Eight years ago this morning, I was riding a Metro North train down to Manhattan when a conductor ran through the train with the terrible and surreal news that the World Trade Center towers had collapsed and that the Pentagon had been hit. I knew about the two planes going in when I boarded the train but in a distant echo of the way so many other New Yorkers acted that day, my instinct was to head towards the trouble. When I heard the terrible news, I spontaneously began to say a Buddhist metta prayer for all the people I pictured falling to their deaths: May you be free from suffering….May you be at ease. I wasn”t in denial. It was one of those rare moments in life where the heart steps in and takes over for the head and all the distracting thoughts, fears, and sense of separation between myself and others came down. It was as if my heart was with them, as if they were the same as I was. My yoga teacher called for a moment of silence this morning, standing in mountain posture with our hands in prayer position. I hadn’t even registered what it day it was. At the end of the class, as we lay on our mats in silence, she asked us to consider the word “service” and the question (or questions) “How or what should we serve?” This reverberated. Up welled that experience on the train and that memory of how my heart opened and the walls of separation came down for instant. I felt that I was part of a larger body–wishing that all beings be free and at peace, not just little me. I think that knowing how and what to serve is best begun that way, letting the heart open to what is happening right here and right now. More and more, I find myself thinking about service. As Ram Dass once said, “What else do you have to do with your life?”
Author: Tracy Cochran
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Heroic Labors
On this Labor Day weekend, I am thinking about work and about what elevates some work to the level of the heroic, the mythic, the stuff of art, legend, and inspiration for us all. Usually, my days are filled with work and information. It’s not all unpleasant but there is an endless but unmemorable quality to the tasks that can leave me a particular feeling of sorrow at the end of the day, as if my life is vanishing like water into the sand, leaving no trace. Do you know this feeling? It usually comes with a kind of questioning or longing for life to make more of an impression, to penetrate more deeply, to make a mark. For some time now, I’ve been thinking about how Buddhism and other spiritual traditions teach through stories–even though the aim of Buddhist practice is liberation from stories. I’m realizing that there is something about the way certain kinds of stories unfold that satisfies that deep need that feels hardwired in to us humans to live a deeper life–to have life be a journey that leads straight out of ourselves to something greater. The best kinds of stories have an unlikely hero, someone who is called out of a grinding, humdrum life to face adversity, to take on great risks or labors, a story where an seemingly ordinary man (and all too rarely a woman) is called by circumstances to go beyond the rest of us, to be like Milarepa or David, going up against Goliath.
About 35 years ago, in the founding issue of Parabola, P.L. Travers, the creator of Mary Poppins, wrote that the raw material of these mythic stories could be found in The New York Times. It just took a certain kind of mind to see through the mere facts to the deeper truths. The New York Times and other news outlets are currently reporting that bribery accusations are being made against a judge overseeing the $27 billion dollar contamination lawsuit against Chevron in Equador. In the current issue of Parabola, I interviewed Joe Berlinger, the director of Crude, a powerful documentary about this on going legal battle, in which the remarkable 35-year-old lawyer Pablo Fajardo is representing some 30,000 rainforest dwellers and indigenous people against Chevron for being responsible for an alleged “death zone” of a land that was a fertile paradise even during the Ice Age. Among other deeper truths that come through in this messy, seemingly endless case, is that every life–including Indian and poor peoples’ lives–matter. Clean water, land, and food matters. And it isn’t in spite of our hardships and hindrances but through them that something creative and deeply true can come into being. Plunging into the jungle and into the heart of this crucial case, Crude fulfills what Mary Poppins creator P.L. Travers called in that long ago essay, “the essential mythical requirement: the reinstatement of the fallen world.”
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Pay Attention!
How to close the gap between what we think and what we feel? How do we come to know our deepest aspirations and intentions in the midst of welter of large and small actions and reactions that fill an ordinary day? A little while ago, I received a comment from someone (who was clearly familiar with the Gurdjieff ideas and work) suggesting that the difference between a feeling from another level and our ordinary egocentric emotions (as grandiose as those can be) is the questioning that can come in its wake…a questioning that wakes us up: How can I be responsible? Sometimes (certainly in my case) it gets framed as: What have I been doing with my life?
A few days later, this same person quoted from Exchanges Within by the brilliant student of Gurdjieff, Lord John Pentland: “Sensation is the relating element. How do you feel what you think or think what you feel? It is through sensation.”
How do we go about this? Tear your nose away from that proverbial grindstone, peel your eyes away from the screen, pull your poor, worried addictive mind away from its current desire and pay attention to what is left in that wake, experience desire as desire, experience your life. Attention can be magic. It can unlock the secrets of life.
To demonstrate, here is a wonderful passage from a story the great contemporary writer, Lorrie Moore: “O.K.,” I said. “Sounds good.” Sounds good. It was the Midwestern girl’s reply to everything. It appeared to clinch a deal, was somewhat the same as the more soldierly Good to go, except that it was promiseless–mere affirmative description. It got you away, out the door.”
Attention can reveal the unexpected depths in seemingly ordinary things.
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A Wild Time at The Happiest Place On Earth
I’m just back from a week in Florida. In addition to visiting family and enjoying the beach and the storm-tossed sea, I revisited Disney’s Animal Kingdom, which nearly killed me last year (as chronicled in the blog entry “The Happiest Place on Earth.”) This year, thanks to technical difficulties, I didn’t have to face down my fear of the Everest ride (“Of course you can do it,” said another in our party. “They strap you in and in about three minutes it’s done.” His point, I guess, is that it is an all but involuntary procedure, not really a test of any finer, inner quality.) This year, there was just the comparatively gentle safari ride (where I saw a silver back gorilla who embodied what it means to be still and alert, nothing but his eyes moved as he sat and took in supposedly higher life forms that moved about restlessly in the oppressive August heat)–the white water rapids ride–the dinosaur ride–all rides that Alex and I have come to experience as memories (“Remember, the first time you did this ride you closed you eyes the whole time). During the trip, I happened to be reading Surprised by Joy by C.S. Lewis at Alex’s urging, because she was much impressed with it last year in college. I kept thinking about the differences and similarities between Lewis’s definition of Joy which is infused with a sense of memory, of nostalgia, of an overwhelming longing for something that overtakes him each time with “the same surprise and the same sense of incalculable importance. It was something quite different from ordinary life and even from ordinary pleasure; something…’in another dimension.’” Lewis contrasts Joy, which is “that of an unsatisfied desire which is itself more desirable than any other satisfaction” with mere Happiness–and he never link it with Disney Happiness. Still, there is something in the way Alex was embracing the place in every detail including (especially) the nostalgia the place provoked–there was something about the way she kept remembering the experiences that she was having again that reminded me of Lewis’s Joy: It has to do with remembering! Remembering the joy that surprised him on a certain walk (for Alex, a certain ride) brought an experience of the same kind: “But then what I had felt on the walk had also been desire, and only possession in so far as that kind of desire is itself desirable, is the fullest possession we can know on earth; or rather, because the very nature of Joy makes nonsense of our common distinction between having and wanting. There to have is to want and to want is to have. Thus, the very moment when I longed to be so stabbed again, was itself again such a stabbing….”
Maybe this is a weird quote to include in a blog. Still, thinking of Alex’s full tilt embrace of the nostalgia of the Disney experience–and registering of my own painful sense of time passing, that I was remembering being with her and with the rest of my family even as I was with them –it dawns on me that what he is trying to capture is true! And this act of remembering is crucial in the process of being fully human.
And I know perfectly well that Lewis was writing about a longing for alignment with something from another level, something holy, not a longing for the “Kali River Rapids Ride”…Not a longing to get in line or to “Have a Wild Time” (as they say when you buy a ticket) one more time. But there was something pure of heart in what was happening. And as Lewis himself says, “all things in their way, reflect heavenly truth.”
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Mastering the Art of Life
What a thrill it is to see Mastering the Art of French Cooking by Julia Child, Simone Beck, and Louisette Bertholle at the top of the Amazon bestseller list, and for weeks now! Of course this has something to do with the appeal of Meryl Streep’s extraordinary performance in Julia & Julia. It is also possibly evidence that in uncertain times, people take refuge in timeless activities like cooking–or the fantasy of creating wonderful dinner parties (I took to reading cookbooks on Metro North to Manhattan in the dark months after 9/11). But it also confirms something I discovered after reviewing hundreds of books and interviewing bestselling authors for Publishers Weekly. To paraphrase the great mystic G.I. Gurdjieff, people who have a real passion for a craft and do it really well also have something to teach the rest of us about deeper truths in life. While I never had the pleasure of meeting Julia Child, I did meet and talk with a few chefs, including Patrick O’Connell, who turned a former gas station in the rolling Virginia countryside into what is thought to be one of the most sumptious and original restaurants in the world, the Inn at Little Washington. I met O’Connell one long-ago night at Restaurant Daniel on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. Chef proprietor Daniel Boulud himself was honoring O’Connell by preparing recipes from Patrick O’Connell’s Refined American Cuisine and I got to taste how deeply savory, how, well, resonant and even moving seemingly simple snacks like pizza with wild mushrooms can be.
Days later, I spoke to O’Connell by phone. We actually spoke about Julia Child and the culinary revolution she began, a revolution that continues to evolve with the work of American chefs like Alice Waters and himself. O’Connell made the point that American cuisine is now on a par with–if not eclipsing–French haute cuisine. It started with Child’s openness to the experience of great food: “When you experience the best, you realize that it is humanly possible to create it, ” O’Connell told me.
And how do we achieve that greatness?
“I think the discipline or approach you need to take to learn to cook is the same for anything you might want to pursue….You have to give everything you have. I’ve given cooking demonstrations to young chefs where I’ve brought a broom. I demonstrate how to use it. The point is that when I learn how to become one with the broom, when I learn to engage completely in what I am doing, I will sweep the floor perfectly. It is the same with cooking. I have to learn to become one with the food, to engage with what is in front of me with my whole being. ”
O’Connell also spoke with me about the importance of finding your place in the universe, of connecting with life, of coming home to our true nature. He discovered what it was to have a sense of place in the countryside of Washington, Virginia. Instead of the distracted state he felt he was in in the city, his priorities shifted to the basics of country life, the goodness of being warm and dry and fed: “In the country, you realize you want to share what you have with other people, so you have a sense of connection with others.”
I asked him if he thought people can taste this heightened sense of connection and generosity in his food (people from all over the world travel to the remote Inn at Little Washington): “If you make it that way, it will be received that way. People will receive it no matter how dense they are….If you have purity of intention, it gets through. It reaches them all.”
I interviewed a few other chefs and food writers and I’ll get to that later. For now, suffice it to say that based on the Amazon list the quality of passionate openness and engagement that Julia Child embodied is reaching people in a way that Julie Powell’s likable but gimmicky book just can’t.
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Ulysses
We will be meditating tomorrow, Wednesday, October 5, on the Jewish holy day of Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. Although I didn’t grow up observing this holiday, I like to reflect on elements of it from the perspective of contemplative awareness or wisdom. In fact, the word contemplate comes from a root that means to come inside the temple. This can mean to enter the temple of the body/mind, to look and see within.
The root meaning of atonement in English is “at one.” The traditional observation of this Jewish holy day involves fasting and prayer, and not wearing leather shoes (which I like to think of as touching the earth with your feet, not simply substituting sneakers). Also offering forgiveness and charity–which I like to think of as opening the field of our awareness, offering ourselves and others the gift of a forgiving awareness. We can think of this as forgiving in the way that cozy clothes are forgiving–soft and roomy, welcoming us in all our states. When we meditate we touch a natural awareness that is naturally forgiving, not in the sense of making excuses or arguing our cases, but in letting things be as they are. Letting ourselves be human, flawed, full of regrets even, but still beloved on the earth.
One Yom Kippur, at a particularly low point in my life, I saw a group of Jews , the men in black hats, the women in long dresses, scattering bread on the water. It was explained to me that they were casting away the sins of the previous year. Later that day, I stood at water’s edge and cast away the story of sorrow and regret that I was carrying, giving it to the water and earth and air. I felt as if I was letting go of clinging to a burden that separated me from life I felt enlightened…literally lighter.
Who are we without our stories? Don’t worry, they return. We are story-telling creatures, endlessly updating our narratives. But we can also practice just being human beings, not special or apart but open to a greater awareness. Together and alone, we can practice opening to a greater oneness.
The great stories about ancient heroes like Achilles and Odysseus reveal that it isn’t always in spite of our weaknesses, mistakes, and shortcomings but through them that something unknown can come into being. Achilles pride is also the source of his strength (and his weakness is the source of his destiny); Odysseus cleverness charted a long and perilous journey from the pits of misery and captivity to freedom and homecoming. The hero with all his glaring flaws, through all his spectacular mishaps, was meant to fulfill what Mary Poppins creator and Parabola founding editor P.L. Travers called “the essential mythical requirement: the reinstatement of the fallen world.”
The revelation is that the same principles apply to the rest of us. When you hit bottom, a new world can open up. Friends of mine recently asked me to reflect on how a mistake, shortcoming, or misfortune has enriched my spiritual practice. I’ve been carrying the question around for weeks wondering how in the world a person is to choose. On the one hand, there has been no catastrophic and soul-defining mistake or misfortune–convicting the wrong man of a heinous crime and spending a life time atoning for (ala the book and movie Atonement) or contracting polio and conducting a war-time American presidency from a wheel- chair like FDR. On the other hand, my ego is defined by mistakes, shortcomings, and misfortunes. I’ve heard the ego defined as the “pain body.” I’ve heard it defined as a web of habits, of physical, emotional, and mental addictions, all of them aimed at helping us keep our story about ourselves going, defending us from a pure, unfiltered encounter with reality. The Buddhists speak of the “three poisons” at the root of much of human suffering — greed (or lust), anger (or hatred), and delusion. Once in a blue moon, I experience one of these poisons to such a raging, blinding degree that I surrender to the truth of it. For once, I don’t justify or downplay or deny. I just admit that I have been helpless to my anger, say, and that it has hurt me and hurt others. In those moments, it seems clear that what I call spiritual practice has mostly been thinking. Then, as if by magic, other possibilities open up: patience for myself and others (and patience is an incredible healing balm against anger), lovingkindness, connection with what really is.
Tracy Cochran 