Today's Reading
How do you tell a story that's beyond words? The question is its own kind of Zen koan—you won't find the answer by thinking but by living. It might take years to solve. You must be willing to let go of everything you know. You will have to stop looking in order to find it. It can't be told in the usual way, with three acts and an epiphany. The mind, like time, isn't linear. It jumps from now to then and back again. It bends and braids like a river, rising and falling in the shape of mountains, in the space of a breath. It comes and goes in waves, doubling back on itself like the lip of a rapid or the folded fortune tellers my daughters make out of paper. Pick a number, they tell me. Our stories are built from bits and pieces, broken fragments we string together, determined by chance and choice, accident and intent—sudden bursts of understanding that illuminate the truth of who we are. You write your story with your body; read it this way, too. There are a dozen different outcomes, no one beginning or end. Every possibility already exists.
INTRODUCTION
On a cold, snowy December evening just after Christmas in 2018, I drove half a mile from my house to a Zen Buddhist temple at the foot of a small mountain in Santa Fe. It was not long past sunset, but the dirt road was dark, and the only light was my headlights, two bright cones illuminating the flashing blizzard and the narrow, quickly-filling tracks of a car that had traveled the road just ahead of me.
I was going to give a talk about running and Zen. I was so nervous I felt like throwing up. Also, I was strangely calm. It was the darkest night in the darkest month of year and the snow fell softly and with great determination and steadiness. The effect was transfixing, as though I was riding a night train to adventure in deepest, farthest Siberia. Something mysterious lay ahead. I was going to discover what it was.
At first, giving a talk had seemed like a wonderful idea. I'd learned about Zen through running and about running through Zen and about life through both, and I hoped I might have something to offer that could be of use to someone somewhere, fumbling through the dark mysteries of their own life.
As the date approached, however, I began to worry. I'm not exactly a walking advertisement for Zen. I wear bright colors, and I move fast. I can run thirty miles, but when I meditate, the longest I seem to manage is fifteen minutes, twenty-five if I'm feeling very strong. What did I know about sitting! Running was my practice.
I realized that I would have to say something that made sense and contributed to the greater good, in front of a room full of people who had probably been studying Zen for far longer than I, and much more dutifully, and I fell into a mild panic. I'd been absorbing the ideas of Zen and Buddhism by osmosis for a decade, but suddenly everything I thought I understood was slipping like seaweed through my grasp. I needed to get a handle on the basics. I needed an explanation.
I went to see my friend Natalie. She'd been practicing Zen for more than thirty years. She would know. "What is Zen?" I asked her desperately.
When Natalie and I met almost a decade earlier, we hiked up the mountain above the Zen center every week. It was winter, and some mornings the thermometer barely edged above twenty degrees. The trail was snowy and slick with ice in the shady patches. My father had just died, and my grief tricked me into believing I was dying, too. I carried my five-month-old daughter, Maisy, in a pack on my chest. Walking up the mountain with Natalie was an act of survival: it meant I was still alive, that maybe I wouldn't die that day, or the next. On the most frigid of mornings, the landline in our kitchen would ring during breakfast and I knew even before answering that it was Natalie, calling to ask, "Should we go?" And I always said yes. Whatever the weather, we went.
Natalie was in her late sixties with clipped, gray-black hair and a blunt manner that belied her soft heart. A prolific and beloved author, she was most famous for Writing Down the Bones, which she'd penned in a three-month frenzy in Santa Fe in 1986, after more than a decade practicing meditation and writing. Wisdom seemed to ooze out of her like a direct transmission from the sages, but she wasn't the usual blissed-out Buddha-type. She practically rattled with energy and laughter and often joked that I was her only friend who could match her zeal for life. Natalie became my unofficial mentor in writing and Zen, and in exchange, I taught her how to go up mountains in the dead of winter when neither of us felt like it. This, we joked, was my version of Zen.
Still, I should have known better than to ask Natalie for a definition. There's rarely a straight answer in Zen, and also every answer, in its own weird way, is a straight answer. Natalie tilted her head and was silent for a long moment, considering her response. "Wear black clothes to the Zendo," she said finally. "And loose. Baggy." The night of the Dharma talk, I dressed carefully in wide-legged, dark-blue pants and a navy turtleneck sweater. I put on my warmest wool socks and winter boots. The snow had been falling all afternoon, piling up on the streets. Natalie phoned me, worried about driving. "We'll make it," I said confidently, secretly hoping no one else would.
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