From Comfortable Distances (16 page)

The days following passed
with Tess in a daze. She felt as if her heart had shut off, like a valve on a
summer home in the winter. There were the funeral arrangements to make, friends
and family to call. There were the conversations with Prakash, calls to Michael,
telling him that she was fine, that he needn’t make the trip up there. As
selfish as it may have been, the thought of being around others just then made
her feel rushed. She wanted to be alone in the house if only for a bit longer.
It was the first time in her life that she had been alone in the house without
the prospect of her mother coming home.

The silence and
spaciousness of the empty house made her feel eerie and free at the same time.
She felt connected to her mother being there in the silence. She walked the
upstairs halls, her bare feet grazing the cool hardwood floors, and studied the
mahogany wood-framed pictures which adorned the walls—pictures of her mother
with her friends, various spiritual leaders whose names escaped Tess. Tess as a
teenager, and then a young woman and then a mother, Tess and Prakash. She tried
to imagine what it was her mother had felt or thought as she walked through
those halls, living alone in the house all those years. There was a level of
compassion and acceptance and love, true love, that Tess felt for her mother in
those days of solitude.

Resting on her mother’s
bed, she read the pamphlets on
Four Noble Truths
and
The Noble
Eightfold Path
that her mother had formulated and stacked in a wooden trunk
in the larger of the two meditation rooms, near the stacks of sitting cushions.
The pamphlets had been for the people who used to come to the morning
meditations to see what they were all about prior to their becoming regulars at
the house—practicing Buddhists. Tess remembered when her mother had typed up
the pages, reading them aloud as she did, and then brought them into town and
run off copies of them at the library, stapling each one and how a week or so
later one of her followers had volunteered to have them bound with a cover into
pamphlets. Tess remembered keeping both pamphlets by her bedside table for a
time, tracing the glossy photo of Prajnaparamita, the Mother of all Buddha’s,
and Yeshe Tsogyal, the Mother of Tibetan Buddhism, alternating reading them before
she went to bed, believing that some of the concepts may seep in and make sense
to her by the morning, but they never did.

1)
Life means
suffering
. Tess agreed with the first of the
Four Noble Truths
. She
had suffered over the years, although she was the first to admit that much of
her suffering had been self-induced.

2)
The origin of
suffering is attachment
. Craving and clinging. It was this concept that had
frightened her first as a young child and then angered her as a teenager. She
had felt scared not to be attached to her mother—who then would she be attached
to? She had wanted her mother to cling to her as the other mothers clung to
their daughters—to worry where she was going, what she was doing and with whom,
what she ate. She hated the freedom her mother imposed on her. The constant
discussions in which her mother would tell her that nothing was permanent. It
had made Tess paranoid: each night she would go outside to make sure the sky
was still there and the stars and each day on her way home from school she
would pray that her house would still be there, that her mother would still be
there. After all, her father had proven his impermanence. Tess had been guilty
of craving and clinging for as long as she could remember, whether it had been
another person, her independence, herself. She had clung to the version of
reality that she believed was the right one. In retrospect, it had always been
attachment that had caused Tess to suffer.

3)
The cessation of
suffering is attainable. 
It was through nirodha, or the unmaking of
sensual craving and conceptual attachment, that one could end one’s suffering.
One needed to use a fire extinguisher on clinging and attachment. That’s how
her mother had explained this noble truth. Tess hadn’t wanted to cut out her
attachments.

4)
The path to the
cessation of suffering.
This path could extend over many lifetimes, through
many rebirths. It was only as one made progress on the path that delusions and
ignorance and cravings would disappear. Tess used to imagine herself suffering
for years on end and then dying and coming back to life and suffering some
more. What she wondered, was the point of life if it was full of so much
suffering?

She closed her eyes and
fell back onto the pillow propped up behind her. Right now she was clinging to
her mother’s memory, this house, her solitude, and craving her mother’s
company.

She moved on to
The
Noble Eightfold Path
, which was a “practical guide,” per the introductory
paragraph, on how to end suffering in relation to one’s ethical and mental
development.  The goal of putting The Noble Eightfold Path into practice was to
become free from attachments and delusions. Ultimately, it was to “lead one to
understanding the truth about all things.” Tess skimmed the list:

                 
Right
View

                 
Right
Intention

                 
Right
Speech

                 
Right
Action

                 
Right
Livelihood

                 
Right
Effort

                 
Right
Mindfulness

                 
Right
Concentration

If it were a true or false test, Tess would fail.
Although she would give herself a true for Right Livelihood—she did earn her
money in a legal and peaceful way.  She was losing her concentration with the
pamphlet, which would count as unwholesome thoughts or wrong concentration. She
moved onto the books she had found in a wicker basket under her mother’s bed.
Open
Heart, Clear Mind
by Thubten Chodron,
Be Here Now
by Ram Das,
Food
for the Heart: The Collected Writings of Ajahn Chah
,
The Art of Happiness: A
Handbook for Living
by Dalai Lama. A typed note fell out of her mother’s
well-highlighted copy of Jack Kornfeld’s
A Path With Heart.

A guru's job is to help you to know
yourself. Nothing more or less. No other human being is going to be able to
change your life, but a guru can help you to change your life just by being in
your life. And there's never just one guru, but a chain of gurus who keep
imparting their wisdom until it reaches you. So be respectful of the lineage of
gurus. Your teacher is by no means the end all, be all of gurus. Rather, he or
she is part of a lineage of gurus.

The thing about gurus is that the
turn up in life when you least expect them. When you seek them actively, when
you force that bond, it won’t work. Generally, whenever you seek a person
thinking that he or she is going to have the answers to your life, it leads to
disappointment. However, when your life is somewhat on track and you’re feeling
good and finding your way as best you can, that's when you tend to encounter a
guru. And gurus come to us in the least expected ways—a guru can be a friend
you meet who has gone through a life experience that you’re first embarking on;
a guru can be your mailman or your yoga teacher, or your neighbor or High School
English teacher. Gurus don't have any special uniforms. It's the knowledge that
they can impart to us, and their own life experiences. Gurus are humble and
patient, but they're tough on us, too. They may not always tell us what we want
to hear, but if they didn't challenge us, chances are that we wouldn't grow.

The word
guru
means from darkness to
light—if you take away anything from our talk today, I hope you will remember
that you are the only person who can bring yourself from darkness to light.
External forces can help you to find your way, but in the end, you are the only
one who take to your path and make it your own. In
Dante's Inferno
, it's
Beatrice who leads the way, but it's Virgil who makes his way from the darkness
of the nine circles of hell into the light. Chances are that you've all met
gurus in your life, and possibly that you've been a guru; chances are that you
will keep coming upon gurus as is necessary in your life. The best gurus are
the ones who refrain from preaching and rather live their lives in a quiet way
that enables others to learn from them by watching them live. Of course there's
the famous guru-student relationship in
The Bhagavad-Gita
in which
Arjuna learns from Krishna; remember though that it takes Arjuna time to learn
and accept the lessons that Krishna teaches him. Often what our guru advises is
not what we want to hear, but perhaps that’s because when we first ask for
help, we are not ready to listen.

That’s where it ended. Tess
remembered her mother giving lectures. She had always thought that her mother
just spoke. She never would have known that her mother scripted anything. Tess
wondered if she had been at this lecture or if it had been one that she skipped
out on by hiding in her closet. She felt cheated that she had missed out on so
much that her mother had to offer because of her own obstinacy. But she had
been too young and she had repelled her mother and her ways because she had
been trying to find her own way, learn who she was, she supposed. She hadn’t
wanted to be the different kid on the block, the weirdo as the other children
called her. When her mother sensed Tess’s anger and rejection to Buddhism, she
would tell Tess that it was okay, that it would make sense to her one day and
that had made Tess even angrier. She didn't care about Buddhism, didn't care
about dharma and karma and being a bodhisattva; awakening and spirituality and
enlightment was silliness to Tess. She didn’t want to hear about
The Four
Noble Truths
and the
Eightfold Path
. To her it was just words about
giving up everything she cared about and trying to be perfect by thinking,
saying, doing the right things. She wanted to be Tess, whoever that was. She
didn't want to be part of the cult—she ran away from it all at any chance she
could, opposed it, and her mother's friends had treated her with compassion,
meditating for her that she would find her way, awaken. All the talk of
awakening made her want to sleep, escape from her life. She had wanted a father
like the other children. She didn't care about her mother's need to be free;
she had felt like a prisoner. She didn't want to wake up each day to people
meditating in her living room and practicing yoga. She had wanted to eat
hamburgers and French fries; wheat grass and grains made her want to vomit. She
didn't understand why she had to be a vegetarian.

“Mom? Please come to me,
Mom. Please let me know you are with me,” Tess said as she moved through the
empty house. She had always imagined that when her mother passed, she would
feel her presence. The absence of her mother’s presence made her feel
desperate. Would her mother ever come to her? If only she could feel her presence,
know that she was okay, safe, then Tess believed she would feel peaceful.

Each day the finality of
death, the irrevocable nature of it, hit Tess anew. She was afraid of time
passing, as it seemed to move her mother farther away from her. Thoughts of
December—cold, dark days—unnerved her. She moved through the house, her
footsteps on the wooden floor startling to her in the silence as she made her
way into the living room and paused by the large bay windows overlooking the
backyard. Outside, the trees swayed in the breeze and Tess plastered her nose
against the cool window glass. The endless rows of flowers her mother had
planted had already begun to bloom. There were yellow flowers and bright pink
flowers and a patch of what Tess knew to be fresh lavender. She longed to be
outside, smelling the fresh, sweet lavender and yet it seemed too far to go.
Along the east side of the low wooden fence, there were rows of tulips, some
beginning to bloom, others not quite there. She wished that she had asked her
mother the names of all the flowers that she had planted if only so that she
could replicate her garden one day. How had she never gotten to that?

Landing in her old
bedroom, now a guest room, she tossed herself belly first onto the day bed. The
mattress was hard and stiff. She remembered spring evenings nestled on her
pillow-top mattress, which had been on the floor back then, candles scattered
about her. Long after everyone had left for the night, she had heard the sound
of the weeping willow trees outside her window shooing back and forth to the
gentle night breeze. She saw the beaded curtains that she had strung that
separated her walk-in closet from the rest of the room. She had spent so many
afternoons camped out in her closet, in this room, candles lit all around her,
illuminating the darkness, casting shadows against the wall that transformed
into her secret friends, glowing and growing and dancing so that watching them,
she would feel what she imagined to be her soul—a wild, lithe creature within her,
confined by her flesh—merge with their movements and then she would be up,
moving with them, dancing in the darkness like a girl in a trance.