable. Unfacts. Perhaps nothing more than figments of the imaginations of people—my sister, Rinpoche—who didn't play by the rules of our scientific-minded society. Wishful thinking, some would call it. Flakiness. Wisps of idea from a dream world that ignored the all-too-factual hardship and suffering of what most of the rest of us considered real.

Scientists use the term
uncertainty principle
to denote the relationship between perception and actuality, the idea being that what the scientific observer sees in, say, the inner workings of a cell, is not pure objective reality but reality influenced by his or her observation. It raises some large questions. If two people view human life very differently, for example, what is the actual truth of the situation? If I think life is a bowl of cherries, and you think it's a cauldron of pain, which is it? This goes beyond a mere difference of opinion, it seems to me, and beyond individual circumstances. What I'm getting at is this: The mind is the perceiving instrument when it comes to defining reality
.
If the functioning of one's mind changes, then one's assumptions about life change. After the war, the combat veteran's worldview could very well be altered, but has the world altered? Isn't the spiritual search, at its essence, a movement toward objectivity? Toward seeing our predicament clearly, as it actually is, without being influenced by reflexive patterns of thought, and without being seen in the refracted light—rose-colored, tragic, or otherwise—of our life experiences? Isn't true scientific study the same thing?

I pondered these questions as we drove through the parched New Mexican landscape, along a road leading us to the city of Farmington. It seemed to me that, beginning with the meditation at the stupa in Crestone, my own perceiving instrument had changed in some fundamental way, and I was trying to describe that change to myself, to make sense of it, to find concrete markers that would enable me to speak about it in terms that weren't too vague and general.

One thing I noticed was that I'd started to care less about the label and to look deeper into people. The friendly nun, for example. I'd been able to see beyond her habit.

Another was that I seemed to have developed a different relationship to nature. I'd always loved to see new landscapes and had, since my earliest days doing chores on the family farm, been attentive to the flora and fauna of my surroundings. (I had loved, for instance, the call of the sharp-tailed grouse, the sight of the prairie rose; I had thrilled at the rare visit of a whooping crane flapping over the box elders in our yard, and even at the sight of a porcupine waddling through, quills up, hips swinging.) But now I felt what can only be called a
kinship
with the earth. The dry brown hills we were driving through—hardly beautiful—seemed to me to be breathing, pulsing, throbbing in the subtlest of ways, as if the energy field of my own body extended itself out into the sage plants and dry stream beds, the red rocks, the cirrus clouds. I wanted to ask Rinpoche about it but decided to wait. “Don't get stuck on the experiences,” he'd said. “Don't pay too much attention to you, you, you.” So I drove, wondered about the Mary spirit, missed my children, and worried, just a bit, about finding my way north and west to Moab, the site of Rinpoche's last scheduled talk.

Farmington, a few miles down the road, was a strange apparition. There must have been a dozen pawn shops, a couple of “Asian Massage” establishments, an adult bookstore with a billboard right next to it that showed a familiar, bearded face and the words
JESUS IS WATCHING YOU
. We strolled back and forth along the flat main street, perusing the merchandise in a secondhand store with friendly clerks and an absolutely incredible selection of objects from another era. Straight razors, a real barber's chair, pearl earrings, wall hangings, porcelain plates, paintings of Elvis—it was a step back into another America and I enjoyed explaining it to my companion. While telling Rinpoche what a transistor radio was used for, I had a memory of watching one of the Harry Potter movies with my kids and hearing Ron's father say, “Harry, tell me, what, exactly, is the function of a rubber duck?”

“This used to be a big oil and gas town,” the woman at the desk told us, “but the oil and gas kind of disappeared and things got tough for a while. It's coming back a bit now,” she said.

I hoped so. I always hoped for places to come back. I hoped, in fact, that they would never have left in the first place. I remembered driving through Youngstown, Ohio, with Rinpoche on our first road trip—he'd had an event there—and witnessing the devastation left behind after the iron and steel jobs disappeared. Walking back to our car along the hot, deserted main street of Farmington, I couldn't help but wonder what North Dakota would be like when the oil and gas ran out, when and if it was proven that fracking caused earthquakes or the spoilage of groundwater. All those people would have moved in, new houses would have been built. Would the oil workers make a smooth transition back to wheat farming and the simpler life, or would we be stuck with abandoned storefronts and Asian massage parlors, hundreds unemployed, an economy built on pawn shops, adult bookstores, a casino or two? Small cities full of friendly citizens like those in Farmington, Bloomfield, and Dickinson seemed to me a kind of smiling, generous flotsam and jetsam being lifted and dropped on great economic tides over which they had no control.

BEYOND FARMINGTON WE SLICED
through the Navajo Nation. In the distance we could see the monolith referred to as Shiprock, an old protrusion that could, I suppose, in the eyes of a drunken cowboy or mad conquistador, seem to resemble the prow of a ship, standing 1,500 feet above the high desert floor. “Used to be underground,” Rinpoche told me. “Wery hard rock it's made from. Now all the soft rock washed away, little after little, and this stays.”

“Sacred to the Navajo, I've heard.”

“Wery sacred.”

“The stupa was a sacred place.”

He looked over at me, not fooled, not taking the bait. “For Rinpoche, every place sacred, every person, every food, every cloud, every mouse and snake and deer. Sacred.”

“Right, but even for you some places seem more holy than others.”

“Different energy,” he said.

“Some people are more fun to be around, less threatening, calmer.”

“Sure.”

“But sacred all the same.”

“Absolute and relative, Otto.”

“Right. I'm working on it. I feel a little more absolute lately, like I moved over a few inches into the absolute light and out of the relative light.”

No response. Bait not taken.

In Shiprock, feeling sleepy and realizing how far we still had to travel, I looked around for a coffee shop and, finding none, reluctantly pulled into a McDonald's. Rumor had it that, since switching over to Newman's Own, they'd improved their coffee offerings, but, chain-averse as I was, I hadn't experimented. The servers were all Navajo. I asked for an iced coffee, on the dark side, and was served one as light as an eggshell in color and sweetened with about four sugars. I asked for something darker, no sugar, and, with some regret, watched the woman pour out the contents of my cup and make me another one, exactly the same. In her worldview, from her vantage point in the spectrum of life, coffee was supposed to look and taste like this. I thanked her, took it into the car with me, and didn't drink any. We stopped at a roadside flea market and bought something called kneel-down bread, which turned out to be made of cornmeal and wrapped in a charred corn husk. The name derived, the seller told us, from the days when Navajo women ground the cornmeal by hand, kneeling down to do so. I found it not to my liking, but Rinpoche nibbled away contentedly and took two sips of my coffee.

We drove then, through a wonderland of light-brown buttes and mesas, dry, flat-topped hills placed in such a way—looking at each other across the highway—that they seemed about to speak. Sacred land, without question. At one point we pulled into a rest area littered with whiskey bottles and we simply breathed in the magnificence of that scenery, a magnificence that no amount of roadside litter, no amount of poverty, no sweet milky iced coffee could spoil.

“If your ego is wery, wery small,” Rinpoche said, almost as if speaking to himself, “then the world is wery big, wery beautiful.”

“I wonder if pain is smaller then, if fear is smaller.”

“Yes,” he said, as if nothing could be more obvious. “The ego is like the big animal that breathes all the air in the room. The small ego leaves air for other people, other animals. Then the earth can breathe, see?” He squeezed the back of my neck like a basketball coach squeezing the neck of a guard who'd just missed a key three-pointer but might still help the team win one day.

“What would you say,” I asked him, “if you had to pick one sign by which the ego could be recognized, what would that be? Just to be on the lookout for something, you know?”

He looked at me, the coach seeing now that his player had understood, that there might be hope for him after all. He turned his eyes to the flat-faced buttes for so long I thought he might not even answer. “The one thing?”

“Yes. I'm sure there are many. But give me one.”

“The ego takes. The attention, the money, the things, the time, all the space in a room. Okay? But when you thinking,
I'm not taking up space, I'm giving
—little bit of ego there, too, Otto.”

“It's impossible then, this enlightenment thing. It's like trying not to be.”

He smiled. He said, “Bet your ass, man,” and we headed west in a pleasant silence, past the tourist attraction of Four Corners, and the Ute Mountain Indian Reservation, through Cortez, Colorado, and Monticello, Utah, and then north, in darkness, along a snaking two-lane road, to Moab.