I'm Loving It
 Genine Lentine on how a McJob and her
brother’s magic tricks led her to the zendo. Advisory: this piece
contains adult language and partially unbuttoned fast food uniforms.
What brings you here
this morning? This is the guiding
question of the “way-seeking mind talk,” a talk students at the
San Francisco Zen Center are invited to offer on Thursday mornings
during
intensive periods of study. On these mornings, the regular schedule
of zazen and service is abbreviated so that a student may tell her story
of how she got there—a twenty-five-minute slice of how she came to
be sitting on a cushion in the Buddha hall at 6:45 a.m., speaking to
a group of people sitting in zazen posture, their eyes lowered to a
forty-five-degree angle.
These talks chronicle
an arc of awareness, an unfolding portrait of a mind getting to know
itself. They often single out specific traumatic events as turning
points,
recounting new permutations of what other human beings and circumstance
can levy onto the self. They are tales of extremity and moments
of clarity, of hunches followed, of determined recommitment to life:
an emergency tracheotomy on a premature infant, as recounted half a
century later through that blessed, resealed trachea; an encounter with
a person who sees something everyone else had missed; an offhand
reference
to a parent in prison, to suicide attempts. One after another, students
explore the infinite ways a life cracks open and shines.
These accounts
are registered by the assembly with extremely subtle facial responses,
the kind Paul Ekman studies, the kind longtime meditators are said to
be better than the average population at detecting. Faint variations
that say, I’m here with you, or that was funny, or
that was tragic, or that’s just like my life. An upturned
corner of the mouth, delicate nostril flare, lift of the chin. Sometimes
there’s outright laughter—relief at the prevailing nervous
suspension—and,
of course, much quiet sniffling.
A feeling of
temporal dilation pervades the room, but still there’s a clear boundary.
At 7:20, if the talk hasn’t already tapered off into, “Well, I think
that’s about it,” or, “Does anyone else have a question?” a
bell might ring to indicate the time. This audience was woken up by
a different bell at 4:55 a.m., and they haven’t yet eaten breakfast.
When I gave my
talk a couple years ago, I focused on a cascade of revelations brought
about by a string of very thorny breakups, so-called losses, and strokes
of fortune. Yes, they are indistinguishable. Mostly, I gave
examples of how the world makes
explicit offers framed almost exactly to the specifications of one’s
barely registered needs, but usually the offering remains unrecognizable
to the recipient. I illustrated this phenomenon by describing how one
afternoon I set out on my bike down Commercial Street in Provincetown,
Massachusetts, heading to the library to work at one of the spacious
oak tables overlooking the harbor, and I almost rode right past a
beautiful,
perfectly proportioned maple writing desk a guest house had put out
at the curb. I caught just in time the familiar flaw in the logic of
my hurry: Too bad I can’t stop to pick up that table; I have to
get to the library… so I can, uh, use the table there.
I turned back to get the desk and right then a gardener appeared from
the adjacent yard and asked if I’d like some help carrying it home.
With so many
tiny moments when an acutely relevant lesson feels fully articulated
and noticed in the nick of time, it’s impossible to include them all.
I did not find time, for example, to speak of how, the very next day
after I met Popeye—a beloved figure in Provincetown who collected
aluminum cans, told fabulous stories, and marched at the front of the
Fourth of July parade every summer—he suffered a fatal heart attack
the morning before the parade. He was found in a porta-potty in full
sailor regalia. I took his death personally, numbering it among all
the other incidents that verified my theory that if I cared about
someone,
that person would disappear immediately. But somehow this incident with
Popeye, in its acute swiftness, helped me see the absurdity of my
theory.
And with the hairsbreadth of space that opened for me in relation to
this person to whom I’d spoken only once, I was emboldened to entertain
other, closer, losses with more space as well.
Time constraints
require one to be selective, so no Popeye story—that will have to
be saved for the director’s cut—but still, the expectation is that
the talk is going to touch on all the key points. And so, for months
after the talk, whenever I mentioned a new fact about my life to my
friend Stephen, his face took on a wide-eyed, genuine disappointment,
confusion, and shock: I can’t believe you left that out of your
way-seeking mind talk! For him, the way-seeking mind talk is the
primary point of reference, the hegemonic text for knowing anyone, as
if you are supposed to include every pivotal incident, overshot gesture
and course correction, relationship, and part-time job in your life.
Though I mentioned
only briefly the profound and abundant gifts of working for six years
with the poet Stanley Kunitz, Stephen remembers my talk as being very
“heavy on Stanley” and yet considers grave the following omissions:
(1) My brother is a magician. (2) My first job was as a hostess at
McDonald’s.
From the July 2010
issue of the Shambhala Sun.
ILLUSTRATION BY HILDE THOMPSON
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