This is a kind place

This is a short essay I wrote about my time at Organization for Awakening and Kindness (OAK), a monastic academy in the Berkeley Hills in California.

This is a kind place.

I arrived in the middle of winter. It was like arriving at the end of a bad trip. The few months immediately prior to my arrival were as if I had taken a bad batch of mushrooms and gotten lost in a scary amusement park, and this had gone on for months, and I knew there was this place called OAK that I was heading towards that was going to be safe, and I knew that I need not get tripped out by the clowns and fire in the amusement park, but knowing didn’t help a single bit, and when I arrived I collapsed into the loving arms of Pan and Joshin and was very glad that I had arrived.

I had left my house and my wife and my life in San Francisco. I had started a new relationship — certainly the most incredible of my life — and then we had ended it so we could both go into monastic training. I had been travelling and not found the safety I was looking for there. I had been on a retreat at Spirit Rock and gone deeper than I was prepared for, and then left there without knowing how to integrate, and without anyone at home to talk to. My friends seemed to be worried about me. My life seemed to be a basket of eggs that I kept almost dropping, so I dropped them all at the same time and walked in the door at OAK.

OAK is a kind place. In the first weeks it was Morgan, Qiaochu, Pan, Joshin and I. We lived a life distilled to its most basic elements. How simple can life be? Sleep, chant, sit, cook, eat, work, cook, eat, work, work, sit, sit, chant, sleep, repeat. How simple can sleeping get? How simple can eating get? How simple can life get? Stop inflating imaginary apparitions of grandeur through each part of life and just live. There were no seats in the house. There was no furniture. There was no heating. This is simplicity and it is the warmest way of living that I know of.

We cooked food together. Ate together. Simple food. We swept the patio. We swept the driveway. We sat and chanted and found each other’s company in silence to be nourishing like an oasis in a barren desert.

My favorite thing was working outdoors. What a joy to be in the cold sunshine working on something real. We built a vegetable garden! What a joy to see this project take shape.

I learned during this time about coldness and the great comfort and energy that it brings. I learned this from Joshin, who went barefoot everywhere and sat every sit with just a sweatshirt. Casting off my socks and layers of clothing was like sweeping away a great suffocating ball of wool that I had stuffed around my own throat.

There wasn’t very much talking. We were each reeling, I think, from what had come before. Whereas I had imagined that by moving into a monastery I was moving from a comfortable life into a challengingly uncomfortable life, in fact it turned out to be like coming into a little sanctuary after wandering barefoot through a battlefield. We were each, I guess, quietly coming to grips with all we had seen.

And we were doing it together. I have never before lived in actual community, in constant proximity to others, doing each thing with other people. Yes I’ve lived in a family, and in share houses with roommates, and I’ve spent days in classrooms, lecture halls, offices where there are other humans. But in all those places there was a big solitary room in the middle of the house where I went at the end of each day to grapple with life on my own. Here at OAK that room became as small as a sleeping bag where I had no reason to linger beyond a few warm hours of sleep. Those solitary hours are punctuated on both ends by chanting, to remind ourselves that we are not alone, that there is no reason to live in that solitary room any more. So I left that lonely room and did not return.

There was less time to spend with old friends. Less time for coffee meetups, for hosting and attending dinner parties, or parties of any sort, less time for going to events and meeting people. When I told my friends about this I think they imagined that it must be lonely and difficult living in a monastery. In fact I was truly living with friends for the first time ever.

And then Sunny and Wenzday arrived, and we all went into our first silent retreat. And we started throwing ourselves in and the world became utterly magical. I cannot remember what took place during those days. I think I was extremely happy. I can’t be sure. The waters we slid through and the stardust we glimpsed in each others’ hair cannot be translated into words. The wise and compassionate thing is to leave these days without comment, without summary, without distortion.

And then we walk,

gently hand-in-hand

into the sunset

and die

Today it has been 48 days since I arrived. It feels like 10 years.

There is a great terror as we determine to live an ethical life, as we turn a little and come face to face with ourselves and with the real world. It is not an easy sight to take in. But if we lock eyes with it and determine to stare it down, the scary apparition of our wrongness passes right through us and reveals behind it the simple truth of what must be done, and pain becomes joy and fear becomes delight and the magic of the world envelops us in its arms and propels us forwards into the cold magical forest of heaven.

While I was in Vermont, on a day when I was deepest in practice, I snowshoed out into the crystal white forest that surrounds MAPLE and made my way through deep snow up to the top of a hill. I sat in the snow and prayed to God, asking again and again how to do this, how to keep going, how to accept not knowing, how to accept not understanding, how to find the courage to move forward, how to remember this, how to remember this, how to remember this. I did not get any direct answers.

On another day I stayed up late and spent many hours meditating in the zendo. There were no answers there either.

There were interviews each morning. Soryu sat opposite me. I tried to do something, say something, say anything that would express in any tiny way the world that was opening up before me. I failed completely, and Soryu gestured at the way forward with a tiny dancing smile and it made no sense whatsoever. I don’t know what happened in these interviews. I don’t understand any of it. It’s not an understanding kind of thing. It just doesn’t have that nature.

We are like satellites orbiting a great unknown something. We can turn our rudders towards the unknown and direct our orbit so that we sail through the heat of the burning mysteries of the universe. If we dare, we may extend our fingers and feel the molten plasma of this great unknown storm as we sail briefly through its outer reaches. We cannot hold it, keep it, capture it, or even remember it. All we can do is keep turning our rudders towards it, and let its deep fire open us.