A quote from Isabel Allende on Darvish, a Sufi blogger

http://darvish.wordpress.com/2009/05/03/you-only-have-what-you-give/

An expiration date on mothering?

Does it mean your job as a mother is done when your 18-year old drives himself to a weekend-long outdoor rock festival and not only brings sunblock without being told, but actually remembers to put it on?

Living in the past, present and future

I'm having a hard time with this whole blog thing. Part of the problem is that I decided to start posting my work quite a while after I started doing all of this so I'm still scrambling to catch this journal up with where I "really" am, while trying to slow down the doing part so I have a fighting chance of actually doing that. On top of that, living and writing about the past and present at the same time is messing with me. Guess I'm always living in the past, present, and future -- for me, especially the future --- but this consistent writing about it shoves my nose into how whacked that makes my life.

Even outside this project, I google old friends and boyfriends just to see what's happened to them (Hi! to any of you doing the same to me now, by the way. Bet I was the last person you thought would end up doing this, eh?)and I can spend hours reviewing key moments of my life that I've loved and even longer picking apart those mortifying "high" points that I still can't shake, the times when I said or did things I still can't believe, those moments when I sacrificed myself or someone else. I find myself luxuriating in the second-by-second unfolding of those scenes, feeling every feeling, over and over again. Why? Am I hoping, if I go over it yet again, that it'll turn out different? That I'll understand why I did what I did so I won't get to that place again? In a few cases I have developed some compassion for the situation, for whomever I deem the perpetrator, me or another, but, still...

My real obsession is the future: I get lost in it. I want to know what's going to happen. In detail. Barring that, I want a concrete list of possibilities all laid out. Why? Because I want to control or at least influence the likely outcome. I get paralyzed in fabrication, examination, consideration, rumination. I have turned millions of present moments over to this imagined future. Why? I dunno. It actually seems easier than letting all of it go, easier than hearing the bird outside my window, feeling that my fingers are a bit cold as I type this, that I made a mistake in the underwear I chose today - it kind of hurts - and that, until this moment, I didn't notice how thirsty I am and that the glass of water I poured before I sat down has gone untouched until now.

The Bowing Controversy - or To Bow or Not to Bow

I knew I had a hard time with the whole idea of bowing (see the end of the Path of Love) but I thought it was just my personality quirk. Then came all the hullaballoo over President Obama bowing to Saudi King Abdullah on April 2nd. You'd think President Obama had floated the idea of making the king a cabinet member.

I thought it was my little old outsized ego that kept my spine rigid, unwilling even to try out this bowing thing just to see if I could at least come to appreciate why it's so important in both Hinduism and Buddhism but here I find it isn't just my problem, it's cultural. We're all raised to think bowing down before someone implies weakness or, worse, fealty or subservience to another.

It seems to me that how we greet one another is less important than that we do. I know that when I'm concerned more about how someone else sees me, more about making clear my power and its importance to me, more about making sure my position seems dominant from the get-go, my relationships don't go very well. I've lived most of my life with that first in my mind and, boy, was that a waste.

All I can say is, the whole angry storm over the President's bow at least made me feel that I am a real American, not just a real egotist.

(In case you're interested, here are links to previous posts with some of my bowing challenges: Hemu's Morning Rituals, First Teacher, Path of Love, Doing It, The Destroyer of Time...there must be a few more but, you get the idea. Most of the bowing is at the end of the posts...)

Disneyland

What on earth is happening to me?

My sister-in-law said she wanted to take her daughter, my nine-year-old niece, Marley, to Disneyland, did I want to come, too? Well, yeah, I sure did.

If I’m lucky, I get to see Marley once or twice a year because they live in Texas so I’ll pretty much go anywhere to see Marley or Ann or my brother, Adam. And two Marleys in the teacups? Eating pink spun sugar? Avoiding teenagers dressed as Mickey or Minnie Mouse? No way I’d miss that.

But once I got there, it was an act of sheer will to move around that park, pretending the person I have always been was still there. I still ate, played, rode, and ran around, and the park was in much better shape – cleaner, more attention to detail, better food choices – than years ago, but all I kept thinking about was: how much money is being dumped here and to what purpose? I guess I should be grateful there were so many people getting a paycheck because of all of the people willing to spend money to go on a ride through a paper maché mountain, jungle, or castle but the fun felt forced, fake, hollow. Did I always feel this way to some degree but never noticed it before? I remember looking forward to going to the Philadelphia zoo but ending up depressed watching all of the big cats pacing in the little tiled cages they used to have. Or am I losing something I once had? I so don’t want to become one of those dour, serious people who can’t enjoy a game of miniature golf or bowling or pinball or air hockey or a couple of days at Disneyland but all I could think about was how short my life is and what I could have or should have been doing. Now I’m sure that’s in nobody’s tradition, wishing you were somewhere but where you are. Two thoughts brought me back.

One, Disneyland isn’t as different from so-called real life as I’d like to believe. Take the longest possible view and nothing I do – whether I ride a ride, or work to understand a faith, or cure a disease – will finally matter. The pursuit of fame or so-called immortal works, for example, is so clearly useless, ultimately, when you think forward a few million years. And yet I also know that what zen teaches, that every action each of us takes affects others and couldn’t be taken without the previous actions of countless others, is true so everything I do matters. Even if it’s just going to Disneyland with my sister-in-law and niece. If I’m fully present. I guess even if I’m not fully present as well but with a different effect, I suppose.

The second thing that brought me back from my dyspeptic ruminations: sometimes I hate myself for this but I’d rather be with the people I love than get more work done. There is a part of me that wishes I were more ruthless, more focused than that, and another part that’s grateful I’m not.

An interesting conversation over at Sharp Iron...

http://sharpiron.wordpress.com/2009/02/25/the-murderous-root-of-religion/

What else is there to say? It's a new day...

Dinner Party

So, what do I tell people I "do" now?

He should lift up the self by the Self
and not sink into the selfish;
for the self is the only friend
of the Self, and its only foe.

Bhagavad Gita, 6.6

I hate dinner parties but I keep forgetting that. I may have always hated them but, since I’ve started going to houses of worship in earnest, doing nothing else but that, they’ve really begun to fill me with dread. But I didn’t know we were going to one when Marisa said, “Come on over for dinner. Ken and I haven’t seen you in ages. Sunday night at seven?”

Ken and Marisa were safe. They knew what I was doing and weren’t too freaked out. “Sure! We’ll be there.”

But on Friday, when I called Marisa to say, “The lemons in our back yard were great so I made a lemon chiffon pie and I’m bringing it.” Marisa said, “Oh, I guess we’re going to have a lot of dessert then. My friend Lissa is going to cooking school and she’s bringing a dessert, too.”

Strangers. I was going to have to talk to strangers. At some point they were going to politely ask, “So what do you do?” That question was kind of fun to answer when I worked for Ed Bradley at 60 Minutes. Now? "I'm going through the conversion training for the seven major religious traditions?" That's a conversation starter.

I made it all the way until dessert without the subject coming up but then Marisa, who thought she was being a good host, said, “So, Marley, tell us what’s going on with your work.”

I’ve gotten the explanation down to a few sentences and I can usually turn the conversation around to get people to talk about their beliefs and family traditions, about their experience with faith, but I wasn’t lucky that night. These were kind, thoughtful, curious people who went right for the jugular: “What’s happening to you? How is it changing you? What are you feeling about it so far?”

I could feel my eyes blink as I looked into Lissa’s sweet earnest face – she really wanted to know something of my insides. I could feel my eyes blink…and blink again. It was an overture of friendship, of intimacy…and I couldn’t think of a thing to say.

My feelings? What am I feeling? Heck if I know. Maybe spending so long as a journalist has made me incapable of accurately seeing myself. Maybe there’s such a thing as being too open-minded. I’ve presented myself, arms flung wide, over and over and over again hoping to feel the irrational tug of faith. I’m even oddly fascinated by my obedience to this uncontrollable drive to do all of this and feel like my own lab rat sometimes but how can I say that? It sounds almost disassociated.

“But you must have found yourself changing in some way, haven’t you?

I wanted to scream: I have no idea what I’m feeling, what’s happening to me, so I cannot tell you what I don’t know myself. And I am okay with that until I am asked over and over and over again to report in: ‘Marley, how is this affecting you? How is this changing you?’ I don’t know. But I’m going to find out if I can, but back off and give me time.

I need to do this, to see if taking these actions will change me, change my perceptions. But is it change I’m after? Or do I really want knowledge? But if it’s only knowledge I’m,after, wouldn’t I have just kept reading books?

No, knowledge alone isn’t it. Perhaps the desire to find out about all of them, all of the faiths, is a workaholic’s way to avoid coming to know anything deeply, a sophisticated dodge, like Swami Sarvadevananda said you dig ten feet here,then ten feet there, you never get any water. I don’t know. Maybe. But when I went looking for someone else’s description of what it felt like to practice each faith, hoping to start this journey farther down the road, I couldn’t find it in any form I could understand, in any form that started from the very beginning for those of us with nothing. How can I go deep if I don’t have any idea where water is likely to be …for me?

What has changed is I can’t give glib answers any more. I can’t pretend to know something I don’t. I can’t talk about feelings and change I haven’t identified and feared I’d never identify. I can’t chat, can’t entertain, and I certainly can’t trot out my innards over dessert. All I can do is hope that, by writing all of this down as I go along, all the facts, the actions, the confusions, the moments of connection, maybe one day I’ll be able to come to understand for myself what changed, what was changing, what I was feeling and be able to do more than shrug and stammer, “So, how did you grow up?” in the effort to make it safely through one more dinner party.

Belief-o-Matic

A retired minister who's hard at work setting up the next Parliament of the World's Religions (3-9 December, 2009 in Melbourne, Australia) mentioned that he thinks Beliefnet is one of the more respected interfaith sites so I spent a little time wandering around on it. I found one fun thing not to be missed: the Belief-O-Matic. Here's how they describe it:

Even if YOU don't know what faith you are, Belief-O-MaticTM knows. Answer 20 questions about your concept of God, the afterlife, human nature, and more, and Belief-O-Matic™ will tell you what religion (if any) you practice...or ought to consider practicing.

Warning: Belief-O-Matic™ assumes no legal liability for the ultimate fate of your soul.

Have fun!

With grace

Christmas eve dinner, grace was said.

Kevin came home from a business trip and, although we hadn't had a chance to talk about it, he simply reached for my mother's hand and said, "Matt, would you say grace?"

Matt was thrown. He hadn't expected it. "Ah, okay. Sure."

My mom and dad put down their forks and, without any significant looks at each other, just took the hand of the person next to them... and we had grace.

Grace

I am a complete coward. I thought I wasn't going to write for a while but spending time with family has a way of slamming my face right up against some of my most lovely traits. The moment my parents come, I hide.

Most of the year we say grace at the dinner table. I shouldn't say we. Matt says grace. He came home from preschool one day and simply announced that he was saying grace and he has ever since, the very same one he learned in preschool. "God, you are very good to us, to give us food each day, to make us big and strong, so we can work and run and play. Amen."

Luke hates it. There have been nights when the simple act of Matt saying grace has touched off yet another round of the never-ending theological, philosophical, legislative ( as in "I shouldn't have to be forced to sit here while this is being said.") debates.

I love that it hasn't changed one bit in all these years. I wouldn't know what to replace those words with anyway and I sure wouldn't want to replace the feelings. I don't know if what is said matters as much as that we take a moment to appreciate that we are sitting together, to recognize, with gratitude, that the many things that could disrupt such quotidian tranquility are not in our lives. I like the fact that, at fifteen, Matt likes the ritual and still feels comfortable with those preschool words in his mouth. I even like the fact that, as much as Luke sighs and complains, he still takes the hands of whomever is sitting on either side of him and suffers through it.

Okay, so why on earth do I let the simple presence of my parents in my house cow me, cow us into abandoning one of our rituals?

At dinner years ago, when Matt was four or five and the words of the grace were still fresh, he started to do what he always did: make us hold hands. My mother was shocked but she complied, perhaps because he was cute and small, but the eye-rolling and significant looks at my dad were loud enough that none of us - especially Matt - wanted to do that again.

It makes me so sad that I haven't figured out a way to be myself and their daughter at the same time. I feel lost if I force it, lost if I don't but there is something about taking the time to recognize the sacred in the day-to-day I don't ever want to lose.

Christmas break

Mom and Dad are in town so I'll probably be too busy dealing with the "now, why exactly are you doing this crazy thing" questions to post until the end of the month but, maybe not... I hope your holiday season, whatever it entails, is filled with peace and joy.

A present -- my favorite passage of the Bhagavad Gita from Stephen Mitchell's translation all together in one place:

He who can see inaction
in the midst of action, and action
in the midst of inaction, is wise
and can act in the spirit of yoga.

With no desire for success,
no anxiety about failure,
indifferent to results, he burns up
his actions in the fire of wisdom.

Surrendering all thoughts of outcome,
unperturbed, self-reliant,
he does nothing at all, even
when fully engaged in actions.

There is nothing that he expects,
nothing that he fears. Serene,
free from possessions, untainted,
acting with the body alone,

content with whatever happens,
unattached to pleasure or to pain,
success or failure, he acts
and is never bound by his action.

When a man has let go of his attachments,
when his mind is rooted in wisdom,
everything he does is worship
and his actions all melt away.

Bhagavad Gita 4.18-4.23

Mumbai

Does this really have anything to do with faith? With religion? If someone robs a bank but says the devil made him do it, or Jesus, or God, a jury sees that for what it is and convicts him. We don't blame the faith the bank robber happened to choose to use as an excuse for his indefensible acts, right?

In the middle of the chaos, Mumbai still under seige, a woman interviewed on the radio pleaded for all people of faith not to use this crisis to pull apart from each other but to join together, to use it to rise above, to see what we share not what divides us. I hope her voice is heard and her prayers are answered.

Thanksgiving

I didn't bang pots and pans around this year. I think Buddhism had something to do with it.

How come I can leap from the a table in someone else's house to offer to help clear and clean the dishes, how come I can put my head down and simply do what's in front of me on a retreat at the Zen Center or the Hsi Lai Temple and even get pleasure from mopping a floor or scraping an old label off a window with a monk yet, in my house, the very thought of any item on my to do list gets a heavy sigh? What is it that makes the make the ordinary stuff of life feel like such an intrusion on my life? Just thinking about organizing my finances, doing the dishes, cleaning out the cabinets, the car, the flower beds is definitely something I can identify as suffering...that is, until real suffering comes along. Today I finally got it that it's all in my head and that's because I had a truly lovely Thanksgiving and I changed nothing about it except what was inside that head.

Karen Armstrong's quote is really coming home to me. Maybe religion isn't just about believing things; it's also about doing things that change your life. In these small but profound ways, this is definitely changing my life.

Okay...this post gives me an excuse to underscore that, as I am scurrying to get this blog up to date with where I am, putting up what I've been doing for the past eighteen months or so, I am currently working on Buddhism and beginning to figure out how and where to do Daosim which is coming next whether or not that was my plan. When I told Professor Amir Hussain I thought it might be time to start figuring out what came next and how to do it and it was either Confucianism or Daoism, he sent me to Robin Wang, Associate Professor of Philosophy and Director of Asian and Pacific Studies at Loyola Marymount University. (Note: she's in the philiosophy department, not the religious studies department which is the very first thing I have to deal with: why does Huston Smith call Confuciansim and Daoism religions? Are they? And are either even "practiced" here in the United States? And is it spelled Daoism or Taoism? )

Anyway, Professor Wang said, "Oh you have to start with Daoism! Much more interesting. You have to deal with the body!"

Great. I decided to do this to get beyond the body but, no matter what I do, my body keeps getting dragged back into it.

Sorry to confuse the heck out of you with the past present and future all going on at once in this post. I hope to be thoroughly contemporaneous as soon as possible. When I catch up, I'll republish this post in its proper chronological place. In the meantime, please email me to let me know you're out there, to give me some sense of who's listening and what you're thinking about all of this. I'd like to know.

Right now I'm grateful I live in a home with people who don't mind my crazy ideas, who have supported me even as I act on them.

Subscribe!

You see that heading over there ========>>>> in the skinny column? "Subscribe to posts?" If you click on it, it'll make following along with me even easier.

I tested it out and, when I clicked on the "subscribe to posts" link, it offered a bunch of choices like "My Yahoo", "Add to Google" etc. When I clicked on "My Yahoo," it put my blog on my Yahoo home page, right next to all the other stuff I like to read every day like the AP and Reuters services as well as a bunch of newspapers, blogs, and service items to which I like to have quick access. (Okay so I don't really need to know the weather in every single family member's home town but I do...)

So, try it out! I like company!

Voting

Voted today. I waited in a long line - my first long line to vote ever - and it was thrilling. Usually I'm in and out in minutes but not one of us on line was impatient or put off. (Well, one school principal was happy when I let her go ahead of me.) Every person stood there, certain they had a purpose that morning and that it was critical they acted on it regardless of the outcome. Debbie, who's worked for my father in his office in rural Delaware for more than a decade voted for the first time....and she was excited about doing it. Today, so many of us felt that we mattered, that what we did today mattered. Isn't that faith? Isn't important to act out of that kind of faith whether or not it turns out to be correct? Didn't we all feel good acting out of that faith today?

Learning how to sit...all day

What I love about ZCLA is they take nothing for granted, they assume you need to be taught.

At the heart of Zen practice is something called "sesshin." The ZCLA curriculum describes sesshin this way:

Literally translated, sesshin means “to unify the mind.” It is an extended silent retreat in which our normal daily schedules are set aside to allow for a more focused zazen practice, integrated with walking meditation, face-to-face interviews, mindful work practice, chanting, rest, oryoki meals, and talks.

Most sesshins last a week, you sit for six or more hours a day, and are completely silent but, once a year, ZCLA has a shorter, three day Introduction to Sesshin to teach us newbies how. So I signed up.

~~~

The day I was supposed to check in for the start of the sesshin began with yet another huge fight between Luke and Matt over music. Luke drives Matt to school. Given their previous music wars - Luke insists on playing things like Gogol Bordello, a gypsy punk metal band, while Matt prefers classical, opera or, perhaps French bistro music - I said there would be silence, no music, during the ten-minute ride to and from school. Yet, there they were on the phone on the way to school, screaming at the top of their lungs. So I made good on a previous warning: I went to the school, handed each of them notes between classes with a bus schedule and quarters for the fare home, and drove the car out of the school lot.

This is what silent retreats are for: mothers of teenagers.

Late that afternoon, I drove through the worst weather I'd seen in Los Angeles in a long, long time - not just rain but even a funnel cloud that turned a tractor-trailer over in another part of the city - and got there in time for dinner. Tomato soup, a salad filled with vegetables and whole grain bread which the six of us ate while chatting. When dinner was finished, Koan, a tall friendly guy with silver hair and glasses (who I found out later was the head of the ZCLA Board) said that, as all of the teachers were in a meeting, "Do what you can to help clean up." He left the four of us - two guys, the roommate I'd been assigned, and me - in the care of one ZCLA member. One of the guys went outside to stretch. The other stood supervising as my roommate and I started to wash the dishes. I just couldn't resist handing the guy a dishtowel and pointing to the silverware. Definitely not "zen" of me but, then, he wouldn't be getting the benefit of the practice if he didn't help out, right? Right?

Did I mention that I had three younger brothers growing up? Or maybe I was just on a roll from following through with Luke and Matt.

I've never really worked in an industrial kitchen before so I spent way too long wrestling with the big washer/dryer/sanitizer but even that was kind of fun. Why is the work I do anywhere but my own home fun? Give me a campsite and some dirty dishes and I'll have a blast figuring out how to clean them. Same dishes at home? Ugh. All in my head. But there is something gratifying about everyone doing it together, working towards the same goal that just doesn't happen very often, at least not in my house, not without a certain amount of grousing. Okay so, growing up, I was one of those big grousers but I still remember those weekends when my Dad decided it was time to clean out the garage or the basement or some other monumental, somewhat disgusting task, with more fondness than makes any sense at all. Those working weekends rank up there in my memory with cotton-candy filled trips to the circus. What I remember most is how close I felt to my Dad while simply sorting through a box as he swept the floor nearby.

Once dinner was through, it was time for the evening sitting in the zendo...followed by oryoki bowl training for those of us who needed it. That would be me.

Alarm bells

Okay, I'm gonna talk about why I've been so deliberately vague about the location of this retreat....

4:45am. I was almost late for the dawn sitting because my pants hadn't fully dried from yesterday's attempt to wash out the coffee I'd spilled on the drive up so I'd been up in the middle of the night dodging deer in the moonlight to use the dryer in the building with the washrooms. The day began with 108 full prostrations which, I'm telling you, is better than any morning calisthenics. From standing, you bow, then get all the way down on your knees and touch your forehead to the ground and then stand back up. 108 times. Empty brain. It was actually pretty great.

I didn't have half the trouble sitting I'd had the night before. No ticks. Legs didn't die. Minimal sweating. Mind, it wasn't easy to sit. For many of the half-hour sessions, I took counting to a new art form. I figured out how many times I counted to ten, on average, in a thirty minute session - somewhere between seventeen and eighteen times - and I'd just keep track of sets of ten. Counting to ten, seventeen or eighteen times doesn't sound so bad, now, does it? Better than sitting for thirty minutes without any way to mark time...over and over and over again. There were even moments I actually didn't fight sitting there, as much as one or two whole minutes. Those were lovely.

They did use the "wake up stick" (kyosaku) at one point, though. One of the officiants got it from the altar and creaked slowly behind all of us and ritually smacked those who asked to be hit twice. You had to ask to be hit which, my guess is, is the way it is in most zendos in the United States. I couldn't see how it was done but the sound of the people around me getting thwacked was pretty alarming, given the essential silence of the room otherwise. The stick didn't come out during every session of sitting and I don't know why it's used sometimes but not others but I sure am going to find out more about it.

Using the oryoki bowls and all the ritual that went with them wasn't so bad. While everyone was serious in their attempts to hew to the ritual, there was a low-key vibe that made looking up and following along as best you could okay.

But part of the retreat included a face-to-face interview with the center's spiritual leader. We were taught the ritual for waiting our turn, how to know when our turn was, what to do when we went in, and how to leave. I wasn't quite sure what I was going to say but I did know I was going to explain exactly who I was and what I'm doing. The monk couldn't have been sweeter. We talked for a while, about what I wanted from the practice and why but then he said, "I want you to be my student."

"But I don't live anywhere near here."

"That's okay. You can sit with people down in Los Angeles but you can be my student. Do you want to be my student?"

Although I didn't know much about Buddhism, I was pretty sure it wasn't supposed to go this way. There's a strong tradition of teachers resisting students when they first show up, waiting to see if their desire to learn is strong enough to overcome the first few "no"s.

It's a mystery to me about how one chooses a place to practice, a spiritual leader to guide you, if you aren't able to continue on with your family's traditions for whatever reason. I guess I'm looking for a teacher so committed to their own practice that who is or isn't around them doesn't matter all that much.

I hope I'm not doing the Woody Allen thing, running away from a club that would have me, but this just didn't feel right. I think I'm going back to take another class at ZCLA.

Religion, Faith, and Sitting

...a spectacle. I made a spectacle of myself.

After dinner we were supposed to meet to learn about something called oryoki bowl eating. There were bowls, wrapped up in a napkin, already with our names on them, in cubbies. All told, there were actually three different cloths - a napkin, a mat, and a wipe - as well as three bowls of different sizes nesting in each other, a long cloth case which held a wooden spoon, a pair of chopsticks, and a small rubber spatula. The largest bowl was called the "Buddha" bowl.

The teacher taught us how to unwrap, set up, and use all of these things, just so, and then the ritual to put them away. He also said that, as we were going to be eating in silence and "the server will be behind you," we needed hand signals to indicate if we wanted more or less of what was being served.

Complicated doesn't even begin to describe the unwrapping and then rewrapping of all the things. I couldn't keep my napkin/wrapper from coming undone once I put everything together which was the least of my problems. But the man teaching us was pretty low key about it so I figured the only way to really learn it all was just to muddle through a meal or two.

Then came the evening "zazen" or sitting. After the overwhelming detail of the oryoki bowl training, I was actually looking forward to just sitting.

It was one of the worst hours of my life.

Okay, so that's hyperbole but, in the list of my very worst moments, days, periods of my life, this ranked.

It all began innocently enough. I was on a small square cushion facing a wall, a bit out of the way, next to one other beginner. I took my glasses off, which seemed like the right thing to do as I was going to stare at the base of a wall anyway, and hung them on the top of my shirt, just above where my borrowed black robe closed. For possibly the first time, being near-sighted was actually helpful; the whole soft-focus thing was a cinch with my glasses off.

I sat and began to count my breath. All fine. It was quiet in the zendo and there was no "stick" - the so-called wake up stick that confused and frightened me a bit - in use. Good. One to ten, then one again.

But then I started to notice that I was fine.

All hell broke loose.

I had run sixteen miles the day before. I was sore and tight to begin with. My legs went dead. Not just dead, but dead dead. Then, I got so nervous from my legs going dead that I started to sweat. I've never been much of a sweat-er but leave it to me to have this moment be the sweat of a lifetime. I was sweating so much it was dripping down the back of my neck. Then I started to panic, panic that my panic was turning my sweat into stinky flop sweat. Was my odor assaulting the nostrils of the poor guy right next to me? Was I emitting some horrible smell that was, even now, wafting its way throughout the zendo?

This, of course, made me sweat even more.

A shrill internal monologue began. "Calm the heck down. You can do this. You can sit through a half hour of anything. You've done this before."

A little whimpering voice inside my head started up: "I can't. I really, really can't. What if I start to cry?" Because that was what I really wanted to do, cry.

"Grow up. Stop wishing for things to be over. You always regret what you rush. Remember when you felt overwhelmed when the boys were little? Don't you want those moments back now?"

"Nice try. I'm going to throw up. I know it. And my legs feel three sizes larger than they are. I really want to cry and my back hurts and now my right sit bone feels like it may come through my skin. Really. I think it's gonna come through my skin. I can't move. I can't adjust because you're never supposed to distract the people around you--"

The guy next to me began to move. He scratched his nose. He rearranged his legs. A reprieve!

I took advantage of his initiative to change from a half-lotus position to kneeling. I put the cushion between my legs to support my butt the way Luminous Heart/Penelope had taught us at the Zen Center. I could actually feel the blood flow back into my legs and out again. A breeze began to move the air. I started to relax.

One of the questions that often comes up is: is Buddhism a religion? Buddhism resolutely does not discuss the issue of a higher power or creator god so there are those who say it isn't a religion. Professor Huston Smith, author of the book, The World's Religions, certainly considers Buddhism a religion but he does take the better part of a chapter to list aspects most religions have in common...

- authority: people and institutions who occupy positions of authority
- ritual
- speculation
- tradition
- grace: "the belief, often difficult to sustain in the face of facts,
that Reality is ultimately on our side"
- and mystery

...that Buddhism does not share. Professor Smith says that the historical Buddha began "a religion of reaction against Hindu perversions - an Indian protestantism." It was devoid, at least in his lifetime, of all of these aspects conventionally associated with religion.

Professor Smith said Buddha "preached a religion devoid of authority." The Buddha said:

Do not accept what you hear by report, do not accept tradition, do not accept a statement because it is found in our books, nor because it is in accord with your belief, nor because it is the saying of your teacher. Be lamps unto yourselves.

Smith said, Buddha preached a religion devoid of ritual. The Buddha said:

Belief in the efficacy of rites and ceremonies is one of the Ten Fetters that bind the human spirit.

Buddha preached a religion that "skirted speculation." Smith quotes his parable of the poisoned arrow:

It as if a man had been wounded by an arrow thickly smeared with poison, and his friends and kinsmen were to get a surgeon to heal him, and he were to say, I will not have this arrow pulled out until I know by what man I was wounded, whether he is of the warrior caste, or a brahmin, or of the agricultural caste or the lowest caste. Or if he were to say, I will not have this arrow pulled out until I know of what name of family the man is; or whether he is tall or short, or of middle height; or whether he is black of dark or yellowish....etc (it goes on this way for a while and then...) ...what have I explained? Suffering I have explained, the cause of suffering, the destruction of suffering, and the path that leads to the destruction of suffering have I explained. For this is useful.

Buddha preached a religion devoid of tradition.

Do not go by what is handed down, nor on the authority of your traditional teachings. When you know of yourselves: 'These teachings are not good, these teachings when followed out and put into practice conduce to loss and suffering' - then reject them.

Buddha preached a religion of intense self-effort.

Buddhas only point the way. Work out your salvation with diligence.

And, finally, according to Professor Smith, Buddha preached a religion devoid of the supernatural.

By this you shall know that a man is not my disciple - that he tries to work a miracle.

All this is a little confusing because it seems that many of these elements were at the Hsi Lai Buddhist temple; ritual for sure. What rituals there are at the two Zen Centers I've see so far do seem simpler than those at the Hsi Lai Temple. But whether or not Buddhism is a religion, I'm in no position to argue. Buddhism is a chapter in Huston Smith's book called The World's Religions so, for now, that's good enough for me. What I can tell you, even at this early stage, is that it sure takes a mountain of faith to sit for hours at a time, day after day, especially when you're told "just sit."

In between two half-hour sessions of sitting, we got up and did a slow walking meditation and then sat back down for our final session before bedtime. Although I'd cooled down and calmed down, I noticed that my neck was still dripping. Odd. I wasn't hot anymore. I finally couldn't bear it and lifted my hand up to wipe the drip away.

It wasn't a drip. It was a tick.

I was so surprised, I let out the smallest of yelps, flicked my arm, and knocked my glasses off my shirt. They skittered across the polished wooden floor just out of reach. In a room full of silently meditating strangers, I crawled across the floor, collected my glasses, and sat back down on my cushion.

I tried to count my breath but I got stuck on just one number: six, six hours of this tomorrow. Six. I had no idea how I was going to do it.

Traces

I found a one-day sitting for beginners in a beautiful Zen Buddhist center a day's drive from Los Angeles and decided to go. It began before dawn so I arrived the afternoon before, shortly after spilling a full cup of coffee on one of the two pairs of pants I brought to wear.

If you go to a Zen retreat, here's a tip: although the email may say go to the office when you arrive, most likely, no one will meet you. After I stood around trying to figure out where to go, I finally interrupted someone in the kitchen to ask for help. Turns out everything you need to know is posted on pages right outside the front door: where you sleep, where you sit in the zendo, the schedule, the rules etc. I guess everything's set up to eliminate as much talking as possible. Next problem: finding a place to wash my pants so they'd have some chance of drying before morning.

The showers and toilets were in building of their own. There was a place for shoes outside and, just inside, there was a sign saying it was a "silent area" and another that said, "No Trace."

I have never in my life see a cleaner bathroom. There were three stainless steel sinks which looked like they had never been used, a spotless floor, empty trash cans, and polished wood. Even the rubber sink stoppers for each sink were placed in exactly the same position on the rim of each sink. And I would let my children eat off the floors in the bathroom stalls. I was scared to even use it.

Does "no trace" mean no trash? I had very little time before dinner and, I'm sorry, but washing your pants in the sink leaves a trace no matter what you do. My "traces" were paper towels used to wipe up the sink and the water dripped on the floor. I just had enough time to hang up the pants just outside the cabin before dinner.