By Anna Baker Smith
You move there in 1995, enchanted. Before dawn, with your flashlight, you try to avoid puddles as you make your way to the shrine room to pray to Tara. There are manzanita and madrone, their limbs shining and sleek in winter rain.
From the office, on an old radio, you hear about the Twin Towers falling and new wars. Outside are moss-covered rocks, a roaring creek, rhododendron on a dark hillside.
In February of 2008, you drive to the Grange Hall to vote, then back to the dharma center to make coconut soup for thirty-five. Come spring, you look for an apartment in town. Finally, you pack your little Subaru and head over the mountain.
1. Find another place to live.
The man who cleans the carpets at the dharma center is also a landlord in Weaverville, the little town nearby. He has a tiny efficiency apartment for rent behind a duplex on a street called Oddfellows. Your new windows look out on the mountains and the huge double garage where the landlord stores his enormous boats. For no extra charge, he lets you keep your boxes of books in the garage. You take out the books, put them on the metal shelves in a corner. Soon the corner looks like a badly funded library. You can pop out of the studio, crunch across the gravel parking area (sometimes through rain or snow), unlock the door, and browse.
2. Contemplate spiritual practice.
All the stuff you did back at the gonpa (that’s Tibetan for a “secluded center for meditation”) still applies. And if your practice has ceased to seem so fun or life-sustaining after five, ten, thirteen years living at a dharma center, just more reason to rejoice! Now you get to apply it in a totally new situation! This situation—you know, being unsure what kind of toilet paper one should purchase if one hasn’t had to buy one’s own toilet paper for, you know, five, ten, thirteen years—this situation can be “taken on the path.”
For example, you can stand in the Tops Super Market and study the brands (even contemplating their impermanent nature), but thirty minutes is probably long enough for this. (I’ll just save you the time: Scott Tissue, the blue label.)
3. Try not to hate people.
For example, the people who are still living back at the gonpa.
Don’t resent them just because they keep telling you about their cozy, intimate moments with the capital G-Guru. This is jealousy. It’s a spiritual no-no for a reason. The reason is not that the system is rigged by people who don’t “do” emotion (though that theory should be explored), but rather because jealousy will fuck with your head—you will lose sight of what you want. You’ll feel so bad that somebody gets to go to Nepal to study Tibetan, or to school to become a hip psychotherapist, or (worst of all) hang out with El Guru all the time. These jealousies are distractions—like the maras who came to pester the Buddha before he attained enlightenment, or—heck—Satan coming to pester Jesus during the forty days and forty nights in the desert.
4. Okay, you can hate them a little.
Especially when you hear testimonies of all the wonderful honesty and growth that is taking place since you left. (What?!) There are reasons why you don’t still want to live there. Reasons not nearly as shallow as the fact that you once were a baby professor at a Jesuit-run college in New England with pretty brick buildings, and while pretty buildings do not a worthy college make, face it, you miss being valued for the odd corners of your thinking—not merely endured for these traits or being told you’re “too in your head.”
You’re tired of wanting to sneak off to town to drink coffee and read, tired of wondering why on earth you didn’t just tough it out and stay at Pretty Brick College. You notice you have a tendency to be super encouraging to the prep cooks who chop veggies in the kitchen, encouraging them to write those poems! Start that band! Go into a three-year retreat! Whatever they are quietly longing to do. You are like a secret guidance counselor for the community, but why in hell can’t you counsel yourself?
In your twenties, back when you were trying to figure life out, you stumbled upon the foundational Buddhist teaching, the truth of suffering. Bingo!
Who needs to be convinced of the truth of that? You’d experienced your mother’s pain, your father’s rage, the inside of a junior high school in Greensboro, North Carolina.
Depression is a “disorder” technically, but it makes so much sense to the very sad. By the time you reached college in Wisconsin, lo and behold, there were temporary solutions: Virginia Woolf, Christopher Isherwood, Friday night fish fries, Leinenkugals, something called a vodka gimlet.
Then when you met the dharma, it was like you entered the ultimate fraternity/sorority. You could look at all that earlier suffering as a twenty-five-year hazing process that you passed with flying colors. You joined forces with some of the smartest, funniest people you’ve ever known—and some of the most miserable! You found your people. You will never leave them.
But eventually, years later, there are only so many ways you can ignore that inner voice, the one that says, Go, it’s time.
5. Contemplate love and sex—as long-term, not just short-term phenomena.
Perhaps you have had a spiritually troublesome longing to get together with someone you might actually marry and/or stay with for a long time. If you have (hypothetically) slept with more people at the dharma center than you have fingers on a hand (both hands? include toes?), you may have exhausted this particular resource, and it might be time to “cast a wider net.”
Yes, you were learning about non-attachment, and that is a lifelong study, but maybe, as far as love and sex are concerned, you can consider this lesson learned. That inner voice is speaking, and if you don’t listen to it, it gets snotty and sulks, and you find yourself making “errors in judgment.”
6. Obtain the proper equipment, and seek perspective from people outside your circle.
Say, for example, you get to the little studio and realize, you’d like a cup of tea. You realize you need to boil water.
Uh, oh. You have very little stuff. Even though a friend gave you a brown fondue pot that will boil water just fine, you know you’re just a tad ADHD and don’t want to accidentally forget the burner’s on and die alone.
So you drive over another mountain, Buckhorn Summit, to the town of Redding, once referred to by one of the lamas at the dharma center as a “vortex of entropy.” (This is the very vortex of entropy that took on an uncanny allure after a few days at the gonpa since it has, you know, actual stores and stuff—things that start to seem appealing when you spend day after day in a county with zero stoplights and more deer than people.)
Here’s how it would typically happen: You wake up. You establish pure motivation to free all beings from suffering. (Hopefully, this happens sooner rather than later.) You go about your duties, but at some point in the day, month, year—after days of chopping broccoli, cleaning the laundry room, corresponding with prisoners, sending malas (those Buddhist rosaries) to the folks living back in Boston or New York so they can say the Tara mantra on the subway—you start to think longingly of the subway. You remember standing in Harvard Square, waiting for the T, the wind whipping through your coat, your feet freezing in their Doc Martens. You have gone down the samsara/nirvana rabbit hole. (Samsara sucks so you reach for nirvana, which just leads to more sucking.) You remember autumn in Massachusetts, taking trains and buses to Pretty Brick College (forgetting how long and annoying that trip actually was), and somehow, because it’s expensive to fly to Boston, you end up longing to go to…Redding.
So today, years later, you’re on your way there again. As they would say back at the gonpa, you’re “taking a day off.” (The first of many.)
You get in the Subaru and go straight to…hell.
Well, maybe not straight there, but after buying a couple of plates and bowls, having gone from store to store in search of a tea kettle that won’t kill you, you end up at Sears in the Redding Mall.
You used to love Sears. The smell of roasting nuts blended with dreams of a new Easter dress makes Sears a nostalgic cocktail for those of us who grew up in Greensboro in the ’60s and ’70s.
But for you in Redding, there is no nostalgia. There are shoes, clothes, underwear, gear galore, but it doesn’t feel like home. Where are your parents? Where are the salty mixed nuts?
You make your way to the appliance section, past gigantic burnished chrome numbers, and eventually end up in the section for coffee- and tea-making paraphernalia.
The goal is to find a teakettle that whistles. The whistle seems really important, given that one might need to be nudged from some loss of mindfulness, or even a loss of consciousness, as might occur with falling into the black hole of the internet or an unplanned nap. The key point: one can no longer depend upon the consciousness of others.
So now, standing in Sears, you stare at all the electronic coffee/tea-making gadgetry. Gee howdy, so much stuff! The electric boilers are made out of some kind of white plastic crap. When you have very little money the last thing you want to do is spend it on a piece of garbage.
But for God’s sake, you need your water boiled. Where are the whistling teakettles of yesteryear? I mean it’s been thirteen years since you lived in the rent-controlled apartment in Cambridge where your boyfriend would boil water on the funky gas stove, but has the world changed that much? How do people cope?
At that point the thought occurs to you—you are Rip Van Winkle. You have missed a shitload.
So, struck by the impulse to glean wisdom from wherever you can, you call your Methodist brother.
“Robin?”
“Uh, hey, Anna. What’s up?”
“I have a question.”
“I’m between sessions. Shoot.” (He works as a psychologist in Asheville.)
“How do Methodists deal with Sears?”
I’m not sure this was the precise wording, but you get the gist.
“Actually, I’ve been going to the Unitarian Church lately. It’s really great. [Okay, ADHD runs in the family.] Learning a lot about Buddhism as a matter of fact…but I just got word my patient’s here. Is there something I can do for you right now?”
“I’m in Sears. I’m overwhelmed…so much stuff…so many choices…”
“Yeah, I hear ya…but I think you should write about this, Anna. It might even help.”
He says all this in his calm Southern accent. He sounds more like a father than a brother. It took you years to realize this is how he talks now.
Thank him and hang up. You go to the parking lot and cry in the shady spot where you left the car.
As you drive back over the mountain, over the same switchback road, resolve to use the brown fondue pot to boil water, and, while doing so, try extra hard to stay very, very awake.
7. Contemplate home.
It’s a shifty thing. You clearly loved your little cabin next to the creek. You loved walking the quarter mile from one building to another at 9:00 on a summer evening to fetch your dog from the front door of the temple (his favorite hangout), wearing nothing but a white cotton nightie, greeting people you meet on the dirt road, happy to be able to walk freely, almost nakedly, in this bowl between beloved mountains, as their darkening blue edges meet sky and star and sickle moon.
You love all that, every inch of this dirt road, these smiling Buddhists, this pine, this scrub, this manzanita and madrone, but you are not yet home.
What is home?
Once you had a dream… In it you are with the guru, not your original Tibetan guru, Rinpoche, but the younger one—his lineage carrier, the one you have the most gnarly, complicated, and intense relationship with. In the dream, you and he have just made love (something you never did in real life—in case anyone is curious). He’s now sitting on the bed, smiling, loving you in that special way only he is capable of, and you ask, “What is home to you?”
At that moment your mind is filled with moving stars, as if somehow you are in that old screen-saver from the nineties “flying through space,” but you are not just seeing a little screen in an office—you are flying through space, passing stars gently as you go, moving freely through creation.
The answer is formed then—delivered straight from his mind to yours: Rinpoche’s mind.
You can make whatever you want of this one. If you practice Tibetan Buddhism, I probably don’t need to say anything more.
But if you’re from the Christian side of things, remember that part of the gospel, the scene they call the “Transfiguration”? Jesus and some disciples were on a mountain, and Jesus was transfigured before them; his face shining as the sun, and his clothes became dazzling white, whiter than anyone in the world could bleach them. And then, miraculously Elijah and Moses were there talking to Jesus. It was trippy! “Whoa, are you seeing this?” “Yeah, are you seeing this?”
Then Peter gets kind of clingy. “Hey Jesus, how about we build some cabins for you and Elijah and Moses, and we’ll just stay here!” (The text then says of Peter, in parentheses, He did not know what he was saying.)
Well, maybe you’ve all seen and/or felt like that bumbling idiot Peter. Faced with the divine, you just want to nail it down. But that desire to keep the guru to oneself, or at least get your time with him, can really sour your practice. You can’t build a house around him.
Home is that place where you can rest, with the guru/without the guru. He or she is within you and without you. Home is within you and without you.
8. Contemplate family.
Family can be a tricky sticky wicket. You may, hypothetically, have believed for many years that the spiritual community was your family. Subject closed. You may have firmly squashed any tendency toward bonding with another human with the intention of procreation. And that might not be a bad thing. But if you’re female and could never seriously entertain the idea of your own offspring while at the dharma center, you may find yourself in that awkward, even horrifying situation of realizing you are leaving the community a weensy bit past the optimal whelping time for the human animal.
This might be sad. You might look at yourself in the mirror and ask, What is happening here?
Wait, you might be thinking, I could adopt/kidnap/babysit a lot to make up for this feeling in some part of my anatomy—a hole—the feeling I’m missing something—like air to breathe.
I’ll rescue you now. Here’s the deal: people with kids, they have that feeling, too. Here are the possibilities:
1. kids/hole
2. kids/no hole
3. no kids/hole
4. no kids/no hole
Kids or no kids, you’re goal is no hole.
And here’s another possibility: Sometime down the road, you might meet someone with a kid who needs an extra adult around. As for Maria in The Sound of Music—it could happen.
9. Contemplate resources, nature, and the elements.
Now that you have given up the little cabin by the roaring creek, where deer and bears would wander through the rhododendron, you might take this time to consider, what is the nature of nature?
If you’re fortunate enough to live in the middle of many acres of national forest, you may already have had the opportunity to breathe the smoke of long-burning forest fires.
When you first got to California these fires were odd. Why were there so many of them? And let’s talk about the weather. What’s with the no rain for six months out of the year? They didn’t mention that in the pretty brochure.
The fires keep getting worse, but now that you’re living in town, on the scale of fires, you’re headed for a doozy. People wear special masks to avoid inhaling as much carbon as a two-pack-a-day habit.
And somehow (funnily!), you get a rare summer job teaching four credits of college composition. To do this, however, you have to make the trek over the mountain by switchback road to Redding.
You wake in the morning while it’s still cool, find a summer skirt and tank top that won’t attract too much attention in hot as hell but super-Christian Redding, load up your briefcase with student essays, and hop in the Subaru to begin your journey.
There are some days when the highway is simply closed because of the fire, but usually you are allowed over the mountain and can see flames still burning where trees used to be. You see stumps or branchless black trunks, ashes floating through the air like evil snowflakes, smoke so thick it looks almost charming, like British fog—except it isn’t really at all.
Pre-fire, when you still lived at the gonpa, you and your friend the physicist (another dharma center ex-pat) met a few times after work at the Nugget, the little diner in town. He helped you plan your exit. He always paid for your burger and fries.
Now that you’re living in town, he continues his role as financial and life advisor. His contributions are manifold. He brings you a box of mac ’n cheese when you’re short on cash. In face masks, you walk the large Frisbee golf course around the town park. You discuss his recent heart attack, the political nature of spiritual communities, and…money. He explains compound interest, quantum physics, Madhyamika, the inner workings of the heart.
One day in the diner drinking iced tea, he says, “You were too smart to spend the rest of your life in that place.” You find this comment disturbing, not just because praise and blame are two of the Eight Worldly Dharmas (as in worldly=bad, things you don’t want and should avoid—opposite sides of the same coin that lead to ego and other naughtiness), but because you feel you know what he means—it’s a timing thing. Some people have abilities that go well with spiritual communities, some none at all, but some have them for a while and then it’s time to go.
And let’s face it, your gifts are eccentric. You have a tendency to notice the emotional underpinnings of things. You can’t not talk about what’s really going on in social situations. This really creeps people out sometimes.
You can’t help but realize that studying Tibetan has become kind of like that part of Jane Eyre when Jane is living with her evangelical cousin who wants to marry her and is pushed into studying Hindustani so they can be missionaries in India.
Or you can’t help but notice how you’ve had a few too many nights sobbing on the floor of your cabin, like Dorothea Brooke in Middlemarch. She can no longer cram herself into the mold of her younger self’s desire for hardcore renunciation. You’ve come to realize you have been prey to what might be called “renunciation seduction”—the desire to be one with God in a way that feels not unlike the desire for a honkin’ good romance.
If you’d done what Jane Eyre did, spent the night outside on the heath, sobbing, heartbroken, not sure what would happen next, you’d probably be hauled into an administrator’s office to discuss your “lung problem” (an imbalance of the subtle energies, lung being the Tibetan word for “wind”—in other words “yogini on the verge of a nervous breakdown”).
Or if you’d done what Dorothea did, renounced too much and realized it too late (without the option to later hook up with that cute Will Ladislaw), you may have been told this is the nature of samsara—and who can argue with that, ever?
Or you can simply realize that you have resources that were with you all along, resources so natural to you that you didn’t see them.
10. Contemplate dharma.
Remember a time early on: You are young, not a single gray hair. You’ve flown to California from Boston to join a large group retreat.
The night is dark. Sheets of biblical rain shake the token palm tree at the Redding Greyhound Station. A tall man in sweatpants comes to pick you up. In an old station wagon, he drives you over switchback roads to the next county, to the land that used to be a gold mine, the land where the dharma center is now.
That night you sleep on a Thermarest in the office of the publishing company (foreshadowing years working in that room). A tiny leak begins above your head, and you find a garbage can to catch the drip.
The next afternoon, Rinpoche teaches. He was born in Tibet in 1930, and has been through pretty much everything. He slowly makes his way up onto his seat, which is raised and covered with cushions, lovely carpets, and brocade. On the table in front of him are flowers in a small vase and a brass thing with a spout, like a pitcher, with peacock feathers sticking out of it. He has a tiny topknot and looks, well, like a wizard.
When he speaks it’s like a sun is emanating from his core, warming and softening everything. People start to smile. The relentless rain seems less cold, more amusing. You are on an adventure at a former goldmine in the Trinity Alps of Northern California. This is what you were born to do.
He says these very highest teachings that you have been preparing for years to receive (having done 100,000 prostrations) are more precious than anything you have ever known. For that reason you aren’t supposed to share them unless your teacher authorizes you to, so they will be passed through a pure lineage. So, he says, when you go back home, if people ask about your retreat just say, “It rained a lot,” or “The food was good.”
He then says there is a Tibetan saying, that once you’ve left your homeland to go into retreat, you’ve accomplished half the dharma.
This stays with you—half the dharma. You’ve accomplished half the dharma. What ever could that mean?
So, many years later, when your homeland calls, when you long for rain in the summer, the soft Southern accents of your blood family, hardwood floors and a fireplace, your own bathroom and kitchen, a tea kettle, a lasting relationship—what then?
If you return to your homeland, what happens to your accomplishment? How do you maintain whatever practice you have? How do you avoid getting lost? And seriously, how on earth does anyone make a living after all those years working at a dharma center? It’s not like you went to seminary to become a priest or into a long retreat to become a lama. You’re just one of the dharma bums who dropped out.
But never fear. Because in a few years, you will be back in New England at a job interview, and when someone says, “Tell me about this place where you worked for all those years”—pause, take a deep breath, and say, “The food was excellent.”
Anna Baker Smith grew up in Greensboro, North Carolina, and now lives in Western Massachusetts. Her writing has appeared in Essay Daily, PANK, Massachusetts Review, After the Art, TriQuarterly, and elsewhere. She has an MFA in fiction from UMass Amherst where she teaches part-time. Twitter and IG: @innergothic