Excerpt
Two chapters from Day Breaks Over Dharamsala:
The beginning....
Chapter One
Immediately upon landing, her obsession to describe precisely how Delhi smells becomes mine, too. Yes, it is like exhaust fumes; but from what? Big diesel trucks, for sure, but from other things, too: something sweet that is barely decipherable; burning rubber and other things it is illegal to burn back where I come from; something sweaty and forbidden; something else that is on the verge of being unbearable.
Thrinley is grinning. “It smells so much better than last time I was here,” she says.
I’m wondering what else she has in her arsenal of surprises about India.
Thrinley and I are on pilgrimage. Her reasons are distinct. As the manager of a Tibetan Buddhist retreat center on the island where we live, Thrinley was invited to attend the long-life ceremony for His Holiness Sakya Trizin in Rajpur, a small town just on the edge of Dehradun in northern India. Sakya Trizin is one of her Tibetan Buddhist teachers. I’m going along for the ride, which isn’t quite true. What is true is that I was compelled to go for reasons I could neither articulate nor fully comprehend. And it wasn’t so much India that drew me; it was Dharamsala, the small hill town in the foothills of the Himalayas where the Dalai Lama has established the Tibetan government-in-exile. I love the Dalai Lama; I want to be where he is. But right now I am in Delhi; and it smells bad.
Back in the sixties and seventies, my friends who went to India went mostly for drugs and levitation. Everybody lusted after gurus and good dope and India supposedly had both. The Beatles went there, too. But in those days I was a young, responsible mother and recently divorced. I taught Montessori school and protested the war in Vietnam. When I was passed a joint at a party, I took a toke or two but could never really identify what it was that was supposed to happen. India influenced my wardrobe with dangly earrings, light and bright and flimsy cotton skirts and shirts, and patchouli incense; but my mind and its whereabouts remained tightly under my control. Now, more than 30 years later, I am in India looking for something that I’m not sure I will recognize. But first of all, it appears, I am to line up.
It is four long lines for security, immigration, customs and something known only to the Indian government, before we get to our luggage. I have dragged my security pouch out of my pants so often that I no longer worry about appearing masturbatory. Besides, I’ve already seen several Indian men grabbing their genitals with fevered appreciation; why shouldn’t I?
Suddenly Thrinley looks confused. “I could swear I remember that this airport was made of concrete,” she says.
It is stark, white, unadorned, and unmistakably marble. All the better to see the ravishing, unrestrained colors of the clothes worn by the Indian women. I had known about the flowing colors from films and photographs, but the elegance only comes through in person. Even the exhausted mothers with toddlers, who’ve been our traveling companions since Seattle, look serenely graceful and composed. Thrinley and I, weighted down with a couple of old canvas backpacks, hope only that we don’t look American.
It is the first of December, 2004. George W. Bush is back in office and both Thrinley and I are devastated by the thought of four more years. It wasn’t supposed to happen. I’d traveled from the northwest to Columbus, Ohio as a volunteer voting monitor on Election Day. The experience left me shocked and shaken. I’d gone there on principle to participate with Election Protection. I’m not a U.S. citizen but because I care so much about the country, I had to do something. Columbus, Ohio, however, became a lesson in how America had gone wrong. At the polling station where I was assigned, two of the five voting machines were out of order within fifteen minutes of opening. African Americans, who had been in line since before daybreak in order to vote before going to work, had to leave in order to get to their jobs. I watched the subtle and not-so-subtle ways in which voters were disenfranchised. Even so, when I went to bed that night, John Kerry was predicted to win Ohio, and consequently the Presidency. Waking up to a re-elected George W. Bush was a shock and as well as a heartbreak. Suddenly it felt like the right time to leave the country, even though it felt like the wrong time to be perceived as American.
At first, Thrinley was going to get a Canadian flag to sew on to her backpack. I, the non-American and always paranoid about being deported, was afraid that was too deceptive and so I suggested we take a couple of old, worn canvas backpacks that look more Tyrolean than Eddie Bauer. If we avoid the outdoor fashion statement look, perhaps we’ll avoid the stigma of George W. Bush. Our packs have strings and buckles instead of Velcro and zippers. The pouches are bulky; the straps are lined with fleece; and they’re weighty even on empty. If they get wet we’ll be on our knees. For sure we won’t look American.
It was a calling to come here to India; and in some way, inevitable, even as it seemed utterly impossible. Mostly because I have no money. In the past, most of my travel has been job-related. As editor of SPA Magazine I’d been invited to resorts of great luxury and indulgence in places like France and Italy; I’d gone to a private spa in Hawaii with Fabio; I’d also written guides to hostels and traveled to places of no-frills practicality. I’d gone to canyon country in the southwest via the Green Tortoise bus with its on-board beds and barely above-board protocols. I’d biked and camped in Alaska with only a lousy boyfriend and a herd of mosquitoes for company. In some way they were all travel adventures prescribed by circumstance to be somewhat predictable. India, however, was otherwise. At the outset, exactly how I would pay for this trip was totally unpredictable.
Money is not my strong suit. Ever since I was a little girl and my services were sold to strangers, I’ve had trouble touching the stuff. There is no subtle way to say this. My childhood experience imprinted me with a shame about money that has permeated all my life. Although I’ve had 25 years of therapy and several lifetimes of struggle with the honorable concept of self-worth and financial entitlement, I’ve come to the conclusion that money and I are tainted, once and for all, ad infinitum. Which is why I really love the Dalai Lama. He went to a meeting with George W. Bush wearing his patched robes and plastic flip flops. He obviously has trouble with money, too.
My friend, Thrinley, wondered if he did it on purpose—the plastic flip flop encounter with the President of the U.S.A. I know he did. The Dalai Lama does everything on purpose; that’s his purpose. I’ve been trying to do one thing, anything, on purpose my whole life. But when you’ve been trained to believe that if you want something it automatically means you can’t have it, purpose ends up in the non-existent money jar with the non-existent money. Just like money, purpose has to be a sleight-of-hand experience in my life. Which is why going to India in search of the Dalai Lama on purpose, had to happen by accident.
And, of course, it did; even the money part. I told Thrinley that I was thinking about going to India with her only after she’d told me that no-one was lining up to go with her on this trip. So my life-long yearning to actually want to go to India became an act of altruism, a sacrifice. I was off to a good and accidental start. Then a credit card arrived in the mail, then another one. This astounded me as I’ve resisted life-by-credit card since I was married to the dentist more than 30 years ago. I’ve also been quite happily ineligible simply because I never had the credit to apply for credit. But it turned out that my last two get-through-the-winter bank loans, which I had dutifully repaid, put me in the pink with a couple of credit companies. Voila! Just as my altruistic juices were lining up India as a possibility, the plastic showed up.
I called Thrinley immediately. “If the plane ticket goes through on the VISA card, I’m going with you,” I announced, not quite on purpose. And it did. And here I am. On pilgrimage.
To my untrusting ear, “pilgrimage” sounds pretentious and implausible to consider in this post-post-modern world. It rings of age-old goings-on and of something dignified and restrained, somber perhaps, and much too private to be named. When I look it up online I find references of old to pilgrimages to the Holy Land, to Waterloo, to Paradise and Palestine. There’s the pilgrimage of perfection, and The pylgremage of the sowle penned somewhere in the region of 1400. There are New Age pilgrimages, virtual pilgrimages to holy places from the comfort of the computer screen, pilgrimages to the Beatles, to wildflowers, to steam baths and to Glastonbury. To Google “pilgrimage” brings nearly three million possibilities. The dictionary offers up penance, worship, historic or sentimental journey. And finally a few words that catch a deeper attention, “a search for mental and spiritual values.”
The word “pilgrim,” it turns out, is easier. “One who journeys, especially in alien lands,” is Webster’s first take; followed by “a person who passes through life in exile from a heavenly homeland or in search of it or some high goal (as truth).
For many years, my green card said I was a registered alien. Now I am an alien journeying in an alien land. If I am on any kind of a pilgrimage, it is in search of my self; not the grown-up self in search of realization and accomplishment, but the childhood self that simply deserves to be. I want to know that I have been alive before I die. I want to come in out of exile.
My first attempt to write myself home was in 1991, when I moved to San Juan Island in the far northwest corner of Washington State where there was a Tibetan Buddhist Center as well as a Buddhist Vipassana Center. To move to an island means to be on the lookout for signs of spiritual compatibility; otherwise the isolation gets you if the insulation doesn’t. Islands are not easy places and my life has been full of them. Like Buddhism, they have linked together the fragments of my past, all the life lived and unlived.
When I contemplated this island move, the Buddhist centers beckoned. Even if I didn’t go to them, they were there and it meant something. Even if I didn’t get the book written, it was there and it meant something. This there and not-there experience prescribes the life of someone who survives things that should never have happened. Vigilance takes over and it restrains the body, suspends it in space, and keeps it safely out of sight of the world. There are no daydreams, no wants and wishes; there is no future that can be named. Life happens and parts of us, if we are lucky, are around when it does. This alienation is what I want you to understand. The trauma is simply the trauma; the aftermath goes on forever. And when we begin to see the toll taken, when we begin to heal, it is into the unbearable awareness of all that has been lost. It is an awakening to grief. To suffering. In Buddhism, the number one wake-up call is to suffering. The cessation of suffering is the goal but the path goes right through the suffering. And there is no way out but through. So how could I avoid moving to a small island with two Buddhist centers in order to write a book about suffering?
So I moved to a house on the waterfront of the west side of the island and the book got started in beauty. It was quiet and the light was miraculous on sea and sky. The red currant bushes brought the first hummingbirds of the spring; the whales swam by. Sometimes I heard them breathing from across the still waters. Sometimes the wind and the waves crashed around the house in a fury. I found perfect stones on the beach and the odd ancient shells of chitins; the waters rose with the moon and the moon with the waters. I lived in beauty and wrote 300 pages about suffering. I also got my first dog. He, too, was an accident, a want I had without wanting.
Buck was a two year-old black lab who had survived a sail through the Panama Canal and up the west coast all the way to Roche Harbor on San Juan Island. His owner was working off the bitter after-effects of a bitter divorce; he hadn’t treated Buck very well and a couple of women working at the resort took it upon themselves to rescue him. When the fellow started making plans to leave, they kidnapped Buck, hid him, and waited to see if his erstwhile owner cared. He didn’t, and sailed off without him.
It was a few weeks later when some friends came to visit me on the island and I took them, and their black lab, for a winter stroll through the Roche Harbor gardens. A woman came out of the office; she took one look at their dog, another look at me and said, “I have a dog just like that one and he needs a home. His name is Buck.” She turned quickly, went back to the hotel and brought him out. Before I knew what was happening, he was mine.
The only problem was that I didn’t know how to have a dog. My partner at that time did, however, and when he was around he gave me lessons. But he wasn’t around a lot. As a merchant marine, he went offshore for weeks at a time. When he was away, Buck, himself, took over my training. I was an awkward student because I didn’t know how to talk to him, how to say his name. Our journey to full conversation took a long time. I thought about this many years later when Buck went deaf and didn’t seem to mind. It was a return to our early years when it was long stretches of silence that rang out between us, punctuated only by food and long, quiet walks.
Somebody said that the most valuable thing about marriage is the witnessing of one another’s lives. As a complete failure in the longevity of my relationships with men, let alone my inability to get and stay married after my early foray into the institution, Buck became the witness to my life as it unfolded, with me and without me, for the next thirteen years. Even now, after nearly two years without him, I often wonder, “What would Buck think?” His presence, the way he would peruse the world and its inhabitants without raising his head from whatever soft spot he could find, was masterful.
Throughout the years of writing and not writing this book, Buck taught me about unconditional love and loyalty. His frailties reminded me of my own and as I struggled to recover my self, soul and sanity from the violations of my childhood, his dogged devotion to me—no matter what—finally got under my skin and made a difference. When it was time for him to die I was devastated. For help, I called Thrinley. She was my friend, she had experienced the loss of a long beloved dog, and she knew some blessings. After all, Buck was a Buddhist. He knew suffering; he knew compassion; he knew better than I how to be here now; he also knew impermanence, particularly when it came to food. He was my own private bodhisattva.
A bodhisattva is an enlightened being who makes sacrifices to benefit other beings. It is a Sanskrit word and it applies to Buddha as well as to Buck. At the end of his life, Buck kept getting up for my sake. Early in his life, the Buddha renounced the insular comforts of wealth to learn something that might help those who were less fortunate. He sacrificed his fortune for enlightenment. But on the path to enlightenment, he had no idea what enlightenment was; neither did Buck. He just kept getting up. The Buddha just kept sitting down.
Buck did something else that was astonishing. When we were out in the world, he had a philosophy of life that never failed him, even when it did. He assumed everybody loved him. Unlike his perceptive protectiveness within the confines of hearth and home, when he was out, he reveled in the possibility of love-at-first-smell. He approached everyone he met with big surging licks of tail-wagging affection. Over the years I grew more and more in awe of this unabashed display of undisciplined love for humankind. It never wavered. Even after brusque, sometimes repulsed, responses, he never missed a Buck beat. With inherent dignity he would turn to whoever was next and try again. His was an assumption of love that was majestic in its optimism.
Yet there was a moment in his daily life that reflected an opposite view. He always flinched when I went to pet him. It got less over the years but until he died he never completely trusted the hand that fed him. And loved him. And never, ever hurt him. Buck’s early experiences with the cruel fellow on the boat had left him with an inherent mistrust of the person who was supposed to love him most of all. At first, I thought he would outgrow this instinctive flinch and it hurt to see it so entrenched. After all, I might not have known how to have a dog, but I knew I loved Buck. I knew he had been abandoned and had been treated cruelly; I knew we had shared the worst of times at times in our lives; I knew we were soul mates. He knew this, too; but those early beatings had left him helpless under his skin, as had mine. We both know how to dazzle strangers; neither one of us knew how to trust our friends.
I am a survivor of deviant abuse of my mind, my body and my soul. My abuse at the hands of others was supported and perpetrated by my parents. It started in England when I was perhaps four years old. It continued in Montreal until I was twelve. It stopped when I was around fourteen, after our family moved to Vancouver B.C. I know this because that is when my memory starts. And herein lays a dilemma of enormous proportion. It is everything I don’t remember that drives my life and its losses. The empty black hole of my childhood that was at the heart of me. Into it was sucked everything—the joy as well as the terror, the innocence as well as the guilt, the knowledge of self as well as the self.
Memory is a moving target. Sometimes we recognize it: “I must remember to buy cat food.” Sometimes we don’t: “I must remember to breathe.” In my own uncovering, and recovering, of memories, I had to start by acknowledging that I had a memory. This was, and is, difficult, because all of my surviving life I have forgotten. I learned how to forget everything, the bad, the good, and the indifferent. I couldn’t remember where I slept up until the age of fifteen; I still can’t, even though I know I slept somewhere. I can’t remember sitting down for a meal with my family, even though I did for nineteen years. Sometimes I have a picture of place and a suggestion of activity but there is no feeling of it, nothing that tells me I was really there, that it really happened. This forgetting has marked all the years of my un-abused life, too. Mostly because there was no me to remember.
This has, of course, created doubt and dismay as I’ve tried to heal from the electric shocks that could never happen but did; the sexual slavery as a child that only my body remembers; the experiments that happened to someone else In my body; the days and nights in the dark that made indistinguishable my self from all that did not exist; the places where I became an animal, where being debased for the enjoyment of others was my charm and my glory. I heal from it all, even as I know it could never have happened to me. It is what I don’t know that has both saved me and condemned me. And it seems, at times, as though there is no difference.
I do bear one visible scar. It’s four inches long and reaches down the inside of my left forearm. On my left hand are five-year old fingers and a thumb that does not bend. There is not much feeling in this hand. It is a hand that is always cold, always numb, always looked after by my other hand--the right one, the one that writes, that does everything. "The scar is real," it writes. It is a huge scar. It is connected to medical experiments and electric shocks to see if the severed nerve would grow, and electric shocks to make sure I didn't remember the electric shocks. And shocks to obliterate the memory of the sexual exploitation, the manipulation of my mind, and the banishment of my self to a place of hiding so profound it would take me fifty years to get her back.
So, if I don't "remember" being cut, does it make the scar unreal? This is what I would ask those who think recovered memory is a hoax, that there is only truth in the literal and sequential naming of memory and recognition. The real truth is that the scar on my arm is of little consequence. But the reasons it is there scared and scarred the very soul out of me. My five year old self lives in my five year old fingers. It is a hand I hold dear. A hand that tells me the truth and always holds me accountable to what it knows.
Many children were experimented on in the 40s and 50s; they still are. Many children were used for child prostitution and pornography; they still are. Many children, and adults, too, had their minds experimented upon through electric shock and drugs and by the destruction of the bonds that make life possible. It is everywhere. Yet it is ultimately our healing that matters. Only in healing that which is invisible is there hope.
Reclaiming spiritual grace is the hardest and most harrowing part of the healing journey. It takes the greatest toll—inside and out—and it insists on coming first, last and always. If spiritual healing isn’t tended to, all the techniques in the psychotherapeutic band-aid business are doomed to expensive and shameful failure. It’s not only about healing the body and the mind; in fact, the mind can take care of itself. It’s about healing the spirit and restoring the soul.
In working through my years of recovery, the ongoing psychobabble about memory, false memory and recovered memory was a pain in the butt, as well as a pain in the brain. Any self-respecting survivor of trauma and abuse will tell you that the experts are only experts in their own experience. If they could enter into, for a moment, the place where mind and body separate to survive, they would know the emptiness of their conjecture, the limitation of their experience, and the breathtakingly boring nature of their perceptions. A few begin to get it; those who do usually keep very quiet. Admitting that knowledge is rooted in spiritual experience is a blithering no-no in the realms of academia—psychological academia most of all.
Because I was trained never to want anything, particularly in the realm of spiritual yearning, some other shape of wanting led me through my life. I call it “feeling drawn.” It saved me until I learned how to save myself. It drew me to special people, to poetry, to Buddhism, to labyrinths and folk-dancing, to playing soccer and playing cards, to playwriting and the streets of WTO Seattle, to Jesus and Mary, to bad movies and good books; to my dog, Buck, to my therapist, my love of nature and my love affair with the Dalai Lama. It drew me out and drew me in. Now it has drawn me to India and I am in search of its name. What is it that saves us when we can’t save ourselves? It is a question that has taken me my whole life to ask.
As I’ve reclaimed the innocence of my birthright, along with great gains have come great losses. Realizing how deeply the damage settled, how terribly it informed my life before I learned how to recognize its power, is a challenge sometimes greater than healing. Child abuse most of all abuses the adult we become. The vile acts of abuse happen and are over. The effects of the abuse shape a life and the lives of those we love. This is its deadliest legacy. As survivors, we perpetrate hatred, shame, mistrust and fear; even as we live good lives and become good people. As individuals we reflect the parallel realities of abuse and denial that mark these times. And they do mark these times; we are awash in the destruction of the human spirit.
This trip to India is a lark, a burst of freedom into greater freedom. I knew this as soon as I knew I would go. I also knew that the great draw was at work again. There was something yet to realize. After so many years of therapy, so much grief and despair, so many healing corners turned; there is still one left. As Thrinley and I find ourselves funneling out through the airport towards the real Delhi, a sensation seeps in to me and there is the first hint of a great and thought-less landscape of possibility. Perhaps India itself is a drug. And here I am, about to swallow it hook, line and synchronicity.
It’s Thrinley’s friend, Pema, who’s supposed to meet us at the Delhi airport and save us from ourselves and our luggage. He’s been a travel guide to many Tibetan teachers as well as to Westerners who travel to sacred sites in India. Thrinley met him on her last trip here. So far there’s no sign of him and I’m feeling no small anxiety as the end of airport security closes behind us and we walk through a silent crowd gathered in waiting for their loved ones. None of whom are us.
Suddenly Thrinley shouts out from behind me, “There he is.”
It is three o’clock in the morning and our man Pema looks as fresh as a man can look. His crisply ironed grayish mauve shirt, his freshly-pressed trousers and his polished loafers reflect London’s Fleet Street more than the bowels and bedlam of Delhi. Yet it is to this world that he most enthusiastically delivers us.
Stumbling in the wake of Pema’s confident stride across the airport parking lot is an experience in high-stakes sensory overload. It is dark. It is beyond smelly; whatever it was that Thrinley smelled at 35,000 feet was nothing compared to the blasts of freshly and not-so-freshly pissed urine rising up from underfoot. It is loud; the silence of the loved ones-in-waiting gives way to the barrage of offers and requests of the unloved: the porters, the cab drivers, the beggars, the drivers trying to get their cars out of the whirling mess of traffic—human & otherwise—in the parking lot. It is extremely touchy-feely; hands grabbing arms to take luggage or reach out for money, bodies bumping suggestively yet seemingly by accident, the continual brush of something mechanical approaching the kneecaps. The air feels thick in my mouth; it tastes bad. By the time we reach Pema’s car, no part of my body, mind or spirit remain untrammeled.
We load the luggage wherever it will fit; Thrinley climbs into the front seat; I climb into the back and we become part of the incoherent flow of vehicles looking for a way out. We escape into a street and turn right into a left lane. It’s a wrong way country. The Brits were here.
“We’ll take the long way,” says Pema. “It’s more interesting.”
Taking the long way is not exactly what I have in mind. Besides, it’s dark for god’s sake. What the hell are we supposed to see? Nasty, judgmental thoughts go scrambling across my mind. I feel like I’m failing India already. In Buddhism, our thoughts are perceived as pesky little creatures that insist upon marring the vast expansive clarity of our perfect minds. They deserve to be watched, but that’s about all. Taking them seriously is a sure-fire way to a muddy mind. This means that for more than 30 years, ever since I took my first baby Buddhist breath, I’ve been in a messy mud-wrestling match with my thoughts.
This is where any religious skills of discernment fail me. I just don’t have any. I find it impossible to believe that the world’s religions don’t, at some very critical place, join up in a celebration of unity. Nothing else makes sense. Which is why, perhaps, I am a pilgrim who is not on a pilgrimage. I am an alien in an alien land. It is Thrinley who is on a pilgrimage. She knows what she believes, and why. Her reasons for being in India at this precise moment are clear with responsibility and intention. My beliefs are obscure and unintentional. They veer from Jesus to Buddha and back again. They go to God, to God in us all, to God beyond us all. To a God that doesn’t do religion of any name.
“The smog isn’t as bad as last time,” Thrinley says to Pema.
“No,” he answers. “They make all the trucks drive in at night.”
We are in the truck lane because it is all trucks. Through the black-brown haze of night they each glow with color; sometimes from reckless and garish paint jobs, sometimes from colored lights flashing out from within the cab of the truck, sometimes from something sparkly added outside in decoration. The trucks lumber through the city like motorized circus elephants, almost animate with personality. Fatigue ripples through my body, but so does stimulation. Drivers don’t stop for red lights at night because the police are in bed, says Pema. There are no turn signals in evidence, and no rules of the road, even the lanes are arbitrary; rarely do I see one vehicle lined up behind another. It is like being on a wild ride at a carnival; but in reality it is just another night of traffic as usual. Pema never slows down. He navigates with composure, engaging us in bright conversation, telling us about Delhi.
“It is many cities in one,” he says. “And each city has a gate.”
He points one out, and then another. Through the dark I glimpse a large stone arch. An arch is a gate. It is the very first moment in India in which I hear one thing and experience another. Nothing is as it seems and nor is it otherwise. It’s an old Zen Buddhist saying I heard many years ago; I memorized it because in some profound way it put a stamp on my experience that I could understand.
Nothing is ever as it appears to me and nor is it otherwise. It’s the mantra of a child survivor of childhood abuse. Our child stays with us, with eyes open only to the possibility of violation in all the glances of life. It is as though a veil of threat is permanently in place and life is experienced through it. Everything, even love, is tinted with fear. Like my old dog Buck, I experience even the most trustworthy affection with a flinch. There is always a threat-in-hiding. Unlike Buck, I never mastered the exquisite skill of assuming, first of all and no matter what, that everybody loves me. Even watching him face the odds for thirteen years didn’t put a dent in my veil.
As we drive around Delhi in the early dark hours of the morning going who knows where, I feel no fear. Everything is a threat; but nothing is in hiding. It’s the hiding, the presentation of one thing being a mask for something else that I am always on the lookout for and consequently always see. The trickery of love that seduces the innocent faith and hope of a child and then twists it until it hurts. It’s a veil I’m always trying to make friends with; I know its reason for being, I just don’t like being it. We are working on our relationship. As Pema points out the high walls of the Red Fort, an ancient palace that was also a fort, complete with a moat, I think of this my sixtieth year. Somewhere inside, I, too, am a palace. Maybe one day before I die I’ll get over the moat.
The massive red sandstone wall around the Red Fort stretches a mile and a half; it reaches anywhere from 60 to 110 feet high. Even at four in the morning I am impressed. But, finally, I’m even more impressed that Pema, who graciously met us at such an ungodly hour at the airport, is so enthusiastically going the long way around to show us sites he loves, and that we can barely see.
It’s 4:30 when we finally get to our destination, Majnukatilla, the Tibetan Camp tucked away somewhere in the middle of Old Delhi. The word “camp” is misleading; there are no tents. Camp means simply an official place of exile; and camps are the only thing Tibetans know as home in India.
Pema pulls up on the side of the street, gives us strict instructions to stay where we are, and walks off towards a row of derelict looking buildings and disappears. When he returns, he's accompanied by a young man, tousled and sleepy, who looks to be about sixteen years old. We all tackle our luggage and with the young fellow in the lead, wearing the mother of all suitcases on his head, we head off to wherever it is our beds will be for the next couple of nights. Our environs are dark and I make out shuttered buildings and a feeling of ghostly emptiness. We turn down yet another alley and the young man with the big burden climbs the stairs to the Himalayan Guest House. Pema ushers us in and quickly up to a room, bypassing registration as well as any other form of hotel decorum.
“It’s okay,” he says. “You can sign-in in the morning.”
Pema gives a quick but efficient look around our room, checks the bathroom, announces it clean, and briskly wishes us goodnight. He will meet us tomorrow afternoon, he says, and show us the sights. As we haven’t gone to bed yet I don’t know when he means by tomorrow, but I’m too tired to ask. All I know is that it’s quiet and at the moment there is no other prerequisite for perfection. Thrinley and I stumble, each towards a bed, and sit gaping at one another. We’re in India and nobody can tell us otherwise. I drop off to sleep not even minding the small smears of snot on the wall beside my pillow.
It’s the sound of children being tortured that has me bolt upright in bed a few hours later. Alarm ripples under my skin. After a closer listen, I hear that they are playing, teasing one another in a furious race through the halls of the guest house. Terror and delight. They must live here, I think. Somebody loves them. I go back to sleep to the reassuring sounds of a couple of happy kids who couldn’t care less about someone sleeping in the next room.
I love the way love works; how it expands the sense of self in quiet and unassuming ways. How it makes a home in the body. How lovely and unselfconscious is the self when it doesn’t have to question its existence, or where it belongs, or whether it belongs. The healthy self is always at home in the halls of its embodied world. Then, when it’s time, it knows when to let go, when to join the deeper flow of existence, the flow of awakened enlightenment that is the promise of Buddhism and a realized mind. Through the years, as my own mind fragmented under the pressure of denial and delusion that was my world, I devoured books about the Buddhist mind and tried to make it my own. But my Buddhist destiny up the mountain of spiritual life was paved with grief long before I knew the words, the journey or the destination. The words came through art and poetry, the grief through the birth of one son and the loss of another.
In 1966, when Colin was only a few weeks old, we flew across the country to join his father, a captain stationed at Fort Dix, New Jersey. It was the decade in which the spiritual landscape of the country was eviscerated by the violence of the Vietnam War abroad, race riots at home, and the assassinations of President John F. Kennedy Jr., Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr., and Robert F. Kennedy. The first hint of what was to become of my own life came in the middle of that first hot and muggy New Jersey summer. It was a summer that had started as the happiest of my life.
, where he was a after being an army captain’s wife based at Fort Dix, New Jersey, for two years, I started back to school. This only sounds simple. We had returned home to Seattle during a time in which the Vietnam War, race riots, and the assassinations of John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr. had eviscerated the spiritual landscape of the country. I was twenty-three. My son, Colin, who was two years-old, was born just before the move to Fort Dix. I lost my bearings. It happened suddenly, in an instant. There was no substance; it was as though everything turned to water. Terror rose through me and I remember controlling my panic by pinching myself hard. It was a familiar technique. Ever since I could remember, a childhood fear of eternity had sent me into similar panics and I would hurt myself to get back to the feeling of things. It felt as though I was actually in eternity, my mind stretching out ad infinitum with no embodied reality. This time however, it was happening outside my mind as well. The world was dissolving.
Colin was three months old. Up until that moment, being his mom had made me as happy as I could ever remember. But when my world dissolved, he did, too. I worried that I might drop him on purpose, that I might put him in the clothes dryer, that I might die and no-one would notice. The irrational and destructive thoughts combined with the way everything outside became foreign and unfamiliar rendered me helpless and terrified. I remember my husband coming home. I was curled up on a chair and couldn’t stop crying. He called our neighbor, Mel, a physician. He came over and I cried harder and couldn’t stop. I was desperate to speak and there was no language.
Sometime over the next few days, I went to the hospital to see a doctor and was prescribed a tranquilizer of some sort. I took it and was terrified it would get into my milk and hurt Colin. So I pretended to take it. The waves of incipient insanity defined my days and nights. I was terrified of trees. I was terrified I would lose my son. At the same time I was terrified about the meaningless world he had entered. Every moment became a struggle between reason memorized and the descent into a cracked and disintegrating present. So I decided to get pregnant again. We needed a complete family, I thought. One child is not a complete family. So through the new baby I grew purpose and meaning.
Thomas was born on May 29, 1967 at the Fort Dix hospital. He was bellowing before he was fully delivered. “Look at that,” said the doctor. Everyone was impressed. The following morning I was phoned in my room. Would I please go down to the nursery to get my son? When I got there, they told me to return to my room, they would bring him to me. A half hour later, two men came in and told me he had expired. They called my physician and he arrived drunk. It was Memorial Day, a day of BBQ, beer and car racing. “Don’t worry," he said. "You can have another one.”
When I go back to that moment I am struck most of all by the inarticulate helplessness that was my response. I didn’t ask, “Why?” I didn’t even wonder, “Why?” My son was dead. Two strange men in suits—why weren’t they in military uniform?—had informed me that my son had “expired.” Only minutes earlier I’d been told to go to the nursery and get him. Yet I didn’t question anything about any of it. I didn’t know how to ask. I didn’t even know how to want to know. From the far reaches of healing this is incomprehensible to me. Yet it defines precisely who I was—and who I wasn’t. I did not inhabit my own life.
I didn’t even question why my mother was suddenly there. She came three thousand miles to the scene of this loss; yet a year earlier when Colin was born, she didn’t even travel two miles to the hospital to see me and her new grandson. After Thomas died she did insist, much to my surprise, that I go back home for comfort and recovery. But when I got there, her cruelty increased with my grief. I was twenty-two years old; I had a year-old son; I had just lost an infant son; I was exhausted and grief-stricken; and my mother ridiculed me for crying and refused to care for Colin so I could get some rest. Going back to Fort Dix was a relief.
I now had a real reason to sink under the wave after wave of harrowing sorrow that marked my life even before Thomas. The strange dissembling world that had come upon me nine months earlier was replaced with the justified bereavement of a parent. Thomas was a lost child; lost, perhaps, because he couldn’t bear the burden of his conception. His being had brought me out of despair; his death brought me to grief, to a suffering that was real. It was the beginning of my self. It was also a mystery. How he died, why he died. Eventually, even, if he died.
Many years later, when questions surfaced like waves of reason, I tracked down as much as I could about what happened to my son. The hospital at Fort Dix had long closed but I did get his New Jersey death certificate with indications of cardiopulmonary failure. Back then I was simply told, “He just died.” My husband’s reaction was anger. About what, I have no idea.
During that last year at Fort Dix, two days a week I volunteered at the hospital, where soldiers from the Vietnam War returned in pieces. It was the only place I felt comfortable. There was humor on those wards and in those halls; there were moments of joy; there was recovery; there was loneliness. The young captain who came back with malaria and had been in isolation for six months is still vivid in my memory. He had given up any effort to see the world as it had been. I can remember how he looked at me, a bouncy candy-striper without a clue. But I did have a clue. I had lost my son. I knew about suffering.
Suffering gave me a stature that I could identify; and from it came a moment of unadulterated wanting. I wanted to go to college. My parents had not allowed me to go to college when I graduated from high school even though unbeknownst to them I’d secretly managed to get myself admitted. Instead I was to get married. I see this as extremely difficult to understand: Why hadn’t I simply left home and gone to college? Simply because I couldn’t. My will was not to be found. The experiments upon me in my childhood, the sexual exploitation, the mind-control, they had all worked. The elimination of a-self-as-one-knows-it was complete. I'd married a man I didn’t love and lived a life prescribed from without. I don’t even know whether or not it was an arranged marriage. It had all the indications of something I felt freely forced to do. The circumstances, however, from this region of time, appear suspect. But that is too circumstantial for this story, which explores only what I know.
It is hard to look back and see the ways in which the most important thing in the world to me—the birth of my son, Colin—happened within the terrible sterility of the life I was experiencing. I want to tell him he was born of love, but I can’t. His father came into my life under odd circumstances. He asked me to marry him. I said, “Yes” without feeling either passion or affection. There was no other answer. My husband was emotionally and psychologically abusive and often threatened to, and sometimes did, telephone my father to come and take me away. I couldn’t communicate “about” anything—how I felt, what I thought, where we should go, what we should do. My husband was burdened with a woman who didn’t exist. My passivity was pathological and psychological. But I had a pretty face and a nice shapely body. He could have sex with me. I, however, was anesthetized to the experience. Passion would only come many years later, provoking a massive crisis of its own
What I knew, when we returned to the Northwest, was that grieving the death of my infant son, Thomas, linked me to the living, to yearning. I took an art class and the teacher, painter Paul Havas, read us Kenneth Rexroth’s poems. I fell in love with language and went out and bought “Natural Numbers” and read about “nymphomaniacs of the imagination” and “O heart, heart, so singularly intransigent and corruptible,” and “The Reflecting Trees of Being and Not Being.”
I fell in love with the world to which Paul Havas introduced me. The poetic presence, the world as art, gave me a parallel reality, a way of being an outsider that had its own place in the world. A life that made sense without having to make money. It was a recognition that served me through the following few years when, in the face of great odds and vicious internal self-defeating pressures, I left my abusive marriage and continued to find my way.
I actually had to get divorced twice. The first time, after agonizing months of waiting, I was sitting in the court room with my attorney waiting to be called in front of the judge when my attorney whispered to me that he couldn’t go through with it and got up and left the court room. Shocked and bewildered, I followed him out. It turned out that my father had been to see him that morning. What ensued between them my attorney never said, but he effectively removed himself from my divorce proceedings. So I started the whole thing over again.
I never questioned the ways in which my life was controlled. I never asked my father why he did what he did—ever—about anything. From many years later I look back in amazement at my unconscious and complete compliance to the reality created within my family. I was the caregiver for my four younger brothers, the housecleaner, the dutiful daughter who never ever had a thought or an inclination of her own. Before the emergence of my adolescent self, which was the first part of me to have some continuity through time, I remember only one moment of defiance. I was five, perhaps six years old; it was in England and I was out for dinner in a restaurant with my family and some friends of my parents. I was having an amazing and wonderful time. I was “out.” I’d never seen or felt anything like it. Then my brother began to misbehave and I was told to take him to the car and stay with him. I remember the shocking power of “No” coming out of my small being. I wanted to stay. It was freedom. And my five-year-old self wielded it with a five year-old vengeance. I loved being in that restaurant where there were other people. I could sense a normal world, a world of people engaging with one another, the sound of talking back and forth and over one another. There was ease and safety in that room and I wanted to stay right there in the middle of it. I couldn’t, of course. My brother and I were carried out to the car and I could feel what was to come.
There really was no childhood in my childhood. In England, I was in some kind of training school, maybe for days, weeks at a time. I was getting electric shocks. I was an experiment. In piecing it all together, at first I assumed it was simply to do with polio experimentation on the severed nerve in my arm. But because I was also made into a small sexual object, obliterating my memory through shock treatment was most convenient. And I was a mind-control experiment. But there was also something else going on, something inside me that recognized that restaurant and my defiant “no” as the divine light of freedom. That defiant little girl who knew, “No,” was real. It took me a long time, but I have come to love her with great passion and admiration.
Adolescence brought with it some wanting but it could only happen in secret. And when it did, like the dream of going to college, I acted secretly. And I never questioned this either. When I told my parents that I had been accepted at a small college a few hundred miles away, in central Washington, they simply said no, I couldn’t go. Then they said I could instead go to another university, the University of Washington because it was closer. My father made a big show of going to see the admissions officer then reported back that because of my schooling in Canada I was ineligible to go to the university. I hid my heartbreak and never questioned the information.
This might be the most impossible thing to communicate about my story. I had no mind of my own—literally. There was no questioning out loud and there was no questioning inside my mind. It was a mind of pure obedience. My world was controlled and my mind was controlled. But what couldn’t be controlled was something that runs deeper than mind—grief. When my infant son died, I was propelled into a grief that poured out of my body. And this bodily grieving began to put a crack in the dam of control that had been my life.
In grieving I began to feel a small part of my real self, and a heartbeat of entitlement. It was this that aroused the small barely breathing desire in me to go to school and take art classes. We had just returned from our two years at Fort Dix and we moved into a neighborhood where there were families with small children, women who were educated, and couples who communicated. I was a stay-at-home mom. The incipient madness that was my breakdown after Colin was born hovered around my edges. I took art classes because they were “frivolous” and non-threatening to the circumstances prescribed for me. But those art classes introduced me to the freedom in art and in the life of an artist. The hidden seeds of my self felt the ray of light that began to lead my way. That moment, when Paul Havas stepped into that classroom, wielding a disheveled appearance and an ironic sense of humor was like being back in that restaurant so many years ago. It was freedom. Those art classes became the foundation of my future.
When Buddhism took my hand it was a convergence zone: Paul Havas got me to Rexroth and Zen which got me to Kerouac and Ginsberg and Snyder, and the politics and poetics of Zen rage. Art got me to the Seattle Art Museum, where the Asian collection led me to buy a poster of the famous brush and ink painting of Bodhidharma descending the mountain. The aesthetics of Zen, the white space between things, the orderliness, the understatement, the simple being-ness and the empty grace of both Zen art and writing appealed to me in ways I was a long time from recognizing. And that is what defines a spiritual path; it is a path we walk long before recognizing it. It’s why I’m here, in India, nearly forty years later.
Chapter Twenty-seven
They have great cakes in Dharamsala and Matt and I are searching them out for our Christmas Eve daytime dinner at his friend’s place in Dharamkot. Matt has invited me to join him for this event and I think I’m grateful, although I’m not sure. I was ready to spend the day on the beloved patio, drinking tea, writing in my journal and daydreaming about life as a dog in Dharamsala. Matt, however, caught me at my reverie and spirited me away. We get boxes for the big creamy confections and set out on our walk to only-Matt-knows-where.
We start on the road to Tushita and after about twenty minutes head off on a trail across the hillside. Another twenty minutes gets us to a house of cement, color and wrought iron. There’s a patio area out front where food fills a big low table and people are milling and sprawling around eating and chatting.
I flash-back to 1970, in Maui, where communal meals were the diet of the day, often accompanied by nudity and swinging from trees. This group of beautiful young people reminds me that once upon a time I was not afraid to be naked in public. It’s not that they are naked, however, because it’s much too cold. But they could be. I’m wondering why Matt invited me along. I thought there would be two or three people at this afternoon dinner but this is obviously a party and nobody is over thirty. Then I find out that the Dalai Lama is coming back to Dharamsala today. Maybe right this minute. I am so pissed I could spit. Here I am at a gathering of young people all infatuated with themselves and one another when I could be back in town lined up with the locals to welcome the Dalai Lama home. The yearning to see the Dalai Lama has been kept at bay by the circumstances of his absence. With that no longer in play I am suddenly obsessed with the possibility. It turns me into someone who doesn’t like these lovely people who have so kindly included me in their Christmas dinner. But I’m not confident enough to find my way back so I sit and suffer.
It is 3:30 by the time Matt and I head back to town. As we walk, I chirp on in friendly fashion about nothing of significance, feigning obliviousness to my pissed-off impatience about the afternoon. Then, as we walk through town, Matt suggests we buy a Christmas present for the monks.
Okay. Fine. Be nice. See if I care.
I am, of course, struck by the absolute perfection of his suggestion.
“Let’s get them a thanka for the lobby,” says Matt.
“Yes, let’s,” says I.
We go in to the thanka shop where beautiful Tibetan Buddhist hangings of all sizes and deities fill the space with brilliant color. They are all made by monks who also run the shop so it’s fair trade in all directions.
“How about Chenrezig?” says Matt.
“How about Chenrezig,” says I.
After my forty years of Buddhism and his four weeks, it’s Matt who can say “Chenrezig” and know that it’s the precisely right deity for the occasion.
Chenrezig is the embodiment of compassion, the One Who Gazes Upon the World and Sees the Suffering, the One Who Refuses to Become Enlightened Until Everyone Else Does. Including me. And that’s the sobering thought-of-the-day.
Chenrezig has anywhere from four to one thousand arms because two arms is not enough to hold the suffering world. Neither is one head. It is said that Chenrezig’s head broke into eleven pieces when he became overwhelmed with the needs of so many sentient beings. His Holiness the Dalai Lama is believed to be the earthly manifestation of Chenrezig.
Chenrezig has other names, too; Avalokiteśvara is the Sanskrit version and it’s a word I learned to say years ago when I was cooking at the retreat center. A-val-o-ki-tes-vara cried so many tears of compassion for the plight of us all that the millionth tear gave birth to the lake upon which floated the lotus that gave birth to White Tara, the Mother of Liberation. It was no accident that I memorized the difficult name of the deity that cried a million tears and could not stop.
The Chenrezig we select for the Loseling monks has four arms and is bordered by two layers of beautiful brocade. It comes ready to hang with a protective silk covering the color of saffron. It is beautiful and expensive. We’ll give it to the monks tomorrow, Christmas Day. They are already thrilled because Christmas coincides with a commemoration day for some special historical teachers and they will be eating chicken, beef and “pig.” It’s an immensely rare culinary occasion to which Matt and I have been invited.
We are pleased with ourselves when we get back to our rooms. I give an English lesson to Dakpa and then head off for the Christmas Eve service at Saint John’s in the Wilderness.
I don’t do Christmas well. No matter how well I prepare, it is never enough to save others close to me from my meltdown of mind and emotions. I am an undercurrent of cynicism and repulsion, a mire of self-hatred and hatred, a child’s urge to excitement and pleasure accompanied by a child’s heartbreak and disappointment. I love the season because it is full of heart and generosity. I hate it because it is a trick. I spend money wildly. I get lost in irreparable grief. I try to be good, to hold to some sort of equanimity as the good tidings go by. I fail at every attempt to do so. At no other time of the year does desolation so effectively do its dirty work on me and on my relationships. I get totally fucked up and there is not a thing I can do about it.
If one is analytical, this holiday meltdown makes perfect sense. The litany of my upbringing—that I am beyond bad and there is nothing I can do about it—triumphs at Christmas. It tells me that I am a lost cause, that healing is a lost cause, and that the world is nothing but lost causes trying to fool themselves into some gruesome representation of good. I understand the idiocy of all this when my own personal undercurrents get the better of me. But it doesn’t make the feelings go away.
This struggle to feel at home in the generative world, to feel as though I belong in the human family, is invisible. I am perceived as grown up, responsible, creative, accomplished, active in my community, intelligent and sensitive. These are easy things to see. What is invisible is the feeling of defilement that shadows every gesture towards being “good,” towards what I “love,” towards “life.” I write these words in quotes because sometimes they are as science fiction to me as the word “satanism.” On bad days, we mock one another. On good days, “love” and “life” are real and can be spoken.
Even after decades in recovery through psychotherapy and spiritual practice, this idea, that to be good is bad, wrestles within me constantly. As a child, I knew "good" as a lie because it was a mask for cruelty. As I grew up it became a more diffuse affliction. Goodness was rooted in hypocrisy. Fighting through this belief system has affected everything in my life – from harboring a hatred of my own worth to a penetrating mistrust in the good intentions of others. This is a dilemma of the soul. Knowing ourselves as meaningful, as belonging to life, as a natural part of a creative universe, as “good,” means knowing ourselves soulfully. It is the recovery of our spirit that gives us, finally, our place in the world.
The skills that I developed to survive my childhood turned out to be spiritual skills. But it took many years and this trip to India to fully realize this, to get back my Self in all its peculiar grandeur, and to know not simply survival, but triumph. It is with those who have suffered, survived and triumphed where I find solace in this world. It’s what His Holiness the Dalai Lama represented to me so many years ago when the news of his escape to India first reached my attention. It’s what the Tibetan Elders represent as they, some with great difficulty, circumambulate the Lingkhor each morning. It’s what I gleaned from the exuberant, joyful monk meditating in silence and solitude on top of the mountain. It’s what the Khenpo warrior taught me with his fight for freedom and his passion for the language of freedom.
My own states of being often disintegrate into childlike parts and irrevocable sadness, grief that is unassailable. But when I get back from the brink of it all, it is always the stalwart in spirit who guide me, those whose lives have gone through the darkness and who stayed in faith and love on their spiritual path. My own ability to do so wavers on a daily basis. If the spiritual stalwarts weren’t in the world, I wouldn’t be. I know that completely. On this trip, I have found freedom for all of me.
India’s rollicking diversity is exuberant with personal democracy. Yet there is also shocking discrimination and cruelty. Women are chattel, held behind bars and sold for sex. Children are oppressed and suppressed under the best of circumstances and raised and sold as sex slaves under the worst. Poor people grovel in unimaginable filth. The caste system, long illegal, still has a firm grip on the country’s psyche. Yet behind it all, underneath it all, and in spite of it all, there is spirituality. Not the easy kind that sputters up from an overfed, over-stimulated, over-indulged society in search of “meaning,” but the kind that roars out in joy in the face of death and deprivation. It is an utterly nonsensical spirituality. It permeates the suffering. It is the suffering. It also permeates privilege and the privileged. Somehow, spirituality in India arrived before the people, took hold in the landscape, locked on to the very meaning of being, and hung on for dear life. And in India, life really is dear, just as it is expendable. The very deeply held bodily belief in reincarnation creates an almost giddy sense of acceptance of one’s lot in life. Having a bad life in India is like having a bad day. Soon it will be over and there will be a new one.
So I have run away to India for Christmas and found an old colonial stone church on the edge of town where there’s no priest, no pedantry, and no place to sit. The place is overflowing. I have to push my way inside where hundreds of people are crammed together in good spirits and bad singing. There are Tibetan monks, Indian families, European tourists and an array of Buddhists, Muslims, Hindus, Jews, Christians and a collection of those old Saint David’s favorites—skeptics, non-believers, doubters and the gloriously confused. We sing carols in one another’s languages and the buoyancy of hope and possibility is palpable in every breath. I am completely overcome. Tears flow down my cheeks like a river; I can’t catch my breath. It feels as though we could light up the world.
The small Indian man who gave last week’s sermon is bursting with pride and joy. He’s surrounded up front by a crowd of people, mostly Westerners, participating in the service. He ushers them forward to read their favorite passages and to lead us in holiday songs from their countries. Two Indian women give a beautiful full-voiced rendition of “O Come, O Come Emmanuel,” an elegant counter to our communal sing-along. There is a pretend birthday cake for Jesus where children put white candles and then stand gazing into the flickering lights.
The church darkness is also lit by colorful strings of lights and shining tinsel. As I watch the creative chaos amongst the group up front with the gentle Indian man, I realize that this is what he’d invited me to, the participatory process of this Christmas Eve tradition in which the company of strangers becomes a great gathering of spiritual friends.
It reminds me of the children’s Christmas pageant back home. Years ago, I was asked to coordinate it and because I was saying “yes” to everything that was asked of me at Saint David’s, where West Davis had opened my eyes to the possibilities and impossibilities within my own faith tradition, I took on the task. I knew I was in way over my head when the very children who showed up for rehearsal were the ones who knew they wouldn’t be around for the performance. They figured that going to rehearsal was better than not being involved at all.
It all had to do with dressing up. Beards and wings and cloaks and loads of sparkling things made for a great get-up of one sort or another. But not making it to rehearsal had its consequences. Angels wandered the aisles in search of their parents, sheep sucked their thumbs, shepherds jousted with their staffs and Wise Men wisecracked their way through the script. Joseph was usually half as tall as Mary and Baby Jesus was a doll often handled with a startling and casual carelessness. The only role taken seriously was that of God. It was the only role that was fought over. My only requirement was that God showed up for both rehearsal and performance. God’s costume was always a challenge and the solution was always more of anything gold. I knew it was sacrilegious to write words out of the mouth of God but it seemed to me that God deserved a voice in the pageant. After all, God was ultimately the real reason we were all there.
I grew to love those pageants. My favorite part was watching the parents dissemble as they realized there was no real organization other than their kids’ on-the-spot desire to dress up and get attention. One year we had a real donkey for Mary to ride, and two favorite dogs as camels. There was nothing for a parent to do but sit back and pray.
I’d been so held captive as a child that I could never even begin to rein in the Christmas Pageant kids to whatever was deemed “good” behavior. My directorial inclinations held no weight whatsoever with me or them. But they knew I was on their side and I knew they were on the side of all that is good. So they rose to the occasion accordingly and honored the true nature of Christmas—birth of all that is beautiful, joyful and spirited. No matter what the bloopers were, the annual pageant-goers loved the blissfully spontaneous nature of things. And the kids, utterly unaware of their own grace, basked in the love and appreciation. They were directing us, me most of all, and it is something I will never forget. Out of their innocence I could see my own. And if they could do communion, so could I.
The children gave me courage and it was at one of those pageants, years ago, that I joined them for my first ritual of bread and wine. It was a moment infused with the innocence, wonder and rambunctious glee of childhood. Communion. It was a moment free of the gravitas of “meaning;” it was a moment of simply “being;” and “being” with those children was silly and sweet and sublime. That’s all there was to it. But there is no communion tonight because there is no official priest on duty. It’s simply our human communion that connects us, despite our divergent cultures, religions and beliefs.
After the service, there is much milling about outside in the dark and I get a whiff of coffee in the air. This is a shock as coffee is no staple here in India. I smell my way to a long table full of plates of cookies where cups of coffee are being served in honor of all us foreigners away from home at Christmas. I bump into Matt in the crowd. He’s with a friend and they are on a mission. Someone he knows asked him to find the burial place of a woman who died here in Dharamsala and is buried in the cemetery at St. John’s. They are to honor her gravesite for Christmas.
I start back along the road to town and find myself walking behind a family of five people, two Tibetan children, a Tibetan man, a Caucasian woman and another woman who might be her mother. They are all, including the children, speaking “American” English and exhibiting American exuberance. The two children are the ones I noticed gazing into the candles on Jesus’ cake. It’s clear and cold and I feel secure walking alone behind them. We’ve gone about a quarter-mile when an open jeep stops and offers the family a ride. The Indian driver waves at me to join them. I pile into the merriment of the crowded situation and the driver takes us all into town. All the way he wishes us a Merry Christmas.
All the way from the town square to the guest house, people wish me a Merry Christmas. They are delighting in recognizing that I am someone to whom Christmas has meaning. It is as though the occasion identifies me with spirit and it is something reassuring, familiar and trustworthy. I go to Jimmy’s and get two pieces of banana toffee pie. One to eat tonight under the night sky of Christmas Eve, the other I’ll eat for breakfast.
Nothing could have prepared me for Christmas in Dharamsala as my own personal convergence zone. All the loose ends of my long and convoluted life-journey have transformed themselves into a tapestry of faith that I can finally see and understand. The sense of isolation that has been my constant companion has been replaced by a deep and deeply reassuring sense of belonging. I no longer feel as though I need to be fixed. My “craziness” is the craziness of India. Nobody can fix it because in some profound way, there is nothing to fix.
I have always been guided towards faith and hope, even when I had none. Sustaining grace always intervened when life seemed inconceivable. It is a grace outside my control. It manifests itself in nature, in synchronicity, and in faith that everything that happens has spiritual meaning. These days it is not easy to confess to faith, to the religious impulse, to the possibility of encountering the Divine in ordinary life. Just as it does not make it easy to confess to an experience with evil.
But here in India, daily life is infused with celebration of the spirit and protection against evil. Buddhist and Hindu rituals, shrines, stories and temples are just a few of the ways in which religion sparks the sensibilities of day-to-day living. It is religion that lights up life and landscape with color and joy, even as so many Indian and Tibetan people’s lives are rooted in suffering. I have discovered that grief and love are the fundamental links to life, to the living, to healing and to belonging. Weaving through these five weeks in India is a lifetime of longing, of continually starting over on the doorstep of my own life. I have finally crossed the threshold. I’ve experienced Hindus and Buddhists celebrating life and religion side-by-side, inclusively, with lots of room for a stumbling Episcopalian along the way. I’ve experienced the buoyancy of people and place as well my own buoyant and healed self in a place that I recognize and that recognizes me. It has been a spiritual, emotional and psychological homecoming, an epiphany from beginning to end.
The deepest truth is that every day is a profound and miraculous mystery. And we are gifted with the consciousness to know this. And we are gifted with the knowledge and the power to fix what’s wrong in the world. Waking up to the truth is waking up to tragedy. It is also waking up to our responsibility to the world, to our place in the world and to our power in the world. A power fueled by spiritual truth.
What happened to me, and why, can be explained. The evidence abounds. But how I was protected, nurtured and sent along my spiritual way is an immense and majestic mystery. It is on this trip to India that I am recognizing what was always in attendance—an inextinguishable flame of spiritual guidance that knew me from the very beginning. It is why these words are on this page. It is why I am happy to be alive. It is why the very nature of being is sacred. We are here on earth to honor love—for our lives, our earth, and for one another. This is what I am waking up to in India. This is what I have known my whole life. It is beyond me. It is beyond us all.
On Christmas morning I wake to my small array of items on the table, the cards, the candle, the incense and the toffee pie. Dawn is just a hint in the sky. The Dalai Lama is back in town. He is here. This man, whose very life has been a guiding star to me for more than forty years, is less than a mile away. I know enough about his routine to know that he has been up since four, meditating and praying. That these days he wakes up in an earthquake protected room depriving him of his beloved view of the Dhauladhar Mountains. Perhaps, after his prayers, he goes outside to his gardens to hear the morning birds and watch the sunrise. He came back from south India to his Dharamsala home on Christmas Eve. Perhaps he, too, wanted to wake up here this morning, to know home on this sacred day, even if he is not a Christian. Yet, I know he is. He has been walking through the fire of human hatred and violence since he was a small boy, compassion firmly guiding his steps and his heart.
“Forgive them for they know not what they do.” Reportedly, these were Jesus’ first words from the cross. They speak the fundamental shape of compassion born out of understanding—whether from the earthly realizations of the Buddha under the Bodhi tree or the transcendent relationship of Jesus with His God. There is no other way to live. To defy this understanding is to choose death and destruction. When we forgive in the face of cruelty and brutality, whether of a regime, an institution, or an individual, we take the side of life, the unfolding miracle of creation that insists itself into light. Cruelty becomes an aberration, an indication of that which is less than life. Understanding and forgiveness is the high road—and the only road to a future.
The words in the poem that has accompanied me on this trip finally sink into my psyche. To make injustice the only measure of our attention is to praise the Devil, writes Jack Gilbert. It is a very terrible thing to keep suffering just because it proves I have suffered. It becomes another way of keeping my self imprisoned, of worshiping the Devil, of giving power to those who wished me powerless. We must have the stubbornness to accept our gladness in the ruthless furnace of this world.
I will be stubborn.
If we deny our happiness, resist our satisfaction,
we lessen the importance of their deprivation.
I will not deny my happiness.
We must risk delight. We can do without pleasure,
but not delight. Not enjoyment.
I will risk delight.
Delight. It is bigger and brighter and stronger than us all. It delights in itself and in everything it reaches. It is everywhere in India. And it was here last night, in the old stone colonial church on the edge of town. We were directed through that which is always there, waiting for us to wake up to—grace, beauty and understanding.
This is precisely what I’m trying to remember to wake up to this morning. But of course I feel lonely and slightly dotty. There is no-one to share the morning with, no Christmas morning call from my son, nobody to fix dinner for, and no bacon to cook for breakfast—which is one of my Christmas sins. Just the sun, rising brilliantly from the east, the birds singing, the dogs barking, and the monk circumambulating the roof.
Our Loseling monks have invited Matt and me to lunch today. They say it’s for Christmas and there is also a Tibetan holiday to celebrate. They are excited because there will be three kinds of meat and meat is no staple in their lives. There will also be visiting monks chanting in the room behind the kitchen while we eat. Matt and I will give the monks the thanka we bought yesterday. I will give Dakpa some warm sweats, a dictionary, a notebook, some pens and some money. He’ll be here for an English lesson this afternoon. In a minute I will go and walk the Lingkhor and the doors to the Dalai Lama’s compound will be open for the first time since I arrived in Dharamsala. I could explore the possibility of a visit but I know I won’t. Because it’s finally time for me to learn what he has already taught me.
There are things wrong in this world. They manifest themselves in violence against the innocent. They are arrogant with power and rampant with greed. But even when evil gets its way, it doesn’t win. Because what is good prevails effortlessly and takes hold naturally. There is always someone who will turn the other cheek and see the light. There is always life rising out of the ashes. There is always something to learn that will make a difference, and always someone to learn it from.
I sit with all this in a state of something akin to prayer. I’m waking up on Christmas Day in Dharamsala. I’m alone with it all. I miss my son. I had no idea why I was coming here and I discovered it was because I had to, that there was a pilgrimage to take and that it couldn’t be taken without me. I miss Thrinley. I miss the company of friends and right now even of strangers. But the Dalai Lama is just across town and the card from Dakpa has a Tibetan Santa Claus and prayer flags across the top. The card from the dear Loseling monks says “Christ’s Birth” on the front and shows Mary and Joseph in the manger.
So I will be a Buddhist and a Christian, too. I will go to church, to the gompa, to the green cathedral of the outdoors, to wherever it is that stands up for the love of life and I will belong. I will live. I will be holy. I will be happy. And nobody can tell me otherwise.
I wrap myself up yet again against the morning chill and take my Christmas toffee pie out on the patio. There is no cloud in the sky, no protection from the onslaught of mountain beauty rising above the morning streets already filling with breakfast for the cows, monkeys and dogs. After their morning meal, the dogs will come out to stretch, sleep, and perhaps dream, in warm patches of sun. It’s all happening all at once yet again. It’s Christmas and I am here. The patio is fresh with new paint. In a while, Matt and I will meet for tea and perhaps discuss reality. In the meantime, my breakfast toffee pie is sweet and tasty. It is almost as good as bacon.
