On Being a "Temporary" Monk

Someone recently asked me to reflect upon and share some thoughts about my experience as a "temporary monk." The essay below was written in response to that request. I was further inspired this morning by seeing my teacher from the monastery, Pema Chödrön, in an intimate conversation with Oprah Winfrey on her Super Soul Sunday program. The interview concluded with an assembly of footage filmed at the monastery, Gampo Abbey, which brought back many pleasant memories of the time I spent there.

Photo by Sunny Shender. The tiny robed figure
standing in the middle ground was me.

When I tell people that I was a monk for two years and that I lived in a monastery in the remote coastal wilds of Nova Scotia, their reactions usually fall into one of two categories.

For the majority of people, who don't have experience with long retreat practice or monasticism, the standard reaction is: "Oh my God. You did that for TWO WHOLE YEARS?" Watching their faces, you can see their minds boggling as they try to imagine spending such a long and intensive period of time immersed in practice, in such an isolated place, and being silent so much of the time.

For a small minority of people who do have experience with these things, particularly with monasticism, the standard reaction is more like: "What? ONLY two years? What happened?" Watching their faces, you can see them wondering why I couldn't hack it for longer than that.

One of the things that's often hard to explain to both of these audiences is the fact that the monastery where I lived offers something fairly unique among monastic institutions in the West, which is temporary ordination. Rather than diving headfirst into a lifelong commitment to being a monk or a nun, Gampo Abbey offers people the opportunity to come live at the monastery and hold temporary monastic vows for a year or two.

Like quite a few others, I came to the monastery for a year, and ended up staying for two. I went there with an open mind, not really sure whether this whole monastic thing was really for me or not, but interested in exploring the question. Eventually the answer (which, in my case, was "no") emerged in my heart quite clearly, in its own time. For a few people I knew at the monastery, a "yes" answer came to them, and they ended up taking lifelong monastic vows. So, while temporary ordination is a doorway, the door doesn't lead everyone in the same direction. It depends on their calling. Holding temporary monastic vows gives people time to listen deeply to their inner voice and hopefully find the answer that is truly authentic to them as individuals.

This is a wise approach, because I think Westerners practicing Buddhism often have romantic ideas about what it's like to live as a monk or a nun. Holding temporary vows for a while gives people the chance to burn through some of the initial romantic glow and figure out whether their calling toward that life is deep and genuine and lasting.

And in many cases, people aren't even trying to explore that question; they just want to come live at the monastery for a year and immerse themselves in a retreat-like practice environment before returning to their lives in the "outside" world. That, too, is deeply transformative, and the effects are felt for the rest of their lives. In some southeast Asian Buddhist countries it's not uncommon for young people to go live in the monastery for a year or so before moving on into adulthood.

The Great Liberation

Death was a recurrent theme during the two years I lived as a temporary monk at Gampo Abbey. From my circle of friends and acquaintances outside, I received emails telling me of one loss after another. My acquaintance John was horrifically stabbed to death in his apartment by his own lover. My friend Gregg, who suffered from depression and had attempted suicide a few times before, finally succeeded. In the space of a few months, two other acquaintances died by drug overdose. My grandmother died of old age. And finally there was Ani Palmo, a senior nun at the Abbey, who passed away in my presence. As I shared one loss after another with my fellow residents, we contemplated the frequency with which death was visiting my circle of loved ones.

In the Four Reminders, a traditional Tibetan Buddhist teaching, the second reminder urges us to remember how fleeting and fragile life is, like a bubble, and how quickly and unexpectedly the bubble may be ruptured. “Death comes without warning,” it says. “This body will be a corpse. At that time, the Dharma will be my only help. I must practice it with exertion.” In other words, carpe diem: practice like your hair is on fire, for you never know when your time will be up.

“We do not know where death awaits us so let us wait for it everywhere. To practice death is to practice freedom.” – Montaigne

It’s true that death sometimes comes without warning, but at other times it mounts an all-out media blitz to warn people of its coming. It can arrive suddenly in a burst of unthinkable horror, as it did for my friend John; or it can send word discreetly that it is planning to come in the near future. Death can creep in bit by bit over the course of many years, gradually tightening its grip with agonizing slowness, giving you plenty of time to think about it. That’s how it came for Ani Palmo, who had battled first throat cancer and then emphysema for about a decade. She had rehearsed and anticipated and talked about her death for so long that it became a sort of running joke at the Abbey. Ani Palmo was dying, and she had been dying ever since most people could remember; but we wondered if she might end up out-living most of us.

I only got to know Ani Palmo during her last year-and-a-half — but even then, in her diminished capacity, she was a formidable person. As a young child she lived in Poland under Nazi occupation; after the war, she spent five years in an orphanage operated by nuns. A psychologist by profession, she left her first husband and two young children, remarried and emigrated to Canada in the 1970s; but she soon felt lost and confused amidst the drinking and drugging and sexual freedom of the time. After becoming a student of Chogyam Trungpa, she found her way: she divorced her second husband, took life-long vows as a Buddhist nun, and entered a strict three-year retreat with Kalu Rinpoche.
  
In the effusive manner of an old-world Polish grandmother, she was famous for her hospitality, and for the cookies and chocolates and gossip she would offer to visitors at her cabin. But once you were relaxed and comfortable, she would turn her flashing, slightly intimidating blue eyes on you and ask you — in her thick Polish accent — about your meditation practice. Her frivolity was matched by her gravitas as a practitioner. Her students loved her passionately, and had a respect for her that bordered on fear – and for good reason. For all her sweetness, Ani Palmo had sharp edges. She could be severe and demanding, and disarmingly perceptive.

By the time I knew her, Ani Palmo was confined to her cabin, tucked in the woods a short ways from the Abbey, and she breathed with the help of an oxygen machine. I often went into town and did the shopping for Abbey residents, so I was the one who brought Ani Palmo her supplies of cookies and chocolates. Her eyes always lit up when I walked into the room, and she would greet me with a cheerful “Hieeee!” or with my monastic name, “Zopa!” Occasionally, she would ask me to bring her something contraband, such as an “everything” bagel with garlic and onions (both taboo substances in the Buddhist monastic code), and we would share a conspiratorial smile. Then she would invite me to sit down, offer me some of the goodies I had brought for her, and ask for the latest gossip from the Abbey. Often, she would break down in a spell of acute wheezing, unable to catch her breath, the fluids deep in her lungs rattling in a guttural way that alarmed me every time I heard it.

With Ani Palmo there was none of the usual tip-toeing around the subject of death. It was constantly on her mind, and on her tongue. She anticipated death every day, and in fact she wished it would hurry up and come. It was long overdue, as far as she was concerned. Any casual conversation with her was likely to come around to the topic of her death, and she often sent visitors away with some little cherished possession as a parting gift, in case they never met again: a photo, a tchotchke, a Dharma text or practice implement. She seemed to have an endless supply of these objects, so her practice of giving them away was never finished. Again and again, people came to visit her and say their final, emotional farewells, only to return in a year or two or three to find her still alive. At her 76th birthday celebration, she told us that if her birthday wish came true, she would not live to see another one.

Ani Palmo did not fear death; what she feared was the suffering involved in dying. She had seen her mother dying, also from emphysema. She had witnessed the horror and pain of someone slowly drowning in her own internal fluids, so she knew more or less what kind of physical suffering was in store for her. She was already deep in the grips of that suffering, and could only tolerate it with the help of morphine and Dilaudid. Among the team of people at the Abbey who shared the task of giving Ani Palmo her medications, it was joked — but we weren’t sure it was really a joke — that she took enough painkillers every day to kill William S. Burroughs in the prime of his opiate addiction.

Yet, for all that, she was remarkably clear-minded, and surrendered to her situation. She had long ago accepted her illness as her own karma coming to fruition, and she did not seem to have any resentment about it. Since there was no looking away from death, in her case, she chose to fully embrace it. Following the Tibetan tradition, she saw death as the greatest opportunity for liberation and enlightenment — as long as one is properly prepared for it.

When I went to visit Ani Palmo I would sometimes find her listening to a reading of the Tibetan Book of the Dead. This reading had been recorded specifically for her, years before, by Pema Chödrön. The book is a shamanic guide both to dying and to liberation for the consciousness of the dead person in what is called the bardo — the disembodied, confusing state after death but before rebirth. According to tradition, this in-between state is fertile with the potential for full awakening if one is trained to recognize the nature of mind and to rest in it with equanimity. Over the years she spent preparing for death, Ani Palmo must have listened to that recording at least 100 times.

During Ani Palmo’s last stay at the hospital, about an hour's drive away from the Abbey, we set up a team of people to take turns staying with her around the clock. On the day she passed, I went to the hospital for a late-morning shift. Serri, one of the other temporary monks, was there along with Barbara, the director of the Abbey. Ani Palmo was very agitated, and tears were streaming down her cheeks. She was talking very fast in what seemed to be Polish, and struggling to catch her breath in-between phrases.

“Look, Ani Palmo,” said Barbara. “Zopa’s here.” Ani Palmo grew quiet for a moment and opened her eyes wide, making an effort to focus on me; I couldn’t be sure if she still recognized me. Then her eyes went unfocused again and she lapsed back into her Polish monologue. I sat by her bed for a while and stroked her hand and arm. She seemed to want desperately to communicate something, but we had no idea what she was saying.

Then, from somewhere within the stream of incoherent words, a few syllables jumped out at me, and I suddenly recognized them: “...Vajra Guru...” I realized that Ani Palmo wasn’t babbling incoherently — she was reciting the Guru Rinpoche mantra. I began to sing the mantra repeatedly to its familiar melody: Om Ah Hum Vajra Guru Padma Siddhi Hum. Barbara and Serri joined in. Ani Palmo stopped speaking, her eyes still closed, and listened intently for a while as we repeated the mantra, and then she piped up again: “Om Ah Hum!” Those three syllables from the mantra that was sacred to her were her last clearly spoken words.

After a little while Ani Palmo raised her hand and gestured toward the MP3 player that held the Tibetan Book of the Dead. Serri turned on the recording, and we listened to Ani Pema’s voice as she began to guide Ani Palmo, according to tradition, through the stages of the dying process and its immediate aftermath. Since she had listened to the recording so many times before, it was natural to assume that this time might be like all the others.

After Barbara and Serri left to return to the Abbey, I was alone with Ani Palmo and the vivid descriptions, wafting out from the little MP3 player, of what one sees and experiences in the bardo of dying and the bardo of dharmata — the moment when the consciousness of the now-dead person reawakens without a physical body. According to tradition, in the bardo of dharmata the mind’s inherent luminosity and openness shines brilliantly and without obstruction, if only for a moment, before habitual patterns begin to cloud it over again. That moment of clarity is said to be ripe with potential for complete awakening, if one is able to recognize mind’s luminous, empty nature and remain within that experience.

The MP3 player was set on repeat, and Ani Palmo and I must have listened to that forty-minute section of the recording two or three times before it began to dawn on me that this might not simply be another in Ani Palmo's long series of rehearsals for death — that this might be the real thing. At a certain point Ani Palmo’s breathing abruptly shifted and became strangely calm. I called in the nurse to look at her. The nurse checked her IV line and felt her forehead, shrugged her shoulders, and left unfazed. She had seen similar things before.

I ran a washcloth under the tap and wiped Ani Palmo’s forehead with it. She was no longer very responsive to touch, but I could tell she was still listening to Ani Pema’s voice, and following the instructions. Every once in a while when Ani Pema would say her name, she would respond with a non-verbal sound of recognition, just the smallest of grunts — but enough to tell me she was still there, still listening. According to Tibetan Buddhist tradition, the hearing is the last of the senses to go; in fact, hearing is believed to continue functioning even in the bardo after death, which is why the Tibetan Book of the Dead is read aloud to people who have recently died.

Gradually, the spaces between Ani Palmo’s breaths became longer and longer. I began to silently count the time before her next in-breath: three, five, ten, fifteen seconds. At some point I waited for the next breath and counted the seconds, and then just kept counting: one minute, two minutes went by. I kept waiting, but she never took another breath. At the very end, after all those years of battling illness, she slipped across the threshold of death so peacefully that I wasn’t even sure it had happened. I reached out a hand to stroke her forehead and smooth her hair back, and whispered: “Your struggle is over, Ani Palmo. You’re free.”

Death is the greatest uncertainty, and yet nothing could be more certain than the fact that we will die. We don’t know when it will come, or how; and despite what we may believe and what tradition may tell us, we don’t really know what will or won’t happen once we cross that threshold. As with a black hole, we can’t know what lies beyond the event horizon because no light or information escapes the gravitational pull of this greatest of unknowns. But we can choose, to some degree, how we cross into the vast, open space of that question. We can go kicking and screaming with fear and regret, clutching in vain at the shards of the mirror that is shattering before our very eyes; or we can dissolve into that open space and trust that our fractured reflection in the broken mirror of self wasn’t really who we were in the first place.

Ani Palmo became one of my greatest teachers that morning: she showed me what the death of a great Dharma practitioner looks like. To the last moment, her commitment to waking up did not falter. Despite the complete deterioration of her body, the unbelievable amount of medication she was on, and whatever traces of fear and anxiety and attachment she might have felt — with so much stacked against her, she maintained the clarity and strength of mind and singularity of purpose to continue practicing, right up to the threshold of death, like her hair was on fire.

Notes from a Solitary Retreat: Part Two

In my first week-long solitary meditation retreat, in an isolated cabin overlooking the Gulf of St. Lawrence, I came face to face with my own mind — and several hundred other wild things. What follows are some reflections on getting to know the creatures I found inhabiting my retreat cabin — and my mind — and what I learned from them. This is Part Two of a two-part series. Click here to read Part One.


Day 5

The weather has turned wild and wrathful. The wind is now blowing down from the highlands so hard that it’s pushing the waves out to sea, and not letting them break on the shore. Typical Cape Breton springtime weather.

I have a “retreat protector” — a friend who is supporting me in my retreat by bringing me food each day. This is a great blessing, since I get much better food than what I would cook for myself, and I don’t have to spend as much time preparing it — which leaves more time to focus on the retreat itself. Today at lunch I received a special surprise: cake and ice cream, from the farewell party for one of the temporary monks who is leaving now that his one-year commitment is up. While I was devouring the ice cream, my eyes were once again drawn to the floor by one of the ants. This one appeared to be sick or injured, and it was dragging itself around on its side, with great struggle and effort — going in circles, and trying to stand up straight, and collapsing onto its side again. My ice cream and cake didn’t taste quite as good when I was watching a sentient being — however small it might be — struggling in the throes of death right in front of me.

Still, when I dig deep inside myself, I cannot say that I feel the same degree of empathy for these ants that I would feel for another, larger creature in the same circumstances. If it was a dog or a cat convulsing in its final moments in front of me, I could not sit here eating my ice cream at all — I would be in tears, trying to do something to comfort the creature and ease its suffering. But the ant's agony does not even rise to the occasion of halting my ice cream consumption. And there is nothing I can do to comfort an ant — I cannot pet it or soothe its fears or make it more comfortable. I can only watch, and offer as much empathy and good wishes as a human being can possibly extend to an ant.

And what about this macabre charnel ground business of theirs? If there were a bunch of wild dogs passing back and forth through this cabin while I was meditating, dragging behind them canine corpses and carrying in their mouths the severed, bloody heads and legs and abdomens of other dogs, I would be upset, to say the least. But that is precisely what is happening with these ants, day and night, on a miniature scale — and it only arouses my curiosity and attention, and a glimmer of compassion that is, by comparison, shallow and superficial. I wonder why. Is it because they are so tiny? Because there are trillions of them? Because their form, and their way of life, is so alien and bizarre to us that we cannot imagine they suffer as we do? Do we suppose they have no feelings, no consciousness, no will to continue living?



That is, I guess, the view held by many people, who would have no qualms about stepping on any ant that got in their way or had the audacity to make an appearance in their kitchen. We now have industrial factories that produce nothing but toxins to kill ants, and people whose sole profession is to exterminate them. The popular consensus seems to be that their very existence is an affront to the human race, and they must be annihilated to make us more comfortable.


Day 6

The wild and wrathful wind has been blowing for two days, and has grown even stronger. I am uneasy about the many swaying trees around the cabin. They are brittle spruce trees with shallow roots, and many are already dead from a raging Asian spruce beetle infestation that’s wiping out whole sections of the forests on Cape Breton, and throughout Canada. They snap like matchsticks in these winds, and the woods are littered with fallen trees — as this cabin is littered with fallen ants.

My meditation practice started out in a thick fog this morning, with a wild wind of discursiveness blowing in my mind. But by the end of the day, the fog and clouds in my mind have cleared, and the discursive wind has stopped blowing; I feel remarkably peaceful. Curiously, the same thing has happened with the weather outside. In my last meditation session of the day, I feel inspired to do an extra rosary of my practice, and while I am at it the sky outside clears and the wind stops blowing. The sea becomes still and the air itself is now gentle and warm and soft like a baby’s blanket — a perfect springtime evening. The sun sets on the calm ocean with ridiculous splendor and majesty. It is as if a dreary black-and-white film noir has suddenly turned into a lush Bollywood musical in vivid technicolor. The winter here — which lasts, I have realized, about six months — has been so relentlessly gray and cloudy that I have almost forgotten how breathtakingly beautiful and saturated with color this place can be in spring and summer. Tonight it looks and feels like a picture postcard that I want to send to all my friends, with the inscription: “Wish you were here.”



It is April Fool’s Day, and I came to the Abbey one year ago today.


Day 7

The gray fog and mist are back, and the sea and sky have merged into one again. But there is no wind, and the water a hundred feet below — what I can see of it, anyway — is eerily calm.

Last night as I was going to bed I witnessed a murder — or at least, I think that’s what it was. One of the little worker ants had one of the big winged ants and was dragging it off by its antennae. But this one was no corpse; it was very much alive, and was trying to resist being dragged away to wherever the smaller ant was taking it. But, drunk or stoned on whatever it is that makes these winged ants so slow and dull and ineffectual, it was powerless against the smaller ant despite its much larger size. Perhaps the winged ants have no pincers to defend themselves; if they did, this one could have snapped the worker ant in two pieces quite easily. His six legs struggled against the pull of the smaller ant, but his strength was no match for it and he was being dragged away kicking and screaming — or he would have been, if ants could scream. I found the whole scene quite disturbing; but I decided I did not want to know how it would end, and I turned off the light and went to bed. This sinister turn of events has severely rattled my theory that these various kinds of ants are all getting along together peacefully. Apparently, it is not only the dead ones who can get dragged away and “disappear.” I had better watch my back in this place.

Over breakfast this morning I recalled an old scary movie called “Them,” in which America is invaded by giant, man-eating ants. (It reminds me of what’s happening these days, with America being invaded by Sarah Palin and the Tea Party.) I remember being disappointed to learn that the terrible monsters — so fearsome and indescribable that they could only be known as “Them” — were nothing more than oversized ants. I was expecting, I don’t know, nameless and shapeless creatures from outer space, or something like that. Giant, man-eating ants just seemed so…plebeian.

And yet...now that I am getting up-close and personal with these ants, I am thinking how scary it would actually be if the size differential between us were reduced — or even, unthinkably, reversed. Imagine looking up at those black, unemotional eyes staring back at you, having those sharp and unrelenting pincers closing around your neck, and being dragged away to their lair and chopped up to become food for the ant kingdom.

“The ant kingdom.” It’s a dumb phrase. Ants don’t have kings, they only have queens. But “the ant queendom” doesn’t sound quite right. Anyway, it’s strange, too, to call their central figure a queen. She is the only one in the colony who can lay eggs, and that is the only thing she does. She does not resolve disputes or issue royal decrees, and she probably has little idea of what's going on in the world outside her colony. Trapped in her chamber, which she can never leave, bloated fat with eggs, all day long she does nothing but pump out egg after egg after egg. Other ants — nurses and midwives — are waiting nearby, and quickly move in to lick each egg case clean and coat it with saliva that contains mold-inhibiting chemicals. If the eggs begin to grow mold, as everything rapidly does underground, they will never hatch. The queen’s innermost, regal chamber is a nursery, and Her Majesty is really an egg-laying machine, a slave to her own reproductive role.

A friend who lives nearby has another small cabin attached to her property, and recently had an invasion of carpenter ants. They had to be dealt with decisively to protect the cabin from being eaten as the ants’ dinner. This was greatly distressing to my friend who is a very ethical Buddhist and wouldn’t dream of intentionally harming even the smallest creature. But “carpenter ants” is another misnomer. Carpenters build things — but carpenter ants only destroy them. I suppose they’re called that because they’re skilled at working with wood. And they leave scrap wood and piles of sawdust everywhere, which is the other thing carpenters are known for.


Day 8

Last night I had insomnia. I unplugged the nightlight and opened all the blinds next to my bed and watched the stars. I’m from New York City, where maybe on the best night of the year you can see five stars, and even those are probably planets or satellites. Here you can’t fathom the number of stars in the sky, the number of other solar systems and worlds that exist out there. The Big Dipper was hanging right above my bed, pouring down on my head whatever it has been dipping and pouring all these billions of years. Through the walls and the floor of the cabin, if I listened closely, I could hear a strange, rhythmic sawing noise, a vibration that sounded curiously like muffled voices coming from someone’s television in the next apartment. I am convinced it was the sound of that fat weasel beneath the cabin, snoring.

Eight days a week. Today is pack-up-and-move-out day. It’s time for me to go back and rejoin the community at the Abbey. My first solitary retreat is over. But to be truthful, it was never really very solitary. There were no other people here, but I was certainly never alone. Living for a week among these ants and flies and squirrels and weasels, I was simply part of a different community in Cliffhanger cabin, a community that will continue here after I am gone. These creatures welcomed me in their own way, and seemed to have no problem with my presence. With all these ants crawling everywhere, including up my pants, not one of them ever bit me in these seven days. So I have felt at home in this community of solitude, and I hope I have not been an obnoxious guest. Perhaps I will see some of these same faces again on my next retreat.

But some of them I would prefer not to see again. Like the spider crawling next to my breakfast table this morning. Most of the spiders around here are harmless wood spiders, but this one was something else altogether. Its body was fat and bulbous and dark, with a sinister purple tinge. People around here often say to me that there are no poisonous spiders native to Cape Breton. I say those people are full of hogwash. I have seen brown widows here, which are the little-known cousins of black widows; they are not quite as poisonous but they're no kittens, either. Maybe poisonous spiders are not native to these parts, but then neither is anyone else living at the Abbey. We’re all recent immigrants here.

No normal person can look at a spider like the one at my breakfast table this morning without getting the heebie-jeebies. Maybe it isn’t going to kill you, but it’s going to leave a permanent mark. I’m glad I didn’t see him until the morning of my departure; I would have been thinking about him the whole week, looking around anxiously during my meditation sessions, imagining him crawling onto my cushion or into my bed. But I suppose every community has its members who push your buttons, whose presence you find difficult to tolerate, the ones whose faces you’d prefer never to see again. That’s life in a community. You either suffer from it, or you learn to be more tolerant and to let go of personal preferences.

This morning as I was coming back into the cabin after carrying some of my things over to the Abbey, I was greeted at the door by one of those dim-witted winged ants, which crawled towards me slowly in its clumsy way, like an eager puppy. I felt a strange surge of tenderness for it, and even affection. I was happy to see it. But is that really possible? Can a human being think of an ant fondly, like a cherished pet? Maybe I could pack up some of these ants and take them back to the Abbey with me, and keep them in an ant farm. We’re not allowed to keep cats or dogs at the Abbey, and I really do miss having pets to care for.

On second thought, no. I think the test of whether or not a creature would make a good pet is if I would want it sleeping in the same bed with me. I’m sorry to say that these ants — and spiders, and flies, and squirrels, and weasels — definitely don’t pass that test. Wild things, I think I love you — but do me a favor, and stay out of my bed. I don’t love you like that.

Notes from a Solitary Retreat: Part One

In my first week-long solitary meditation retreat, in an isolated cabin overlooking the Gulf of St. Lawrence, I came face to face with my own mind — and several hundred other wild things. What follows are some reflections on getting to know the creatures I found inhabiting my retreat cabin — and my mind — and what I learned from them. This is Part One of a two-part series. Read Part Two.


Day 1

It’s the first day of my retreat — only a half-day, really, since I have the cabin starting at mid-afternoon. Today is about settling in, unpacking the things I’ve brought over to the cabin, preparing for a full schedule of meditation practice on the following six days, relaxing in the space and appreciating the view. Now my work is done, and I am sitting at the table, staring out the window at the vast ocean, enjoying a nice cup of peppermint tea. Feeling inspired, I am moved to sing a song about meditation written by Milarepa, the legendary Tibetan yogi from the 11th century. As I finish singing, I take a drink of my tea and get a chunk of tea leaves in my mouth. I’m surprised by this, and I swish them around and feel them with my tongue against my upper palate, considering whether to swallow them or spit them out. Then it dawns on me: there are no leaves in my tea, because I used a closed teabag. There is only one possibility: what is in my mouth at this very moment is the housefly that had been buzzing around a few minutes earlier. In a fit of disgust, I spit the mouthful of tea back into the cup, and look inside. There he is, drowned and floating at the top.

After recovering from my initial wave of revulsion (which involved a lot of spitting and rinsing my mouth at the sink) I reflect that this is not a very auspicious way to begin a Buddhist meditation retreat: killing a sentient being in my tea, or perhaps in my mouth. I pour out the contents of the teacup, and look at the fly lying in the sink. I am astounded to see that his legs are moving. After drowning in a teacup and being swished around in my mouth and pressed against my palate with my tongue, he is still hanging on to life. But I really don’t think he’s going to make it; he must be on his way out. Still, I want to give him the best chance I can; I feel I owe him that much, after almost eating him. I lay the fly out on a napkin to soak up the tea and saliva covering his body, and to my amazement, within a half hour he has fully recovered and crawled — or flown — off the napkin and disappeared.


The view from Cliffhanger on Day 1 of my retreat.

I am not alone in this solitary retreat cabin. In addition to the flies, there are the ants. Black ants, large ones and small ones, that march back and forth from one end of the cabin to the other, on some kind of mission the logic of which I cannot imagine. I wonder how many hundreds, possibly thousands, of critters are sharing this one-room structure with me. In a way, it’s really their space — they live here all the time. I’m just a guest for a week.

And at night, the cabin is full of strange knocking and scratching noises. I sleep fitfully, glancing at the windows from time to time to see what kind of beasts might be lurking outside, looking in. A bear, perhaps, or a pack of wolves, or an angry moose. I expect to see glowing red eyes, watching me hungrily.


Day 2

This cabin is called Cliffhanger. For about 20 years, it literally perched at the edge of this cliff above the Gulf of St. Lawrence, with the windows looking almost straight down at the waves breaking on the rocks 100 feet below. But about a year ago there were several rockslides in which nearby sections of the cliff fell away. One of the monks who was doing a retreat in the cabin at that time came running into the Abbey in the middle of the night, totally freaked out after hearing rocks falling close to the cabin. Cliffhanger was deemed unsafe, and was off-limits for several months after that. Eventually they brought in heavy equipment and picked up the whole cabin, like a doll house, and moved it back about thirty feet from the cliff’s edge. And now Cliffhanger is back in business.


Cliffhanger Cabin during my retreat. Photo by Miao Lin.

This afternoon I saw what I believe to be one of the two or three other mammals sharing the cabin with me. It is a large brown weasel, fat and as big as a cat, that most likely lives beneath the cabin. I saw it out the picture window, and did a double-take. It has the solid brown coat of an otter or a beaver, which is what I at first thought it was — not at all like the little white weasel I once chased through the Abbey, which may in fact have been a wild ferret. But the way it slinked forward like a weasel, rather than walking like any normal four-legged creature, gave it away. I dashed for my camera to take a picture of it, but it disappeared into the bushes before I could get a shot.

I wonder: does this weasel live alone here? Is he perhaps a bachelor? I like to imagine he is. And what does a bachelor weasel do, living beneath a solitary retreat cabin perched in the woods on a cliff a hundred feet above the ocean? Does he have a network of weasel friends, and weasel enemies? How does he find a mate in all this vast wildness? There are no weasel singles bars that I’m aware of in these parts. (Come to think of it, in my experience all singles bars are full of weasels.)

There is also at least one squirrel living in the upper parts of the cabin. I adore squirrels. I wrote a term paper about them in college, in a class on urban ecology. But the squirrels around here are territorial and aggressive, like Chihuahuas; they are not accustomed to human beings, and they make an awful fuss when you cross their turf. They puff up their tails and beat them against the tree branches, and shout absurd little high-pitched curses and threats that sound like a dog’s squeaky toy being squeezed repeatedly. They apparently have no idea, as Chihuahuas also seem to have no idea, how ridiculous they look and sound. Today while circling the cabin outside, I spotted a hole under the eave, along the wall next to my bed, where one of them seems to go in and out. I hear its rustling noises in the wall and ceiling above me when I’m falling asleep, along with an occasional noisy outburst of activity caused by I don’t know what: whatever it is that upsets squirrels and causes them to screech and dash about madly — which actually, now that I think about it, seems to be just about everything. Life as a squirrel can’t be easy: being so high-strung and edgy and paranoid all the time. It’s like being a New Yorker. It must be exhausting.


Day 3

I am becoming very familiar with the ants in this cabin. Too familiar. All morning, all afternoon, all night they are my constant companions. As I sit in meditation for three long sessions each day, I see them marching back and forth, back and forth, back and forth. Often I see them literally going in circles, sniffing out with their probing antennae whatever it is that ants sniff for all day and all night — which is, I gather, whatever they can score. Sometimes they march right up and climb me like a mountain while I am sitting there. I often shake them off my shirt or my shoes or my hands. I have literally had ants in my pants. A few times, I have maimed or killed them accidentally, because I didn’t know they were there, and I am roughly 20,000 times their size. I conscientiously watch the floors when I walk around the cabin, to avoid stepping on them — but it’s impossible to avoid it completely, because they are everywhere, and they are always on the move. Sharing the cabin’s tiny kitchenette with them is like performing in Riverdance.

There are two or three different types of ants here. At first I thought they were different species, though I have since realized that they are the same species, and even from the same colony, but they have different body types and different roles. Some of them are little worker ants, while others — two or three times their size — are fearsome warrior ants, with much larger pincers. You don’t want to mess with those guys. There are also a few large, winged ants that seem to do nothing but stumble around, slowly and aimlessly and ineffectively, looking rather depressed, like sad drunks or junkies. Perhaps that is what they are. They even have the junky’s narcolepsy: every now and then they’ll just come to a stop in the middle of the room and lie there without moving for several hours, until you’re convinced they’re dead and you’re ready to sweep them away with the broom, and then they’ll suddenly come back to life. They rarely attempt to use their wings, and when they do, they buzz around blindly a few inches off the floor, banging drunkenly into walls and furniture.

The fierce warrior ants, if you blow at them, will rear up and show you their pincers in a threatening gesture, the way a lobster does with its claw: they are preparing to strike if they continue to be hassled. And if you stomp your foot on the floor to shoo them away, they do not run away from it — they run, without exception, directly at it. I suppose that is what they are programmed, as warriors, to do — they are the kamikaze pilots of the ant world, the team’s offensive players. I only realized the little workers and the big warriors were the same species after seeing them meet each other several times and lock together in a sort of friendly embrace, exchanging chemical information face to face, almost like French-kissing. And then they separate and go on their way.

Their antennae, with which these ants feel their way through the world, are another amazing bit of technology. Although they grow out of their heads, their antennae also function as arms, and there is an elbow joint built right into each one. When they find something to eat, they use their antennae rather daintily to scoop it towards their mouth, as if they were holding a fork and a knife. I’ve also seen them use their antennae to clean their faces, and to scratch themselves when they itch.

Today one of the ants caught my eye while I was meditating. At that moment, I happened to be reciting a section of my liturgy that deals with the topic of death (a frequent object of contemplation in Buddhism). I noticed this ant had a very odd shape, and was limping right towards me. I looked more closely. Speaking of death, this was a worker ant, carrying half of the chopped-up corpse of a fly. I saw the other half of the fly lying on the floor nearby. (It didn’t stay there for long, as that ant or another one soon came back to retrieve it.) I can't help wondering if it was the fly that was in my mouth a couple of days ago.

If I died here, if I choked on a piece of broccoli and keeled over, how long would it take these ants to start chopping me up and carting me away? Would there be anything left of my remains by the time the folks at the Abbey came looking for me? Probably just some bones and teeth and hair, arranged in a heap on my meditation cushion. Even now, my only defense against these creatures, the only thing that keeps them in check, is that I’m inconveniently 20,000 times their size. But I suspect they’re looking at me, licking their little ant chops, and wishing, hoping for a miracle.


Day 4

Thick clouds and mist everywhere today: the sea and sky have merged into one, with no visual line separating them at the horizon. The famous Cape Breton wind is also picking up now.

I have been studying these ants, and I have realized what line of business they are in: they are all undertakers. All day long, I see them hauling around the corpses of their fallen comrades — sometimes not even whole corpses, just gruesome severed heads or other body parts. There is no shortage of ants here, and no shortage of dead ants, either. This room in which I am meditating is a charnel ground in miniature scale. Fresh ant corpses — felled by what causes I do not know — just keep appearing here and there throughout the cabin, and this work of undertaking is never finished for those who are still living. I see them at it constantly. They heave the corpses up with their jaws like Olympic weight-lifters and carry the bodies out in front of them, or they walk at a funny angle and push the bodies from the side, or they walk backwards in front of the corpses and drag them the way a dog pulls at a bone. I have even seen one of them rather sportingly dragging around a huge dustbunny, in which were tangled the severed body parts of another dessicated ant. (Don't believe me? I got the whole thing on video...)



I have now observed so much of this behavior from these ants that I am fully convinced that they spend more time searching for and transporting other ant corpses than they do looking for food, or eating it -- unless the corpses of the dead ants are their food. But I don’t think so. I read somewhere that ants build a special chamber in their colonies where they bring — as if respectfully, to their proper resting place — the bodies of their fellow ants who have passed on: an ant burial chamber. That is an altogether more civilized explanation for this behavior I am witnessing, and a more pleasing one for the human mind to contemplate. These small, black, six-legged creatures I am sharing a room with this week are either all remorseless cannibals, or a race of ethical beings whose main business — aside from survival — is scampering around looking for the remains of their relatives, and seeing that those remains are properly cared for when they find them.


Read Part Two

A Monk in Manhattan

I recently spent a week teaching and visiting friends in New York City, where I lived for almost 20 years. It was my first time back to New York since coming to Gampo Abbey, and my first major trip outside of the monastery (with the exception of a weekend trip to Halifax last summer for a workshop).

The strangeness of the trip began before I ever left Cape Breton. I noticed that the driver of the shuttle van that took me to Halifax had written my name down on his passenger list as Dennis Hunger, which somehow seemed oddly fitting. I had to chew on that one for a while.

In Antigonish, halfway to Halifax, it became apparent that a big part of the strangeness of my journey would be the experience of being a monk in Tibetan robes, in a culture that has few reference points for such a thing. I often go into Cheticamp (the local town near the Abbey) wearing my robes, but people there are so accustomed to seeing monks and nuns from the Abbey that most of them don’t give us a second look. But in places like Antigonish and Halifax, I was an object of puzzlement, sometimes veering towards open derision and other times towards great curiosity and friendliness. The Indian manager at the A&W franchise in Antigonish came over to me at my table and said, rather matter-of-factly, while I was wolfing down a fast food meal during our 10-minute stop: “Buddham sharanam gacchami.” I smiled and nodded at him with my mouth full, and he proceeded to explain to his very curious employee (who had tagged along with him to my table) that it’s a phrase people in Buddhist countries often say to each other as a form of greeting or respect. I was as surprised by this information as his employee was. It’s a phrase included in our chants at the Abbey when we say our vows and take refuge in the Three Jewels every morning, but I’ve never heard it spoken outside of that context.

At the airport in Halifax, people seemed to take in my appearance as something of a spectacle. I sat in the restaurant near my departure gate and absorbed 20 minutes of open hostility and suspicious glares from a businessman dressed in tight jeans and an ostentatious cowboy hat and cowboy boots, jabbering into the wireless device embedded in his ear. When I went to the restroom, I paused in front of the two doors and looked at the signs. One sign showed a human being in pants. The other showed a human being in a skirt. I looked down at my robes. I looked up at the signs. I looked down again. Disobeying the signs, I entered the door that showed the human being in pants.

I arrived in New York City during the evening rush hour, a time of day that does not reveal New Yorkers at their best. I took the Airtrain from JFK, then the LIRR and the subway to 23rd Street and Eighth Avenue where my friend lives. As soon as I left the airport and began to see the people and the buildings and the city, I felt a surge of intense familiarity, as though I had never left this city, or had merely been away on a short jaunt, an overnight getaway. But it also rapidly became apparent how much I have slowed down internally during a year in the monastery. The pervasive feeling of speed and aggression in which New Yorkers move and breathe – which is at its most intense during rush hour – was more visible to me than ever before, and more painful to witness.

New Yorkers, needless to say, have seen it all a hundred times over, so the spectacle of a white guy in Tibetan robes, on the street or in the subway or in a museum, was not quite as eye-catching to them as it was to folks in Halifax. The majority of people in New York didn’t give me a second glance. But sometimes my robes would catch someone’s attention, and they would come over and ask me questions, or want to tell me about whatever spiritual trip they might happen to be on. A man in the airport asked me if I was a monk, and told me he practices “self-realization” (I didn’t ask what that means). A man in the bank asked me if I was a priest. A young man at the Shambhala Center asked me if I was a monk, and when I said yes, blurted out enthusiastically: “Cool!” While I was waiting to meet a friend in the East Village, two young Hispanic women passed me on the sidewalk, and one of them called to me: “I love your outfit!”

The strangeness of being a monk in the city varies depending on the neighborhood. In the East Village people expect strangeness, they thrive on it, and so as a monk in robes I felt welcomed as part of the clan. In Chinatown, I blended into the scenery and was largely invisible; the people in the Chinese Mahayana temple did not even look up at me when I came in and took photos. In midtown and the Museum of Modern Art, I was highly visible, part of the big-city experience that tourists had paid good money to see; they gawked and seemed to appreciate me fulfilling their expectations and being part of the scenery that gave them their money’s worth. In Chelsea, my old stomping ground, I stood out like a sore thumb. People on the sidewalk stared in disbelief, and even whispered to their friends as I passed, suggesting the presence of a small-town, provincial mentality right in the middle of the biggest city in America. Walking with a friend on Eighth Avenue, I almost had a Marilyn Monroe moment as I stepped over the subway ventilation grates and a sudden wind from below began to blow up my robes. I got off the subway grates very quickly, and was careful not to walk over them again.

Of course, the robes are just an outer symbol of something inside, which are the vows I’m holding as a temporary monk. That was, for me, the real strangeness and novelty of being a monk in New York City. No cocktails or wine with dinner, no bars or clubs, no dancing. No flirting or cruising. Not even the idea was really there (although, of course, many things caught my eye and took my mind in familiar directions). It wasn’t the first time in my city life that I’ve disengaged from such things, but they were very much part of my New York experience before coming to the monastery, and their absence during this trip seemed somehow conspicuous.

I expected that when I returned to the Abbey after this trip, the place would feel different somehow – but I wasn’t gone long enough for that to happen. Rounding the road into the hamlet of Red River, at the base of the mountain where the Abbey is nestled, I felt quite simply like I was coming back home again. The contrast, in scale and tone, between New York City and Gampo Abbey could hardly be any more extreme, but maybe that’s why I like them both (though for different reasons); I’ve always been a lover of extremes. Ani Pema was teaching the same afternoon I arrived, so I slipped without a pause back into the humming life of the Abbey.

As I reflect on my recent journey back to the city, I sometimes feel waves of nostalgia or loneliness. I already miss my friends in the city. I miss the freedom of deciding my own schedule, of going where I want to go, of choosing exactly what I want to eat and when. I miss the sheer volume of entertainments and distractions and spectacles available at all times in a place like New York. Yet, I know that placing myself in this small pressure cooker for the past year has been, unquestionably, one of the best things I have ever done in my life. And I know that staying here and living as a monk for another year is probably the best thing I can do right now. Beyond that, I cannot presently see – and I know that I don’t need to.

The Pleasantness of Presentness

Meditation practice this morning was a struggle again. The weather today is magnificent, crisp and blue and too early in the spring for biting insects to be out, a perfect day for hiking, and all I could think about as we sat there in the shrine room was how much I wanted to be outside instead of sitting there on my cushion watching my mind run in circles.

There are some days when I wake up and I just know it's going to be this way. Moods and states of mind are like the ever-changing weather here in the wilds of Nova Scotia, on the rugged coast. Some mornings, as soon as I sit up in bed, the clouds in my mind are already there, and a hard, wild wind of discursiveness is blowing my awareness this way and that -- like the wind that blows down from the mountains and up from the sea here in Pleasant Bay, a wind that uproots and knocks down 40-foot trees.

My first three weeks here were difficult because I was fighting against the wind and noise in my mind, which -- I have begun to realize -- is as pointless as fighting against the wind outside. You can rage against it all you want and it doesn't make a damn bit of difference to the wind. The only difference is that it makes your experience of the wind that much more frustrating.

This week I've noticed a shift in perspective taking place. I have observed a new kind of serenity beginning to emerge in my mind, establishing itself alongside and around the monkey that dwells within. On days like this, when the monkey screeches, I am learning to step back and let him screech all he wants. As with The Borg on Star Trek, so with the monkey in my mind. "You will be assimilated," it seems to say, "resistance is futile." And so I am learning to stop resisting, which is an easier practice on some days than on others. But it seems that so much of our suffering comes from our resistance to the way things are, from our raging into the wind and telling it to stop, from screeching back against the monkey and telling it to be quiet.

In our evening chants we have a verse that says:

In order to remain in nonwandering, the ground of dharma,
Relying on the meditation practice of dathun,
Completely free from the movement of discursive thought,
May we give rise to the samadhi of one-pointed shamatha.

I used to think this verse meant only that we should, ultimately, be aiming for a state that is thought-free. "One-pointed shamatha" was, in my understanding, a kind of narrow focus on a single point of pristine awareness, like a laser beam shining on a diamond in a vacuum of mind where nothing moves. The regular screeching of the monkey in my own meditation practice was the abundant, incriminating evidence of how far I was (and am) from attaining that lofty goal.

Recently, though, as I've begun to acquire a more relaxed attitude towards the monkey, it has occurred to me that perhaps there is another definition of "one-pointed shamatha" or "nonwandering." If our awareness is expansive enough that we are able to be open, spacious and relaxed with whatever is arising in our experience at the present moment, even if what is arising is monkey mind jumping all over the place, then we are not really distracted, at least not completely. If awareness can encompass all that arises, then there is no such thing as distraction. Freedom from the movement of discursive thought means allowing enough space for discursive thoughts to arise and pass, not jumping on them like bicycles and pedaling to ride them further. One-pointed shamatha is no-pointed shamatha, because there is no "point" on which to "focus" when the point is everything that arises.

Someone was telling me yesterday about a teaching they'd received from Dzongsar Khyentse Rinpoche. He advised his students, when they go on retreat, to establish very strong boundaries between past, present and future, and to really do their best to stay in the present. Dwell in "the pleasantness of presentness," he instructed them. Before coming here to Gampo Abbey, I tried to arrange my life in such a way that I could do exactly that, a way that would allow me to dwell as little as possible on outside obligations or thoughts of past and future. But still, some days, the pattern of wanting to be somewhere else blows up and rattles my serenity, out of nowhere, like the fierce wind that blows up from the Gulf of St. Lawrence and shakes the Abbey buildings.

Today during the exercise period I went out and hiked up the nearby mountain, Gampo Lhatse, to clear my mind of the fog from this morning's frustrating three-hour meditation session. As I climbed the mountain, I was grumbling to myself about how much I wanted to be up there, among the open sky and the trees and the ocean, away from these people at the monastery and their damned schedules and rules and requirements upon my time. Halfway up the mountain I stopped and looked back at the calm blue sea, 600 feet below me, and at the Abbey nestled among the trees beneath the mountains in the distance, and at the clear blue sky embracing all of it, and my resistance melted away. Close to the top of the mountain, in a sort of clearing where a statue of Kuan Yin sits nestled among a cool, shaded garden of cedar trees, I froze in place as I heard the crunching of fallen tree branches beneath the feet of something very large moving among the rocks and brush below. A moose or a bear, I do not know which, and I dared not climb up further to find out. The bears here are timid black bears, but bears nonetheless, and at this time of the year, very possibly with cubs.

Halfway back down the mountain I stopped again to wait for my new friend to come by -- a tiny little chickadee that lives in the area. I waited in the same spot as we met the other day, and sure enough, he came along within a couple of minutes. I whistled to him, and he flew from tree to tree, getting closer and closer as he checked me out to see if I was one of the good ones. Apparently he decided that I was, because I held out my hand and he flew over and landed on my index finger, just as he had done two days ago. Seeing that I had no food to offer him at the moment, he flew away to a nearby tree branch, and we proceeded to have an extended conversation in chickadee language. "HEEE-hey-hey," he would call out, and I did my best to respond, and then he would call back again -- sometimes before I had even finished responding. Our conversation today lasted for a minute or two before he flew off to seek food in other places.

Moments such as these do not leave much room in your mind for resistance. They crack your heart open and make you realize how precious it all is, and how fleeting. How pointless it is to want to be anywhere other than where you are right now. To finally see this, I realize, I need to be here, in a place where the sea and the sky and the mountains reflect the brilliance and spaciousness of mind's true nature, a place where friendly birds land on my finger and foxes come round at dusk to eat the ritual torma offerings that are tossed out, like clockwork, behind the monastery during evening chants at the close of each day. A place where my meditation cushion sits close enough to the window that I can see the fox sneaking across the lawn at the close of chants, stealing for the torma.

I Love You

As I begin to write this I am in a plane en route to Halifax, a brief stopover on my way to Gampo Abbey, a Buddhist monastery at the far end of Nova Scotia, where I plan to live for a year or more. Following a call from inside me that has made itself heard these past months, I am taking a leap into the unknown, into full-time spiritual practice and discipline, into a new environment and a new way of life. For the moment, for the year, for I don't know how long, I have left behind two decades of history in New York City and said goodbye to job, apartment, friends, and most of my worldly possessions. Quite literally, as the old John Denver song goes: "I'm leaving on a jet plane, don't know when I'll be back again."

Although I cannot know what kinds of teachings lie ahead of me on this leg of the journey, I do know now, beyond a doubt, that the process of getting ready to embark on it has been profound and transformational.

For the past several days, a beautiful old Marvin Gaye song, "God Is Love," has been running the loop inside my head. Those who know me personally may find it hilarious to know that I'm identifying so strongly at this pivotal moment in my life, as I'm entering a Buddhist monastery, with a Christian gospel song, but to me the song's theological perspective is beside the point. The underlying message is universal. In it, Gaye urges the skeptical listener not to disparage his friend God, who "made this world for us to live in, and gave us everything." Then Gaye makes his main point: "All He asks of us [in return] is we give each other love."

Love your mother (she bore you)
Love your father (he works for you)
Love your sister (she's good to you)
Love your brother (your brother!)

I am taking Gaye's advice to heart. In a way, that is the reason I am embarking on this journey inwards and launching myself, physically and otherwise, into the open arms of a new family of full-time spiritual practitioners: to deconstruct some of the walls around my heart and learn, I mean really learn, what it is to love. What other journey is there?

Never in my life have I felt the love and support of my friends and family as strongly as I have felt it this week, as they have said farewell to me and wished me happiness on my path (even from those who do not understand the choice I have made). My eyes have been blasted open to see, with a new clarity, how much our paths are intertwined. I feel a deep respect and affection for every human being who has touched my life, at this transitional moment when, paradoxically, I have left so many of those very people behind me as I travel north to a country I have never seen before.

A close disciple once said to the Buddha, in a reflective moment, that good companions accounted for half of the spiritual path. The Buddha replied: "Do not say it is so. Good companions are the *whole* of the spiritual path."

For the first time, I feel that I can appreciate what the Buddha meant by that.

To every person who has shown me kindness and supported me on my life's path, my gratitude overwhelms me at this moment and I have no words to express it. Tears well up and I'm trying, right now, not to cry into my keyboard for fear of short-circuiting my laptop.

It is in this way that we must train ourselves: by liberation of the self through love. We will develop love, we will practice it, we will make it both a way and a basis, take our stand upon it, store it up, and thoroughly set it going.

- Shakyamuni Buddha